The Weekly Examiner

Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences

As with most government actions, it started with the noblest of intentions: to provide safe, affordable healthcare to every citizen of the United States, leaving no person untreated or left to suffer.

Unfortunately, the early returns for a law that has not even yet fully gone into effect seem to indicate a nasty consequence: area businesses are fraught with uncertainty over just what exactly is contained in the law, and are not hiring new workers as a result, according to an article in the New York Post.

Continue reading on Examiner.com Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences - New York Political Buzz | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-new-york/obamacare-and-the-law-of-unintended-consequences#ixzz1RH3OO9J5

Will Governor Cuomo Become President Cuomo One Day?

As he slowly but steadily builds a record of accomplishment in the state capitol, rumors are already starting to swirl that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo might--already--be setting himself up as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for President.

In 2016, that is, since current President Barack Obama will likely be a shoo-in for his party's nomination for re-election in 2012.

Continue reading on Examiner.com Will Governor Cuomo become President Cuomo one day? - New York Political Buzz | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-new-york/will-governor-cuomo-become-president-cuomo-one-day#ixzz1RH3iPf1C

Why Weiner Matters

Anthony Weiner: Still a Douchebag

Here's why the story known as WeinerGate matters. Say he really did send a photo of his erect genitalia over the Internet; this means a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives is trolling the Internet for nubile young babes and porn stars and sexting them from his public (official) Twitter account. For that, he should be removed from office and possibly (if the advances were unsolicited) even labeled a sex offender.

And if he is innocent? Then we have a case where a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives was the victim of cybercrime, and regardless of party the matter should be taken very seriously and the offenders hunted down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Beyond that, as -- I may be repeating myself here -- a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives, Congressman Weiner is accountable to the public. We, the people, are his bosses, not vice versa. Much like when President Obama was asked to provide his birth certificate, the notion that matters not specifically on-message or related to a specific political agenda are mere "distractions" that should be ignored, and not legitimate inquiries, is a sign of precisely what sort of cancerous elitest mentality permeates our newfound "ruling class." If our elected officials are unaccountable to anyone, how can we entrust them with guarding the sanctity of our inalienable rights?

Show Me Your Weiner!

It's the best story of a long holiday weekend that the mainstream media won't be telling you about. An outspoken and brash Democratic Congressman from New York City, connected by marriage to the Clintons and reportedly positioning himself for a run at Mayor in 2013, sends a picture of "a man's" engorged member to a college student from Seattle.

Or his account was hacked. Either way, it's quite the sordid tale. Let's look at the facts.

1) Congressman drops a completely random Seattle reference in a tweet related to a television appearance.

2) Later that evening, a Seattle-area student (who had previously referred to this same Congressman as "her boyfriend") receives a public mention on Twitter that includes the offending photo.

3) The Congressman then casts his account as "hacked," yet also immediately regains access and tweets with abandon right after the incident.

4) Both the photo and the student's entire online social media persona have subsequently been swept down the rabbit hole into oblivion.

Let's assume first that the account was indeed hacked, and that our honorable representative acted with total nobility and honesty. In an age of rampant identity theft and where the President of the United States can reauthorize controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act via e-signature, isn't it of paramount import that our elected leaders have the most secure communications and platforms possible? Surely, the calls will come soon from Representative Weiner for a full investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, right?

Otherwise, by contrast, we have yet another case of a sociopathic individual abusing the powers of elected office for personal, perverse, predatorial sexual gratification. Given how strong and handsome the Congressman appears to be on his Twitter avatar, I know you as shocked as I am, dear reader, with these revelations.

Verum Serum's exhaustive research seems to have uncovered an unhealthy and unwise connection between the Representative's Twitter account and numerous nubile and impressionable young ladies. Meanwhile, Ace of Spades HQ has utterly obliterated the "hack" argument by putting us into knowledge and facts regarding the timeline and likelihood of said hack. And the always-indefatiguable Other McCain links to the systematic elimination of Genette Nicole Cordova from the entirety of the Interwebs.

I think it's safe to assume at this point where the truth falls. Either way, though, Weiner has been uncovered to be an incompetent techno-n00b or a pervert. Not a great Memorial Day weekend for the Congressman from New York.

Hoisted on His Own Petard

Seems as if the son of the most infamous mass murderer of this current century is a bit miffed at the way his dad met a bitter end.

Osama Bin Laden's son complained Tuesday that his father was summarily executed, deprived of a fair trial and denied a family burial.

The son, who has previously denounced his father's murderous ways, said President Obama was no better than the notorious terrorist.

"As (I) condemned our father, (I) now condemn the President of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women," Omar Bin Laden wrote.

Do you smell that? It bares a strong olfactory resemblance to the smug self-righteousness of a man pontificating and throwing punches a tad outside his weight class. His father clearly was unmoved by his proclamations, so I fail to understand why the President of the United States -- or anyone else, for that matter -- would really care what Omar Bin Laden thinks.

That doesn't stop him from going on, of course.

"Not only international law has been blatantly violated, but USA has set a very different example whereby right to have a fair trial, and presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a court of law," Omar Bin Laden wrote in sometimes fractured English.

Osama Bin Laden was not a citizen of the United States, or a member of any organized state or formal army. As such, he was not entitled to any form of rights or presumption of anything in accordance with any form of law -- "international" or American.

He demanded answers in 30 days and said he is putting together a panel of British lawyers.

You will pardon me again if I'm not exactly quaking in my boots at this proclamation. Still, if would be a fitting irony, indeed, if Bin Laden managed to get an international court to declare Barack Obama a war criminal, much like the president's supporters so vehemently declared his predecessor.

Anyway, I've spent more time on this than Omar Bin Laden deserves. Bottom line, he's upset with the treatment of his father? I'm upset that his father killed over 3,000 people in my hometown. By my calculations, he owes me at least 2,999 more outrages before I give a flying fuck.

No Guts, No Glory

Ace of Spades notes the almost coordinated and on-message references to the CIA operation that killed Osama Bin Laden last week as "gutsy" on the part of the President. Here's a snippet, via Hot Air:

When President Obama was faced with the opportunity to act upon this, the president had to evaluate the strength of that information and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory.

To borrow a phrase so beloved by the Teleprompter in Chief, let me be clear. The operatives who put their lives on the line to monitor Bin Laden for months in Pakistan are gutsy. The SEAL Team that carried out the actual operation are gutsy. The Rangers that went in and then extracted the SEALS from deep inside a foreign territory are gutsy. The men and women that serve so capably each and every day in every undertaking that our armed forces performs are gutsy.

Acting on verifiable data and giving the go-ahead order from thousands of miles away? That's not gutsy, that's the President of the United States' job. Stop with the never-ending victory tour boys; there's a lot of work and messes still to be cleaned up both at home and abroad. Take a lesson from my personal life credo: "Act as if you've been there before."

Jim Geraghty Nails It

Turns out it wasn't a new era of peace, love, and understanding that captured and killed the world's most wanted mass murderer, but some good old-fashioned tactics of war put forth by the much-maligned President Bush that eventually got the job done.

I can hear the liberal cries of outrage, so to recap: The interrogations of KSM (which included waterboarding) and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul (held in “black site” prisons) were key to identifying the courier; the president then authorized military action in a foreign country without going to the United Nations or informing the host government; the military action was unilateral, and we did not consult with our allies; Congress was not informed of the military action; and it increasingly appears that no serious effort was made to treat Osama bin Laden as a criminal (reading him his rights, etc.). The monitoring of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s phone call was a result of an extensive global wiretapping system. Furthermore, as Charles Krauthammer notes, the helicopters used in the raid came from Bagram and Jalalabad; if we had withdrawn from Afghanistan on the antiwar Left’s timetable, we would have had no bases from which to launch this operation.

If I thought for a moment that dialogue and understanding could bring about true peace in this world I would be first on the bandwagon. But turns out that, when people want to kill you, they sometimes just won't listen to reason. That's why you carry the proverbial big stick, too...just in case.

Propaganda Is the Tool of Those Incapable of Logical Persuasion

I did not want to say anything about the tragedy that recently unfolded in Tucson, AZ; what hasn't already been said elsewhere by legions of pundits and commentators both fair and unfair, on both sides of the aisle? Bottom line, the shooting was the work of one man, a very sick and twisted loser working on his own peculiar agenda and unbeholden to any form of human normalcy or ideology. That we are now engaged in a days-old debate over the use of the term "blood libel" only renders the sad scene even more of a farce.

No, instead I'd like to note the continuing descension of American politics into the realm of vapid propaganda that has dovetailed with the rise of this current administration. It started with Barack Obama's coronation as Supreme Overlord of the Democrat Party in 2008, the modern-day Caesar speaking to the plebeians in a Coliseum filled with ornate faux-marble columns. Then came the posters of "Hope," which would have fit in perfectly on any otherwise barren brick wall in the Soviet Union in 1960. Heck, the President has his own logo. And now, building on his former Chief of Staff's infamous declaration to "never let a crisis go to waste," this past week's service for the victims in Tucson came complete with its own memorial slogan and tee-shirt.

It's sickening to me how pathetic and dumb we (at least, 52% of "we") must be to soak this crap in. Marketing and propaganda are the tools of a brand that cannot stand on the pure merits of its primary product alone. I say this as a professional marketer. Can you imagine George W. Bush wearing a special commemorative polo shirt while standing on the rubble pile after 9/11? Or Ronald Reagan hawking "Tear Down This Wall" posters? What about FDR supporters passing out "We Have Nothing to Fear" pins? "Gettysburg 1863?"

It's not all on the President, as he cannot single-handedly oversee the messaging of millions of supporters across the country. But that doesn't also mean that it doesn't still feel highly forced and manufactured, a means of controlling people and telling them it's OK to vote for Big Government and trillion-dollar debts because it makes them feel good. Humans will always be flawed, irrational animals at heart, but shouldn't our national discourse be a little more ... sophisticated? Life is more than just another meme.

Nothing to See Here, Move On...

While the civilized world wallowed in pre-election rhetoric and imagery of Brett Favre's turgid member, noted anti-war Web site Wikileaks actually uncovered the long-missing evidence of Iraq's drive to produce chemical and biological weapons, thereby in one moment justifying the entire last decade of warfare.

The details, as documented by Wired's Danger Room blog, detail copious classified findings of chemical and biological stockpiles, as well as the means and plans for more.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”

Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

If you were among those who cried "Bush lied, people died" or voted for Barack Obama, I will allow you the next moment to officially apologize and admit how utterly and completely wrong you were.  You may start now.

All set?  Thanks.

To this humble observer of world affairs, it always felt extremely unlikely that a regime so hell-bent on conquest and the torture of innocent civilians would not also dabble in the acquisition of big-ticket weaponry.  When factoring in the dilly-dallying and hand wringing perpetrated by the United Nations in the months and years leading up to the second Iraq War, Saddam Hussein and his henchmen were given ample opportunity to ship any WMD out to places such as Syria by the truckload, or even merely to just pour the vials of toxins into the desert sand, never to be seen again.  That our nation's brave dissenting party at the time could not wrap themselves in similar logic is a sad tale indeed, but then again, it's also par for the course for an ideology that also believes that rampant taxation and profligate spending are the keys to ending a full-on recession.  That the story is further steeped in the the delicious irony that anti-war Julian Assange provided the details makes it all the more sweet.

Look, war is hell.  No sane or rational human being willfully or enthusiastically takes up the risk of life and liberty that flow from combat or treats the decision lightly.  I regret and abhor the loss of any and all lives that were lost by our troops in the conflict, and will forever remember and honor their sacrifices.  Make no mistake, though: history will show the war was a just one, and I do not regret or reneg upon my support of it -- and President George W. Bush -- throughout the '00s.

Links:
WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results (Wired)
Imagine That: Wikileaks Docs Show There Were WMDs in Iraq (Bizzy Blog)
WikiLeaks Reveals Troops Did Find Some WMD In Iraq (Ace of Spades HQ)

Things I Don't Understand

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me, but I have a strong bias in favor of the rule of law.  An agreed-upon set of universal principles is the only proven way to maintain order and stability in any form of society.  Heck, even the larger universe (or multiverse, if you are a proponent of things such as membrane theory) has its own set of ordered rules and operations that dictate everything from the application of forces (electromagnetism, gravity) to the specific ways in which time and space become distorted in the presence of black holes.

So, why do our bureaucratic -- and largely Democratic -- overlords have such a fondness for chaos and disorder?

I don't know about you, but when I was hired at my current place of employment I had to pass an extensive background check, which included a look into my (nonexistent) criminal record and credit history.  Heck, when I apply to jobs to this day on places such as monster.com, there's usually a little questionnaire looking into matters of my background as a United States citizen, military history, and more.

So why does the federal Department of Justice not care if its employees actually, you know, belong in the country or not?

Employers who hire illegal immigrants can be fined, but the Obama administration warned this week that they also can be fined for asking legal immigrants to show their green cards before hiring them.

The Justice Department’s civil rights division sued the Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona, seeking damages from schools for having “intentionally committed document abuse discrimination.”

Prior to this year, the local colleges in the Phoenix area asked job applicants who were not U.S. citizens to show a driver’s license, a Social Security card and their permanent resident card, commonly called a green card.

The Justice Department said a valid driver’s license and a Social Security card are usually sufficient to show that a person is authorized to work. Requesting a green card amounts to “immigration-related employment discrimination,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Of course, in a world where the President of the United States is no longer required to prove conclusively that he meets the Constitutional requirements for office, why should the law apply to anyone else?

Just don't dare have the temerity to sell guns, though, because then even if you do all of your proper diligence it might not be enough.

One of the gun dealers of Austin’s Gun Show is sentenced to 6-months at a federal work camp for selling a weapon to an undocumented immigrant.  Independent firearms dealer-Paul Copeland says for years he has commonly sold handguns and antique weapons with no problems and prior to his arrest the illegal immigrant showed him what appeared to be a valid Texas driver’s license.

In January 2009, the ATF along with the Austin police department set up a sting operation targeting independent firearms dealers that were selling weapons to illegal immigrants, both inside the show and outside the Austin’s Gun Show’s parking lot.

Again, maybe this is just me being "me," but I find the phrase "federal work camp" beyond frightening.  Oh, and the rules also don't apply towards counting our military personnel's votes, either.

In Washington, politicians always like to release bad news on a Friday, as fewer people notice. Today, the Pentagon announced that it had granted the waiver requests of five states seeking to escape requirements to protect military voters.

I have written previously here at PJM that all waiver requests should be denied.  Unfortunately, if you are an overseas servicemember from Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, or Washington, the protections in the MOVE Act aren’t going to apply to you this year.  And if you are from one of the states who still aren’t in compliance with MOVE — like Colorado, Wisconsin, or Alaska — don’t be surprised if you get scant help from Attorney General Eric Holder.

Waivers can be granted from MOVE only if states find a way to make sure the votes of servicemembers are still counted.

Washington, despite having plenty of time after an August 17 primary to get the job done, received a waiver today. Washington was unwilling to change their schedule of ballot preparation to allow for 45 days mailing time. Though modern printing technology makes the Washington waiver unnecessary, it was granted.

I guess, in essence, it's not that Democrats and the federal government are not in favor of prosecuting the law to its exact and full extent, it's just that they only like to do so when it benefits them or hurts their political opponents.  And that, is perhaps the scariest reason to throw them all out of office in November as there is, lest one day I wind up taxed to write this blog or thrown into a reeducation camp for thinking the wrong things.

Links:

• Catch-22: Obama DoJ Now Telling Employers They Can’t Check Employees’ Immigration Status (Patterico's Pontifications)
• Gun Dealer Gets 6 Months For Selling To Illegal W/ Valid ID (Stop the ACLU)
• Obama's Pentagon: Why Of Course You Can Have Special Waivers Disobligating You From Protecting The Right of Our Troops To Vote In Elections (Ace of Spades HQ)
• Outrage: Pentagon Grants Five States Waivers from MOVE Act (Pajamas Media)
• Philadelphia Tax Code Sparks Big Controversy with Small Bloggers (Mashable)

The Cryptic Cypher: Is Obama a Muslim, and Who Is at Fault for Perpetuating the Myth?

"The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."
-- US President Barack Hussein Obama, August 21, 2010, during his weekly radio address

In the interest of full disclosure, I am taking the above quotation completely out of context, as it was in response to a recent Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. Regardless, the line proves most interesting and ironic when considering the President's reluctance to basically share any core information about his life or upbringing.

OK, wait, let's start over.

The political world was positively abuzz on Friday morning with the release of poll results indicating that an amazing (although still statistically irrelevant) 18% of Americans believe that the President of the United States is, in fact, a practicing Muslim. In a sane, rational world, it wouldn't matter in the slightest if the leader of the free world was Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Zoroastrian, or a devout atheist. However, we live far from within a rational world, and in one where terrorists murder thousands in the name of their faith -- and then look to build conquering memorials upon the very same land -- this stuff is going to come up. It didn't take long for people on all sides to weigh in on the matter, alternately declaring that they have long suspected Obama's secret proclivities and/or proclaiming Americans to be a bunch of dumbasses.

Personally, I don't care in the least what the President is or isn't, nor do I believe that he is a secret part of some sort of Manchurian Islamist Conspiracy. I also don't believe that he is a Kenyan citizen and therefore unqualified to hold office. What I do believe, though, is that -- for a guy everyone tells us is so very super-smart -- Barack Obama sure does a lot of dumb stuff.

In the absense of real information, what else can you do but build your own reality upon a cypher? It's not as if you see or hear stories every week about the President attending religious services at a local Washington-area parish of any denomination. So, when you hear that the President has openly presented himself an ambassador to the Muslim world, or declared that the United States has always been a fundamentally Muslim nation, or come out more strongly in favor of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque than practically anyone else, it seems logically reasonable to take it to the next possible conclusion as well -- that he's a Muslim. Again, this doesn't mean it's true, it just means it is a semi-logical conclusion to draw.

This history of withholding key information is par for the course for the Administration, which has also refused to come 100% clean on his birth in Hawaii or release his academic records from higher education, fostering a score of wacky conspiracy theories related to his eligibility to serve as president or questioning his academic status/capabilities. Why not be completely transparent? After all, the only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide, right?

Links:

• "Obama Challenges GOP on Campaign Finance Ruling" (Tampa Bay Online)
• "Rev. Franklin Graham: President Obama 'Born a Muslim'" (Politico)
• "Is Obama a Secret Muslim?" (Texas Sparkle)
• "Polls Show Public Unclear on Obama's Faith" (Fox News)
• "Obama Seeks 'New Beginning' in Muslim World" (MSNBC)
• "Planting the Flag: How One Mosque May Change Life as We Know It" (Geek Soap Box)

Planting the Flag: How One Mosque May Change Life as We Know It

Various aspects of this post have been mulling around in my head for days or even weeks now; in many ways, it will be the perfect encapsulation of the story of the Death of the West, a tale of appeasement and surrender in the disguised name of freedom, both of speech and religion. I can barely even bring myself to write about it, as the emotions brought forth are still so raw and brutal that, ten years later, they still shape my every nightmare and paranoia.

Issue #1 -- War and the Conquering Religion

To borrow one of the president's favorite phrases, let's be clear right off the bat: the Park 51 mosque and community center has absolutely nothing to do with promoting tolerance or taking advantage of underutilized office space in Lower Manhattan. The building is located one block from the site of the most deadly and successful Islamic terror attack in history, one that was responsible for the murder of thousands. It's also scheduled to open on the very tenth anniversary of the attack, to the exact day. If that isn't deliberate provocation and of an incendiary mindset it will be hard to locate any in history.

This building is going up as a landmark, a deliberate sign of a perceived victory, and as another gateway into the eventual conquest of the infidel in the name of jihad.

"Oh, but we've always been just as bad...look at the Crusades!," someone remarked to me just this week. Firstly, the Crusades occurred over 500 years ago, get over it. It's not a Christian cathedral that stands in Jerusalem on the arguably holiest site on earth, it's the Dome of the Rock, a mosque built over the original Temple Mount with the express purpose of celebrating the conquering of the Middle East by Muslim forces. Only one religion still looks to convert the unwashed masses by force or death.

Let's just start calling it for what it is, and not pretend otherwise with some absurd prehistoric moral equivilence mental gymnastics. That mentality is going to only, literally, get us killed.

Issue #2 -- Our Mayor Is Full of Shit

I guess, for writing this post, I should be ashamed of myself.

Opponents of the proposed construction of a controversial mosque just blocks from Ground Zero "ought to be ashamed of themselves" for opposing it, Mayor Bloomberg said this morning.

Bloomberg said he also doesn't care where the people behind the mosque and Islamic cultural center will get the money to build.

"People say, 'Do they have the money? Can they raise the money? Where does it come from?' " Bloomberg said during an appearance on his WOR-AM radio show. "I don't know and government shouldn't. Do you really want every time they pass the basket in your church and you throw a buck in, they run over and say, 'OK, now, you know, where do you come from? Who are your parents? Where'd you get this money?'

Bloomberg then added, "A handful of people ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Earlier this week, with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, Bloomberg gave an impassioned plea in support of the mosque for what he said was trampling on religious freedom. "I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state -- as important a test as we may see in our lifetimes -- and it is critically important that we get it right," the mayor said.

It should come as little surprise that a self-loathing Napoleonic figure such as the current mayor of New York would feel this way. After all, in many aspects Mike Bloomberg's worldview dovetails nicely with the entire scenario. For starters, he is a totalitarian elitist unconcerned with the will of the electorate, having undone the popularly elected mandate for term limits in a naked grab for a third term in office. His administration and cronies are among the most plausibly corrupt since the days of Tammany Hall. His unconditional love for real estate developers and passion for tearing down every classical landmark and one- or two-family home in favor of gaudy monstrosities that overwhelm and destroy what's left the City's neighborhoods will forever serve as his undying legacy. It's no wonder that a mega-million dollar development deal perpetrated by a fascist faux religion would be right up his alley.

How ironic it will be that, when sharia law is imposed in NY, the Jewish Bloomberg will be among the first led off to the concentration/stoning camps.

Issue #3 -- Our President Is Even More Full of Shit

First, it was a local issue, and he was going to stay out of it (a classic example of voting "present" that has always been his hallmark). But not it turns out that President Barack Hussein Obama is actually full-on in favor of the development, and touted once again his absolutely absurd belief that "Islam has always been a part of America."

Obama said that Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America.

"The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago."

Well, sure, if by that you mean our way of life has been at war with it since the days of the Barbary Pirates, then sure. Is it lost on the Commander in Chief that there's only one unifying characteristic behind the two wars the United States is currently prosecuting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Much like his obsession with submission and bowing, does he not believe that the entire world is watching every time he speaks?

And what's up with the annual shout-outs to Islam as part of our way of life? I don't recall the President giving similar praise and reminders for all sects of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or even Zoroastrianism. The man doth protest too much, doesn't he?

In coming out so completely and publicly in favor of Park 51, though, the President has actually wound up making what will turn out to be the gravest political mistake of his life. Individuals I never even considered as political are coming out every day on sites such as Facebook and Twitter expressing their disgust with this entire turn of events. In one swift move, Obama has exposed himself and his political party as the enemy of the American Way of Life, more than any bailouts, stimulus packages, or socialized healthcare bills ever could. He has also rekindled every unfair and inaccurate accusation against him -- that he's a closet Muslim, wasn't born in the United States, etc. -- and given all of his most fanatical opponents the causus belli they could only previously dream of.

Obama has inadvertantly cultivated a groundswell of popular revolt and unrest, and in doing so has set himself up for one of the great midterm electoral defeats in American history. So, in this regard, I guess I should offer the President a hearty "thank you" for destroying his own political career and potentially setting up a return to power of the party I nominally support. Provided the Republicans don't fuck it up, of course.

Issue #4 -- Right, So We Can't Do Anything About It, Now What?

It should never have even come to this. Forget talk about freedom, when our leaders first heard about the Park 51 plan -- and believe me, they knew long before we likely did -- it should have immediately been kiboshed by any means necessary. But now that it's here, and will be built, our Constitution and law reign supreme and the Islamic Community Center can and will and should be built.

But that doesn't mean we can't have a lot of fun along the way. That's why Greg Gutfeld, of FOX News' Red Eye, is proving himself to be my total hero. His concepts for the first Muslim Gay Bar, Heaven and Halal, located right next door to Park 51 is a work of sheer genius. If our leaders want to hold up this building as a teaching moment, and a shining example of our committment to tolerance and diversity, let's see how and if they welcome Gutfeld's project with open arms. After all, isn't provocation an important and integral part of free speech?

Greg, I love you in a totally masculine and macho way. Keep up the great work, and thank you.

Let's keep this up. Let's build on Gutfeld's momentum and do everything we can to capitalize on our rights and freedoms. Let's hold routine protests every time a Muslim allegedly murders a daughter in an honor killing. Let's celebrate every Saudi Arabian woman stoned to death for daring to expose an ankle. Let's post videos of every instance of Pakastani goat/human sexual intercourse on YouTube and link them across Facebook, Twitter and the whole world. Let's have weekly contests depicting the human form / portrait of the Prophet Muhammed at his most noble and magnificent.

I mean, we are free to do so, right? It's not like we aren't reminded of every failure of a Roman Catholic Church ultimately run and composed of flawed human beings, right? This is all in the name of education and awareness.

Last Exit Question

Where the hell is Rudy Giuliani throughout this mess?  His silence is positively deafening, and almost worrisome.

Links:

• "Mayor Bloomberg Says Ground Zero Mosque Opponents Should Be 'Ashamed' of Themselves" (New York Post)
• "Expensive People in Unnecessary Jobs" (Queens Crap)
• "Obama Votes Present, Continues Failure as Alleged Leader of America" (Riehl World View)
• "Terror Ties: Ground Zero Imam Attended Hizb-ut Tahrir Conference" (Pajamas Media)
• "The Stunning Decline of Barack Obama" (Big Government)
• "Collapse: The Left Is Unpopular, Undisciplined, and Ill-Tempered" (Weekly Standard)
• "Crist Backs Obama on Controversial Islamic Center" (CNN)
• "Muslim Gay Bar: Why Are the Intolerant Preaching Tolerance?" (Big Hollywood)
• "Obama on Islam in America" (Ace of Spades HQ)