Justin's Political Corner
Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Benghazi is actually part two of the Benghazi show. Season two in the DVD box set, if you will.
Previously, on Benghazi!
Hillary Clinton, in her last appearance before Congressional committees as Secretary of State, was supposed to collapse at the feet of her GOP inquisitors, helpless before them as they posed for the cameras and delivered Fox-generated storylines. In reality, Clinton’s testimony resembled Neo from the Matrix, batting away nonsense and helping to remind the world why she has a historical legacy of her own apart from her husband.
Now with the latest dog and pony show, we will be treated to more GOP harrumphing and more Fox News alerts that will largely be about old, well-worn nonsense that the conservative media will treat as bombshells but turn out to be nothingburgers.
Pardon my grizzled cynicism, but I have seen this storyline before, with Clinton and Whitewater and breathless mumbles of scandal from the mainstream press that turned out to be nothing.
It’s all as fake as the claim that a tiny Arkansas land deal was an abuse of power. I’ve seen this show before, it sucks and it’s a perversion of our government. In other words, standard issue conservative politics.
More proof that the right-wing fearmongering about Benghazi is just a disgusting attempt to weaken Hillary Clinton’s chances for the Presidency or even the Democratic Party nomination in 2016.
In Erik Rush’s latest column, the conservative commentator argues that the Obama administration may be deliberately ignoring potential terrorists targeting the US in order to use their attacks as a “pretext under which martial law might be declared.”
“In order to complete the power transfer to the degree that socialist power players desire, it will become an imperative for Obama to declare martial law at some point,” Rush writes. “This is in part why efforts to dismantle the Second Amendment have been so aggressive since Obama’s re-election.”
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
Writing in WorldNetDaily today, Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman expanded on hisconspiracy theory that a deadly fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, was actually a terrorist attack.
Instead of offering any evidence to substantiate his claims, he argues that the fact that the explosion at the plant was ruled an accident (and likely a result of loose regulations) is proof enough that the Obama administration is actually covering up an act of “Muslim terrorism” that was meant to kill George W. Bush, who lives in Dallas, Texas.
Dallas, of course, is approximately 77 miles north of West, but that doesn’t really matter.
See, as Klayman explains, Obama is “potentially even more dangerous than al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the mullahs in Tehran, or any terrorist group or nation state, combined” and a “traitorous ‘Muslim in drag,’” and only Klayman himself can comprehend and expose his diabolical schemes.
On August 5, 2012, just before 10:30 in the morning, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., took out his semi-automatic handgun and started killing worshipers. An Army veteran and an avid bass player in a neo-Nazi rock band, Page killed two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then made his way inside. There, he reloaded and killed four more, including the president of the temple who was shot while trying to tackle Page. Three more were critically wounded in the massacre.
When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.
According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites “dirt people”), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page’s band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.
Note that back in August 2012, Fox News didn’t care very much about Wade Page and the wild gun shootout he unleashed in an act of domestic terror in the Milwaukee suburb, nor did Fox suggest the event was connected to a larger, more sinister terror trend. In fact, in the days that followed the gun massacre, there were just two passing references to Page during Fox’s primetime, one from Bill O’Reilly and one from Greta Van Susteren. No guests were asked to discuss the temple shooting, and after one day the story was completely forgotten.
In one rare occasion when the conversation did turn to Page’s motivations, Fox’s opinion hosts were quick to criticize the notion that he was a far-right extremist. (He clearly was.) On The Five, after co-host Bob Beckel referred to Page as “right-wing skinhead,” he was quickly shouted down by his colleagues. Co-host Andrea Tantaros stressed that the killing was an isolated event that didn’t have any larger implications. “How do you stop a lunatic?” she asked. “This is not a political issue.”
Fox’s guarded response to an extremist’s killing spree was striking, considering that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack Fox News has gone all in (again) with its war on Islam as the channel fights its latest bigoted chapter in the War on Terror. It’s striking as Fox tries to blame a larger community for the act of two madmen because it’s the same Fox News that often can’t find time to even comment, let alone report, on what’s become regular, and often deadly, right-wing extremist attacks in America.
From neo-Nazi killers like Page, to a string of abortion clinic bombings, as well as bloody assaults on law enforcement from anti-government insurrectionists, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to terrorize victims in the U.S. (“Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists.”) But Fox News is not concerned. And Fox News does not try to affix collective blame.
It’s clear that Fox is only interested in covering and hyping a single part of the War on Terror; the part that targets Muslims and lets Fox wallow in stereotypes. The part that lets Fox accuse Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terrorists and perhaps sharing a radical allegiance. The part that lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminating other Constitutional rights, and lets it unleash a collection of anti-Islam crusaders onto the cable airwaves.
Most importantly, Fox covers a War on Terror that lets it uniformly blame Muslims.
Keep in mind though, there’s been no reported evidence that anyone in the Cambridge, Mass., Muslim community knew about, condoned or helped plan the bombing perpetrated by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, it’s possible the bomber brothers told nobody of their plan because local Muslims would have reported them to the police, the way a local imam tipped off Canadian officials who made arrests this week and thwarted an alleged rail bombing plot. (And the way local Muslims in Virginia and New York have helped prevent terror plots.)
Fox’s ugly religious attacks represent a brazen display of bigotry and bullying. The hypocrisy is that Fox News routinely downplays acts of political, and religious, violence from far-right extremists, while making sure not to condemn those indirectly associated with them.
Such acts have been legion. During a robust period of political violence last decade, women’s health clinics were attacked in January, May, and September 2003, January and July 2004, January, May, and July 2005, as well as May and December 2007, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Then in 2009, five clinics in Florida were the target of acid attacks.
More recently, two antiabortion firebombings occurred in 2011. And last year a woman’s health clinic in Wisconsin was damaged when a homemade bomb was set off on the building’s windowsill.
Of course, in May 2009, antiabortion extremist Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller while he attended church in Wichita, Kan.
And then there are the right-wing hate extremists who have plotted attacks against the government and minorities. Below is a partial list of attacks, or planned attacks, unleashed by radicals in recent years. The descriptions are taken from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2012 report, “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City.”
h/t: AlterNet
(via Muslim Congressman Ellison Slams GOP’s Call For Religious Profiling After Boston | ThinkProgress)
During an appearance on Meet The Press Sunday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) repeated his call for profiling Muslims in the name of public safety, stating that although most Muslims are “outstanding people,” the threat of terrorism still stems from “the Muslim community.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman, quickly shot down that line of thinking, arguing that blanket profiling doesn’t serve the needs of law enforcement and actually undermines effective investigations by unnecessarily straining public resources.
Ellison detailed the shortcomings of King’s approach, stressing that individual behavior and actionable evidence should form the basis of terrorism investigations. He also compared King’s strategy to the similarly misguided policies that the American government adopted towards Japanese Americans during World War II.
King also asked why law enforcement hadn’t made interrogations of the Boston bombers’ mosque a higher priority, prompting host David Gregory to ask what, exactly, investigators could have asked before the bombings had occurred. King responded by repeating that such interrogations had not occurred due to “political correctness” concerning the treatment of Muslims in America.
-Rush Limbaugh, 04.22.2013 edition of Premiere Radio Network’s The Rush Limbaugh Show.
(via nbcnews)
Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt spoke with Stan Solomon about the Boston marathon bombing, and they both agreed that the left is actually pleased with the attack because it might result in increased government control.
After co-host ‘Chief’ Steve Davis said that the left doesn’t want anyone who doesn’t work for the government to have guns and “they don’t care how many of us get killed, blown up, assaulted, murdered or whatever as long as they can control us by taking away our guns,” Solomon maintained that liberals are even okay with other liberals getting murdered: “It’s not just how many conservatives or Republicans [die] because these people that were killed and maimed and devastated and traumatized were overwhelmingly their people, they don’t care, they are like the Chinese who don’t care if they have a million casualties because they got a billion backups.”
In earlier interviews, Pratt and Solomon warned that President Obama is bent on launching a race war that will target upper-class white heterosexual Christians.
A senior congressional aide privy to the Boston Marathon terror investigation confirmed Saturday that the FBI had been warned about alleged bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as far back as 2011, when his apparently suspicious activities prompted Russian authorities keeping close surveillance on militant Islamic groups in the Caucuses region of the former Soviet Union to contact US counter-terrorism officials about him. The 26-year-old suspected terrorist, who was killed in a firefight with police in Watertown early Friday morning, traveled to Russia from Boston several times in recent years, according to multiple US officials who have reviewed his passport file - including an extended stay in 2012. The alleged bomber’s uncle, Alvi Tsarnaev, said in an interview with the Globe that the nephew visited his father in the restive Russian province of Dagestan, which neighbors war-torn Chechnya.
An 18-year-old Chicago-area man accused of planning to join an al Qaeda-linked group fighting in Syria has been arrested by the FBI, the agency said on Saturday.
Abdella Ahmad Tounisi of Aurora, Illinois, was taken into custody late on Friday as he prepared to board a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport bound for Turkey, the FBI said in a statement.
It added that Tounisi was a friend of Adel Daoud, an American accused of trying to stage a bombing outside a downtown Chicago bar last year. The agency said Tounisi had not been involved in that plot.
Tounisi appeared before a U.S. magistrate on Saturday on one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was ordered held until his next court appearance on Tuesday, the FBI said.
A criminal complaint accused Tounisi of making online contact in March with a person he thought was a recruiter for Jabhat al-Nusrah, the militant Islamist Syrian group that the U.S. government calls a foreign terrorist organization operating as a wing of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Syria is in the grips of a civil war that began in 2011 as a revolt against President Bashar Assad and has killed more than 70,000 people.
On April 10, Tounisi bought an airline ticket for a flight from Chicago to Istanbul. On Thursday, the undercover FBI employee gave him a bus ticket for travel from Istanbul to Gaziantep, Turkey, near the border with Syria, the complaint said.
Tounisi’s attorney, Michael Madden, of the federal public defender program could not be reached for comment.
Tounisi faces a maximum of 15 years in prison if convicted.
This is pretty breathtaking. Graham (no relation) is suggesting that an American citizen, captured on American soil, should be deprived of basic constitutional rights.
Keep in mind that Graham isn’t just an angry citizen; he’s not even just a U.S. senator. He is also a trained lawyer, a colonel in Air Force Reserve, and a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal arm of the Air Force.
h/t: The Atlantic
Chechnya is a region in the large isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas north of the Georgia and Armenia in the North Caucuses Mountains. It can be said to stand on the gate between east and west, with Russia to the north and Iran and Turkey only several hundred miles south. Most ethnic Chechens, by far the largest ethnic group, adhere to Sunni Islam. Ethnic Russians, mostly of transplanted Cossack origin, are predominantly Orthodox Christians. The region is also home to other smaller populations of eastern Caucuses peoples. Chechnya was part of the Ottoman Empire and then the Persian Empire until the early 19th century when it was ceded to Russia following their victory in the Russo-Persian War in 1813.
Chechnya has been host to conflict for centuries because of its strategic position between Russia and far eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire and the Middle or Near East. It sits atop the natural barrier of the Caucuses Mountains between two seas. Chechnya has been the site of many instances of brutal ethnic and religious oppression by the Ottomans, Persians, Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Republic, as well as by regional separatist or independence leaders, in an effort to control or keep hold of the region. As a result, inhabitants are quite divided between political, ethnic, and religious allegiances. Roughly speaking, Chechnya has a history similar to regions such as Bosnia and Kosovo, which are subject to much the same tensions.
Chechnya has been fighting on-and-off for independence from Russia for over 200 years. It was briefly independent following the Russian Revolution in 1921. Following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1940, Chechnya again declared independence until Stalin re-established control in 1944, followed by a brutal purge and mass Siberian deportations. The years following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 were particularly violent as many Chechen groups fought again for independence from the Russian Republic, though the region has been under firm Russian control since 1999. However, this control has led some Chechen separatist groups to turn to terrorism.
Since 1999, Chechnya-linked groups have been involved in at least a dozen terror attacks, the majority of which have taken place in or been aimed at Russia. A Chechen group seized a grade school in Beslan, Russia in 2004, resulting in the deaths of 330 hostages, most of them children. In 2008, Chechen rebels took 130 hostages in a movie theatre in Moscow, all of whom died along with their captors following a botched rescue attempt by Russian security forces. In 2010, two female suicide bombers killed 39 in an attack at a train station near the Moscow headquarters of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency.
There is evidence that some Chechen separatist groups may have links to Al-Qaeda. Many ethnic Chechen fighters fought alongside the mujahedeen, including Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Chechens also fought alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan against the U.S. and Northern Alliance fighters in 2001. The Taliban government was one of the few in the world to recognize Chechen independence. Russia has claimed it holds direct evidence of links between Chechen rebels and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Many question this link and cite it as a ploy to ensure the west sees Chechen rebels as terrorists and the west elicits no resistance in return from Russia when it pursues its own terrorists elsewhere.
The U.S. government lists the Islamic Independent Peacekeeping Brigade as a source for funding for Islamist Chechan rebels and has ties to Al-Qaeda. America also lists the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment and Riyadus-Salikhin Brigade of Chechen Martyrs as terror groups.
Let’s just be clear about something here: Bombing an abortion clinic *is* terrorism.
