Presidential Press Secretary Jay Carney, Winner Of The Ron Zeigler Award

It's become completely a no-brainer, spike it in the end zone decision by OS's Awards Committee.

For those who don't remember Ron Zeigler, he was Richard Nixon's loyal-to-the-death press secretary. He would proclaim a lie one day, contradict the next day with another lie, and then finally admit that those first statements were lies, while assuring one and all that the country could believe today's pronouncements.

He did this with a completely straight face, day after day, never a moment's apology, as if the cognitive dissonance of replacing one lie with another and another never occurred to him. His only competitor in our time was Baghdad Bob, who claimed the Iraqi Army had crushed the invaders, as the US Marines were pulling up across the street behind him.

Some of Ron's most famous quotes--

"This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative." –April 17, 1973

"If my answers sound confusing, I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing."

"The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say that there is anything going on in Southeast Asia." –1971, answering a question if the allied troops were preparing to invade Laos.

Jay Carney must be channeling Ron and Baghdad Bob this week--it's deja vu all over again.

It did not take a genius to see that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was a planned and orchestrated affair. Ever seen a group of protesters show up will mortars, full-auto weapons, RPG's, and knowledge of the layout of the target?

Turns out, there were never any demonstrators at all...just attackers...

But the 'spontaneous demonstration that just got out of hand because of that terrible terrible awful disgusting YouTube video' story was the Administration's story, and Jay was sticking to it. Even after the Libyan Prime Minister stated flatly that it was a planned attack. And that they had warned the Administration days before. Even after attacks on British diplomats had occurred some days before. The Ambassador himself knew himself to be on an al-Queda hit list. Ni modo. It was all the fault of The Video! Couldn't possibly be al-Queda operation! We've killed 'em all, we've got them on the run!
Bin-Laden's dead and GM lives!

They sent Susan Rice, our UN Ambassador, to five Sunday talking heads shows to talk the White House line. They talked and talked, and ducked and ducked, and spun and spun, and lied and lied and lied. And lied.

Because to admit the truth is to admit that Obama and Hillary left their ambassador hung out to dry, and got him killed.

Here's the sequence.

Finally, today, Jay Carney does admit the obvious. But never an apology, never a moment's embarrassment, never a moment of consideration that this sort of behavior absolutely crushes what little sense of trust anyone may have in him or his boss. 

It was a Ziegler Moment. And Jay decided to 'fess up while in the air on Air Force One--with loud background noise, spoken sotto voce.

'This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.'

'This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.'

'This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.'

It would be comic, except--this is how people get killed, wars get started, banks are allowed to blow up the economy, friends of the President are able to commit massive fraud and walk away scot-free, a thousand guns are put in the hands of drug cartels by the ATF and no one notices until the bodies pile up. Even then, no one can seem to locate anyone remotely responsible for the carnage.

Remember The Mantra: Israel Bad/Hamas Good, Israel Bad/Hamas Good,Israel Bad/Hamas Good--(keep going until you believe it...)

GAZA (Reuters) – Hamas found the body Friday of a pro-Palestinian Italian activist who was killed by al Qaeda sympathizers in the Gaza Strip, raising questions about Hamas's control over the beleaguered enclave. Two men were arrested and others were being sought for the abduction and killing of Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, who was found strangled in an abandoned house Friday, Hamas officials said.

A group of strict Islamists aligned with al Qaeda, known as Salafists, had threatened Thursday to execute Arrigoni unless their leader, detained by Hamas last month, was freed.

It was an unprecedented challenge for Hamas, an Islamist group whose diehard hostility to Israel has deepened the isolation and poverty of Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians.

"Gaza is safe and I want to assure all visitors to Gaza that they are safe and secure," Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, told a French journalist.

"The crime that took place was an isolated incident ... and we will enforce the law against the perpetrators."

Hamas vehemently opposes the Salafists who espouse a more extreme form of Islam and appear to be attracting recruits -- including from among its own ranks.

Salafists see Hamas as insufficiently zealous, have attacked Internet cafes and want Christians expelled. They deplore Hamas for considering ceasefires with Israel and exploring political accommodation with secular Palestinian rivals.


And, from Donald Sensing, a story with video just too horrifying to describe...

'Ethical Oil'--Ezra Levant, Toronto Sun

Brief, and to the point.

Where did Moammar Gadhafi, the brutal dictator of Libya, get the money to pay the foreign mercenaries who are butchering his people? How did he pay for those French-made fighter jets strafing protesters?

Europe, mainly. Europe buys 80% of Libya’s oil. Other than terrorism, that’s pretty much the only thing Libya exports.

The rest is better...

HT Donald Sensing at Sense of Events.

So, How Did An Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers End Up In The Arizona Desert Near The Mexican Border?

Is it time to finish building that fence? Deploy active duty military units? Really, finally pay attention to the threat?

One could begin to think that Janet Napolitano and her boss might actually want something horrible to happen inside our borders...our own Reichstag moment, so to speak.

It's either that--or shocking, mindless neglect. Any other explanations?

Score One For The Good Guys: Three Hostages Liberated From FARC

News just broke a few minutes ago across OS's facebook feed, and confirmed by New York Times report.

Colombian soldiers stalking leftist guerrillas in the country’s remote jungles have rescued three hostages held by the rebels, including a police general who was their highest-ranking captive, Colombian officials said Sunday.

The rescue carried out by about 300 military personnel in Guaviare, a sparsely populated region in southern Colombia, freed Gen. Luis Mendieta, captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in 1998, as well as Col. Luis Murillo, who had also been held by the rebels since that year, and Sgt. Arbey Delgado, captured in 1998.

Mendiata had almost given up hope, as these plaintive words he wrote in December 2007 attest:

“It is not the physical pain that wounds me, nor the chain around my neck that torments me, but the mental agony of all this, the evilness of bad people and the indifference of good people,” General Mendieta wrote in a letter dated Dec. 21, 2007. “It is as if we are worthless, that we do not exist.”

The FARC is actively supported by Chavez, who is actively applauded by Obama and Miz Hillary. This rescue was undertaken without US involvement, which probably explains its success...no one leaking details to Caracas.

So, a healthy slap-down of a bunch of narco-terrorists and their sponsor, and of the venal crew in Washington who cheer their sponsor on.

All in all, a good way to start the week.

The Moscow Subway Mass Murders: One Question For Us Here In The US and UK To Ponder

The supply of ink, words and emotional outrage about this sort of thing ran out a long time ago.

The most horrifying aspect is that we have come to expect this, or at least are no longer surprised by it.

"It was a terrorist act carried out by the female suicide bombers," said Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, in reference to the first and most lethal explosion, citing the Federal Security Service. "They were specifically timed -- for ... the train was nearing the station -- to make the most damage."

So, to The Question: What are the odds, once the Russian security services run the perpetrators to ground, that they will be read their Miranda rights, housed safely with Halal meals and Muslim chaplains, provided lawyers and tried as civilians at the courthouse closest to the scene of the crime?

And, while we're at it...

What are the odds, also, that these murderers are traced back to Pakistan via Chechnya?

The Demise of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

In the US, what with a professor murdering her colleagues, and a disaffected computer engineer deciding to wage a one-man war on the Internal Revenue Service with his private airplane, New Orleans taking the Super Bowl, and Tiger Woods delivering his tightly-scripted apology, the deliberately-engineered demise of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by an expert team of assassins has not generated much attention.

But it does deserve some thought, as we in the US are engaged in a long-term brush war against some very bad people.  How do we protect ourselves against monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?

It's not just neurotic introspection. This guy was a monster, who happily participated in the murder of a lot of innocent people. But he was a human being, and no human life should be deliberately cut short nonchalantly.

The short version of the story is, that while on a business trip to Dubai, he was tracked down and killed by an expert assassination team, who were travelling on falsified European and UK passports. The hotel security cameras caught it all, except the act of killing itself. By the time his body was discovered, the team had left the country.

Very slick, very pro. Assumed to be Mossad, but about even odds that it was another Palestinian entity.

This guy made a lot of enemies in his day, as he himself was an equal-opportunity murderer.

OldSouth is always interested when people who live on opposite ends of the left/right spectrum arrive at essentially the same conclusion. Here we have one of those instances.

Alan Dershowitz at Huffington Post, in his lawyerly fashion, explores the legal and moral questions raised.

Mohammed Daraghmeh, also at Huff Post, explores the real possibility that Mahmoud was sent to his reward by the Palestinian Authority, who bear no love for Hamas.

In either case, he's no longer with us. He can't kidnap anyone, kill anyone, or supply weapons to help others do the same. This is cause for at least a sigh of relief.

Conservative Israeli blogger Israel Matzav offers more detailed perspective:

There are two reasons why Israel would want al-Mabhouh dead, and I'm going to take the second reason first because the main reason segues into the second question. Think Munich. Remember after the Munich Olympic Massacre how Israel sent agents all over the world to kill the murderers of Israel's Olympic team? Why did Israel do that? To show that actions have consequences. Al-Mabhouh kidnapped and murdered two Israeli soldiers. The kidnappings were among the very first terror attacks carried out by Hamas. If Israel killed al-Mabhouh, it has shown that it knows how to settle scores and that terrorists should not expect to ever be able to live in peace. Al-Mabhouh knew all that - that's why he lived in exile in Syria and it's why he had a security detail.

But the second reason for knocking off al-Mabhouh is far more important. Mabhouh helped found Hamas’s armed wing Izzadin Kassam in the 1980s, was behind the kidnapping in the first intifada of two Israeli soldiers and later established strong ties in Sudan, which he used to smuggle weaponry from Iran to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He was reportedly responsible for the weapons convoy that, according to foreign reports, Israel bombed during Operation Cast Lead as it was making its way to Gaza through the Sudanese desert.

In other words, if Israel took out Mabhouh, it also took out Hamas' weapons supplier, lessening the likelihood of any retaliation from Gaza.

In the midst of all the European hand-wringing over this assassination, and the outrage expressed at Israel for invading Gaza in early 2009, we need to remember:

Israel voluntarily handed over Gaza in 2005, exchanging tangible land and assets for intangible promises of peace with the Palestinians. What they got was Hamas taking Gaza over, using it to stage rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Which led to the death and destruction of early 2009.

Mabouh was one of the prime actors in Hamas, and its weapons procurer. Sans his behavior, thousands of lives would have been spared.

So, the question remains: If we knock 'people like this' off, do we begin to become like 'people like this'?

And, knowing that a person like Mahmoud creates wholesale death and destruction, how can we fail to take advantage of the opportunity to send him to his reward?

Theze is complicated times, ya'll.

September 11, 2001 From The Air

The BBC features a slideshow of recently released photos of the 9/11 attack in New York City, taken by a police photographer in an NYPD helicopter. They are riveting.

OS promises not to rant, honest. He is working hard to be civil, and dispense with mean-spirited diatribes. It's an effort.

Viewing these pictures, it is not surprising to know that the City of New York and its citizens are not eager for one of the ringleaders of this horror to be brought back to the city for a civilian trail.

Where he can stage a show trial, in full view of the world's anti-American press.

The jurors and their families become targets of Al-Qaeda.  As does the city. Again.

OS does not understand how a government can be so totally out-of-touch, literally deaf to its citizenry, in a representative democracy.  And it's not just the present administration, either.  The Bush White House was notorious for this behavior as well.

Here's hoping someone views these, and re-thinks the decision.

Betcha a jury in central Pennsylvania or Virginia would be willing to serve. Try him first at the Federal level, and then let the state go after him on separate charges. Journalists hate Motel 6's and meals at Denny's. They'll lose interest, and the citizens will be safer with them gone.

The True Unsung Hero

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times reminds us of the true unsung hero of the Christmas Day attempted terror attack:  the terrorist's father, who warned US intelligence in detail that his son had been snared by the jihadists, and represented a threat to the civilized worlds.

Think on that one for a moment!  Think about how we love our kids, advocate for them, wish to see them always prosper and never come to harm.

What if it were my son, for instance, that decided that the KKK and Aryan Nation held the 'secret to life', and that he felt obligated to target blacks, Jews and Catholics for violent elimination from society?  Even after a comfortable, even privileged background and education?  Would I have the cojones to call the FBI and let them know?  I hope so.

I would also hope that the FBI would have the common sense to listen and make certain the word got out before someone was harmed, beginning with my son.  That's where things broke down, on our end, our people, our intelligence service, our law enforcement, our White House living in denial that there really are dangerous followers of The Prophet out there, too busy feeding the banksters to notice.

But, another general breakdown has taken place in the parts of the world where Islam prevails:

Finding people with the courage to confront that breakdown — the one identified by the father, the one that lures young Muslims away from the mainstream into a willingness to commit suicide against innocent civilians as part of some jihadist power fantasy — is what matters most right now.
Yes, we need to fix our intelligence. Yes, we absolutely must live up to our own ideals, as President Obama is trying to do in banning torture and closing Guantánamo Bay. We can’t let this “war on terrorism” consume us. We can’t let our country become just The United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th — not Sept. 11th.

But even if we do all that, no laws or walls we put up will ever be sufficient to protect us unless the Arab and Muslim societies from whence these suicide bombers emerge erect political, religious and moral restraints as well — starting by shaming suicide bombers and naming their actions “murder,” not “martyrdom.”

Finally, finally, someone from MSM/ObamaLand is saying what the rest of us have been saying for a long, long time:  There is a big problem out there in IslamWorld, and until they put their house in order, this thing will not end peacefully.

Finally.