Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Son, It Was Obama We Journalists Had to Fear, by Jack Cashill

Cannonized by the mainstream media, Saint Barack inflicted major damage on the First Amendment. From Jack Cashill at americanthinker.com:

“I was driving my then 11-year-old son somewhere, probably soccer practice, when he burst into tears and asked me, ‘is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?’” So claimed the embarrassingly serious Olivier Knox, the White House Correspondents Association president, at the association’s annual grub fest on Saturday.

What Knox should have said is, “No, son, President Trump is at least open in his hostility. The First Amendment gives him the same rights as it gives us. It was President Obama’s dirty, covert war on the media that had me worried.” At this point, little Knox should have asked, “Did this sneaky, back-door attack prefigure Obama’s subversion of the Trump candidacy?” Now, there is a correspondent’s dinner I would pay to watch.

In May 2010, when Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Law, few of America’s reporters and editors were aware that Obama as president represented the single greatest threat to press freedom in their professional lives. True to his reputation as messiah, Obama would soon make even the willfully blind see.

In May 2013, the illusion of an unfettered press disappeared like a magician’s bunny. It was in this month that the Associated Press learned Obama’s Justice Department had quietly seized all of the relevant records for twenty AP telephone lines a year earlier. These included the personal and professional lines of several reporters.

The seizure had to do with AP reporting on a covert CIA operation in Yemen. Although only five reporters were involved in that story, more than one hundred reporters used the lines and switchboards whose records were seized. AP President Gary Pruitt wrote Attorney General Eric Holder that the “government has no conceivable right to know” the content of those records. On Face the Nation, Pruitt boldly assessed White House strategy, “I know what the message being sent is: If you talk to the press, we’re going after you.”

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Malcolm X Warned About These Bourgeois Hustlers, by Teodrose Fikre

Here is an interesting perspective on blacks, politics, and government. From Teodrose Fikre at consortiumnews.com:

Barack Obama was not an outlier but the norm when it comes to the tokens who are paraded by Democrats to represent faux-progress and counterfeit diversity and Kamala Harris is the next in line, says Teodrose Fikre of the Ghion Journal.

Growing up, one of my biggest heroes and the person I wanted to emulate when I got older was Malcolm X. This was during my time of militancy and youthful rebellion, when I thought the only way to arrive at justice was through a revolution. The insurgent within me was captivated by Malcolm X’s take no prisoner approach and the way he spoke harsh truths to the status quo.

It was not until I matured and learned through hardship and indigence that I realized Malcolm X’s power was not his fiery rhetoric but his unifying message after returning from Mecca. However, as much as I’ve become an admirer of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s latter days, there are still aspects of his earlier reflections that ring true given the times we live in.

What I’m referring to are not his blistering speeches where he would call “white” people devils or his addresses where he echoed the teachings of Elijah Muhammad—Malcolm X himself walked away from that type of demagoguery. Rather, what intrigued me the most was his dissection of the political and social dynamics that kept “black” folks subjugated.

To this day, one of the most compelling arguments that Malcolm X made about the evils of both political parties is found in a speech he gave about the political and economic state of “black” America. He brilliantly exposed the false-distinction between Democrats and Republicans as a choice between the lesser of the same evil.

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The Trump-Russia Scam – How Obama Enabled The FBI To Spy On Trump, by Moon of Alabama

The FBI that was unable find any malfeasance by Hillary Clinton has left no pebble unturned in its pursuit of President Trump. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

Despite the loss of major narratives, the war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated. The main of tool in this  war are allegations of relations between Trump and anything Russia. The war runs along several parallel paths.

The narrative war in the media is most visible one. When any of the fake stories about Trump and Russia gets debunked and disposed, new ones are created or others intensified.

In parallel to these propaganda efforts the deep state created an investigation that Trump has no way to escape from. Enabled by one of the Obama administrations last acts the investigation is using signal intelligence to entrap and flip the people surrounding Trump (see section three below). The big price will be Trump himself. Here we take a look at what transpired during the last weeks.

One major anti-Trump narrative was that ‘Russian influence’ helped to put him into office. This was based on the alleged nefarious influence a Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Peterburg, had on the U.S. electorate. That explanation never made sense. Little of the IRA activities had to do with the election. It used sockpuppets on Facebook and Twitter to attract people to websites filled with puppy pictures or similar nonsense. The IRA would then sell advertisement and promotions on these sites.

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A Look Back at Clapper’s Jan. 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russia-gate, by Ray McGovern

The intelligence assessment on Russia-gate was filled with assertions backed by dubious evidence. The tissue of lies has frayed, and Ray McGovern looks back. From McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

On the 2nd anniversary of the “assessment” blaming Russia for “collusion” with Trump there is still no evidence other than showing the media “colluded” with the spooks, says Ray McGovern.

The banner headline atop page one of The New York Times print edition two years ago today, on January 7, 2017, set the tone for two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.”

Under a media drumbeat of anti-Russian hysteria, credulous Americans were led to believe that Donald Trump owed his election victory to the president of Russia, whose “influence campaign” according to the Times quoting the intelligence report, helped “President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

Hard evidence supporting the media and political rhetoric has been as elusive as proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002-2003. This time, though, an alarming increase in the possibility of war with nuclear-armed Russia has ensued — whether by design, hubris, or rank stupidity. The possible consequences for the world are even more dire than 16 years of war and destruction in the Middle East.

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How the War Party Lost the Middle East, by Patrick Buchanan

The war party has a lot of nerve, criticizing President Trump for wanting to pull US troops out of the Midddle East. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“Assad must go, Obama says.”

So read the headline in The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2011.

The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:

“The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. … the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad must go!

Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.

But we cannot “leave now,” insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or “the Kurds are going to get slaughtered.”

Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed our intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will “get slaughtered”?

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Deep Quandaries of the Deep State, by James Howard Kunstler

The money sentence: In fact the evidence of a Deep State gone rogue is far more compelling than any charges Mr. Mueller has so far produced on Trump-Russia “collusion.” The question becomes: will anything be done about the Deep State? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Watergate had tragic Shakespearean overtones, with Nixon as King Lear, but Russia-Gate — perhaps the last gate America goes through on its giant slalom run to collapse — is but a Chinese Fire Drill writ large. The reason? In 1973, we were still a serious people. Today, the most lavishly credentialed elite in history believe the most preposterous “stories,” or, surely even worse, pretendto believe them for political advantage.

Now, an epic battle of wills is setting up as Robert Mueller’s investigation concludes its business and its primary target, the Golden Golem of Greatness, girds his loins to push back. Behind the flimsy scrim of Russia collusion accusations stands a bewildering maze of criminal mischief by a matrix of federal agencies that lost control of their own dark operation to meddle in the 2016 election. The US intel community (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc), with the Department of Justice, all colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the intel agencies of the UK and Australia, to derail Mr. Trump as a stooge of Russia and, when he shocked them by getting elected, mounted a desperate campaign to cover their asses knowing he had become their boss. The Obama White House was involved in all this, attempting to cloak itself in plausible deniability, which may be unwinding now, too. How might all this play out from here?

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Bongino’s Spygate: Exposing the Obama/Clinton Deep State Criminality, by Frank Hawkins

Obama/Clinton criminality is even worse than you think. From Frank Hawkins at americanthinker.com:

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of  the Obama/Clinton Deep State.  Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him.

For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of the Obama/Clinton administration. But who thought they would go this far?

Bongino has painted a highly detailed account of how the Obama administration criminalized our intelligence communities as well as other government agencies to  stop Trump, and when that didn’t work to try and bring down the president of the United States.

The book relies heavily on left-leaning news outlets CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CBS News, The Hill, London-based The Guardian and numerous others. All of this is carefully footnoted in the book. In a recent speech, Bongino said,

“The reason I wrote the book, is because of this whole spy scandal, this debacle, this atrocious disgrace of a scandal that happened to our president.   We deliberately did not use footnotes from right-leaning resources.  I used (the mainstream media) because anyone who tells you oh, this didn’t happen, just go to the footnotes and say, did you read this article?  It happened, folks.  The President of the United States had the intelligence community and the law enforcement community of the United States, at the highest levels, weaponized against him.” [emphasis added]

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As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom, by Glenn Greenwald

Not everything the Barack Obama administration did was wrong. From Glenn Greenwald at theintercept.com:

THE TRUMP JUSTICE DEPARTMENT inadvertently revealedin a court filing that it has charged Julian Assange in a sealed indictment. The disclosure occurred through a remarkably amateurish cutting-and-pasting error in which prosecutors unintentionally used secret language from Assange’s sealed charges in a document filed in an unrelated case. Although the document does not specify which charges have been filed against Assange, the Wall Street Journal reported that “they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.”

Over the last two years, journalists and others have melodramatically claimed that press freedoms were being assaulted by the Trump administration due to trivial acts such as the President spouting adolescent insults on Twitter at Chuck Todd and Wolf Blitzer or banning Jim Acosta from White House press conferences due to his refusal to stop preening for a few minutes so as to allow other journalists to ask questions. Meanwhile, actual and real threats to press freedoms that began with the Obama DOJ and have escalated with the Trump DOJ – such as aggressive attempts to unearth and prosecute sources – have gone largely ignored if not applauded.

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The Limits of Power – The Myth of the Magical American Soldier, by Maj. Danny Sjursen

By now the belief that the US can solve problems in foreign lands just be sending over the troops should be dead, but it’s not. From Maj. Danny Sjursen, who admits he’s not a miracle worker, at antiwar.com:

Americans worship their fighting men and women; but it is dangerous to believe the mere presence of U.S. troops will achieve the miraculous in the Greater Middle East – it won’t

We aren’t miracle workers. We’re just soldiers after all – kids barely out of their teens and officers in their mid-20s do most of the fighting. Still, policymakers in Washington, and citizens on Main Street both seem convinced that the mere presence of a few hundred or thousand American troops can alter societies, vanquish the wicked, and remake the world.

A colleague of mine refers to this as the myth of the magic soldier: sprinkle US troops in some horrific mess of a country and voilà – problem solved!

It sounds great, but this sort of delusional thinking has led the United States into one failed quagmire after another, killing some 7,000 US troops and close to one million locals. After 17 years of fruitless, indecisive war, its quite incredible that a bipartisan coalition of mainstream Republicans (neocons, mostly) and Democrats (neo-liberal relics) still cling to the idea that American soldiers wield magic powers. It’s long past time to review the record of our over-adulated troopers and reframe the actual – limited – capabilities of military force.

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When Will Obama Aides Come Clean About U.S.-Saudi War Crimes? by Sarah Lazare

It’s far to easy in American government to get along and go along, and then weakly apologize many years afterward when your policies come up a disaster. From Sarah Lazare at inthesetimes.com:

Now that Saudi Arabia has become a P.R. liability, Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes have quietly condemned the war in Yemen. But when they had the power to stop it, they were complicit.

It took the apparent murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi for the violence of the Saudi monarchy to finally register with the U.S. media and political elite. Since March 2015, the United States, Saudi Arabia and other allies have waged a war on Yemen that has killed tens of thousands of people, pushed the poorest country in the Middle East to the brink of famine and unleashed a devastating cholera outbreak. On behalf of its Saudi partner, the United States has shipped arms, refueled bomber jets, deployed troops and provided political cover—all without a congressional vote, serious political debate or meaningful media coverage.

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