Monthly Archives: May 2009

The spectacle of two duelling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama’s address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished.

So who won the fight? (it’s hard to use anothing other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides.

But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule his speech (Cheney’s was announced first) at exactly the same time as the former veep was a sign of some weakness.

Obama’s speech and Cheney’s empty lectern. Pic: Toby Harnden

The venues for the speeches said something. Obama showily chose the National Archives, repository for many of the founding documents of the US, and spoke in front of a copy of the Constitution – cloaking himself in the flag, as Republicans were often criticised for doing.

To hear Cheney speak, we were crammed into a decidedly unglamourous and cramped conference room at AEI, favourite think tank of conservative hawks.

The former veep’s speech was factual and unemotional and certainly devoid of the kind of hokey, self-obsessed, campaign-style stuff like this, from Obama’s address today: “I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offer. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land.”

In terms of Obama’s purported aim for his speech – to present a plan for closing Guantanamo Bay aimed at placating Congress – he failed. The reception on Capitol Hill was lukewarm with even Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Dick Cheney responds Pic: Toby Harnden
>>Article

Just came across this; it is worth another listen

And three weeks before his death

I read an article on Politico about Leon Panetta’s message to his employees saying:

“Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead
Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated
previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records
from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been
employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and
reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

Below is a comment from a commenter/ranter giving his bi-partisan response. This is the mentality we are dealing with from too many on the left. All caps, he must be shouting. He must be getting tired, he left out Rove and Halaburton.

‘THE CIA WAS NOTHING BUT A LAP DOG FOR BUSH & CHENEY AND THEIR CALCULATED INVASION OF IRAQ. THE FBI WIPED THEIR HANDS OF THE STENCH-BOMB BUT
THE CIA DIDN’T. ONLY A CLUELESS AND IGNORANT PARTY I.E. THE REPUBLICAN TEABAG PARTY WOULD BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT COMES OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS. HOW DO YOU THINK
CIA UNDERCOVER AGENT VALERIE PLANE’S NAME GOT OUT? THIS IS NOTHING BUT A DISTRACTION WITH NO LEGS BUT THE REPUBLICAN TEABAGGERS & THE MSM WILL PLAY IN THE HORSE MANURE FOR AWHILE. ITS ALL A BIG JOKE TO THE GOP, ANYTHING TO TAKE THE FOCUS OFF OF THIS RECESSION-THIS ECONOMIC MELTDOWN THAT HAPPENED ON THE REPUBLICAN TEABAG PARTY’S WATCH

entire article here

Received my $250 in ObamanMoney in my account. Had to double check to see if I am still alive. Surprisingly, I am.

The secret of self-control.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Continue reading “Don’t!”

Why can’t we have an honest debate about ‘enhanced interrogations’ of confessed Terrorists; without the Lies from the Leftists.

. . . from First Things

Radical evil sets the threshold of victory so high that we risk contamination by confronting it on its own terms. Terrorists tempt us to torture them, by striking against innocent noncombatants out of the shadows. The present debate over torture is a black cloud as big as a man’s hand announcing a storm to come. How do we arrogate unto ourselves the right to inflict death and extreme pain upon innocents—leave aside not-so-innocent terrorists—without corrupting ourselves? The insidious character of radical evil seeks to contaminate us through our own response. Ordinary evil kills for profit or rapes for pleasure. Radical evil rapes and kills so that terror and horror will blot out the memory of the good and leave behind only the capacity for more evil.
Radical evil seeks to destroy the good out of envy; if we cannot envision the Good, we must stand dumb and uncomprehending before radical evil. And no secular philosophy can explain the Good; no mainstream current of modern philosophy even tries. All the less can secular philosophy explain radical evil. The erosion of the West’s theological understanding of good and evil since the Second World War and the Cold War leaves us vulnerable to radical evil. It is in this context that the present debate over torture should be situated.

Commencement Demonstration Details