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Obama's Clintonian speech pulls rug from under mosque supporters

Via-Washington Examiner

By: Byron York

When President Obama used the occasion of the White House Ramadan iftar dinner to announce his support for the Ground Zero mosque, some of his partisans rushed to praise what they viewed as a ringing endorsement of the controversial project.

"Obama's forceful speech yesterday expressing strong support for Cordoba House…will go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency," wrote Washington Post reporter Greg Sargent. Obama, Sargent said, "isn't hedging a bit: He's saying that opposing the group's right to build the Islamic center is, in essence, un-American."

"CAP Supports Building of Mosque Near Ground Zero," was the headline of a press release from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. "President Obama is upholding the best traditions of our Constitution in supporting the right of Muslim Americans to build a mosque and community center on private property near Ground Zero."

"I applaud President Obama's clarion defense of the freedom of religion," said New York mayor and mosque supporter Michael Bloomberg. "As I said last week, this proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime."

The problem was, just hours after the speech, Obama began to back away from his clarion call. I wasn't defending the mosque project, he explained. I was just defending the right of Muslims to build "a place of worship and a community center" on private property in Lower Manhattan. "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," Obama told reporters in Florida. "I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding."

But most mosque opponents concede the Muslim group's legal right to place the mosque in the planned site. They just argue that it's a terrible idea and have appealed to the organizers to cancel the project. At the iftar dinner, Obama cast his vote with the mosque builders. And then he pulled back.

And then he had his spokesman pull back the pullback. "Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night," the White House's Bill Burton said Saturday. "It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the Constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans. What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque."

Now, there is simply no doubt that Obama's Friday evening speech, in the context in which it was delivered, was an endorsement of the Ground Zero project. It was certainly widely understood as such. The headlines of the three New York papers reporting the speech were: "Obama Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site" (New York Times); "Allah Right By Me" (New York Post); and "Prez: Build the Mosque" (New York Daily News). The lead of an Associated Press report on the speech was: "President Barack Obama on Friday forcefully endorsed building a mosque near ground zero, saying the country's founding principles demanded no less." But on Saturday, Obama said all those listeners were wrong, that they misunderstood him.

Several years ago, there was a word for Obama's rhetorical technique: Clintonian. Like the former president, Obama spoke words he knew would be understood as having a particular meaning in a particular context. He also knew that those same words, when examined closely outside that context, might also be interpreted as having a different meaning. In that sense, the mosque affair is a good lesson for both supporters and opponents of the president. From now on, with Obama, as it was with Clinton, the rule is: Don't listen to the speech. Read the words very carefully.

The Last Great Cover-up

TWA Flight 800 and Its Consequences

Via-WND

If TWA Flight 800 had exploded off the coast of Long Island in July 2001 as visibly as it had in July 1996, the world would have been told a different story, even if there had been a Democrat in the White House.

On the night of July 17, 1996, and into the early morning hours of the 18 th, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger huddled fretfully in the family quarters of the White House.

The election they thought was in the bag no longer was.

The air traffic controllers had already reported. The radar data told a story not easily untold.

And now, eyewitness reports were flooding in. The explosion had taken place right at sunset, just ten miles off the coast, on a perfect night, with thousands of people looking out over the sea from Long Island’s popular south shore.

In 2001, some clever soul would have started collecting their tales on a web site before the tide turned, literally and figuratively. And the tales they had to tell!

FBI witness #73, an aviation buff, watched a “red streak” with a “light gray smoke trail” move up towards the airline, and then go “past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing.”

She even reported the actual break-up sequence down before the authorities figured it out on their own..

High school principal Joseph Delgado might have posted his comments as well. He would tell the FBI that he had seen an object like "a firework," ascend "fairly quick," then "slow" and "wiggle" then "speed up" and get "lost." Then he saw a second object that "glimmered" in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a "firebox."

Mike Wire would surely have gone public. The no-nonsense millwright and U.S. Army vet watched events unfold from the Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton on Long Island.

Wire had seen a white light traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40-degree angle, sparkling and zig-zagging before culminating in a massive fireball.

In addition to the testimony, others would have been posting their videos and stills, all of which supported the eyewitness testimony. Others still would have shared the drawings of the incident that they would later give to the FBI.

But in 1996, the Internet was still in its embryonic stages. All information posted thereon was deemed, by the major media at least, suspect and even laughable.

In the absence of an effective Internet, the White House hit upon a control strategy that dazzled in its simplicity and in its sheer nerve.

The Clintons’ trusted point person, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, would take the investigation away from the professionals in the National Transportation Safety Board and give it to the amateurs of the FBI. There was one reason why. The FBI reported to her. The NTSB did not.

This was illegal, of course, but the media had a president to re-elect soon enough, and they were not about to scruple over details.

The second part of the strategy was as simple as the first. The FBI would talk only to the New York Times. This essentially made the Times’ Gorelick’s ministry of propaganda.

Of the 270 eyewitnesses who told the FBI they saw what looked like a missile strike TWA Flight 800, the New York Times would interview exactly none of them.

Fearing perhaps to lose their privileged status and trusting the FBI more than they should have, the Times people followed the FBI lead. The other media, some grudgingly, followed the Times.

Most FBI agents, of course, worked hard and tried to do the right thing. They may have suspected but could not know that their work was being subverted at the top.

As each week passed, the Clintons had to be stunned that so obvious a truth remained so thoroughly ignored. To sustain the lie, however, insiders had to tell more lies still.

The FBI would fabricate a second interview with Witness #73. The CIA would fabricate a second interview with Mike Wire. The NTSB would lie outright about what Joseph Delgado saw, but the election came and went without anyone even knowing who these people were.

Gorelick could not have slept easily through all of this, but the Lotto was around the corner, and she knew she had the winning ticket. In May 1997, they called her number.

Out of all the likely finance and mortgage experts in America, the Fannie Mae Board picked her, a lawyer with no relevant experience, to be its new Vice Chair Gorelick would earn more than $4 million a year for the next six years, and no one in the media asked why.

They did not even ask why when she stepped down. Always the patriot, Gorelick resigned to take one of five Democratic seats on the 9-11 Commission.

Who knew where talk of aviation terrorism might lead? Someone had to keep talk of TWA Flight 800 off the table, just as someone had kept it off from 1996 to 2001.

And lest some messy scraps of information find their way to the Committee’s Republicans, the Clintons dispatched their most trusted adviser to do a little clean-up work.

Alas, Sandy Berger got caught, but this proved much easier to bury than TWA 800. The Justice Department slapped his wrist on a Friday, the day after Terry Schiavo died and the day before Pope John Paul II did.

The media did not want to know anyhow, and this time, there would be no eyewitnesses.


If you want to read a great thriller on this, read "Night Fall" by Nelson DeMille. Even though it is fiction, like "Climate of Fear" it is based on a great deal of factual research and is a gripping read too.

Bubba is back, and that's bad news for Barry

Via-Washington Examiner

By: Chris Stirewalt

The current Clinton resurgence may or may not be the groundwork for a 2012 primary challenge of our beleaguered president. That will depend on when (and if) President Obama can pull himself out of his current skid.

But whether this is the start of Hillary's revenge or just some flexing by the former first lady and her globetrotting husband, it's still bad news for Obama. Americans may not be certain if they're ready for a Republican president, but the chorus of regret over Hillary's 2008 loss is deafening.

Obama, anointed as "our first female president" by Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker for his preference for talk over action, has proven himself passive and vain. His secretary of state, meanwhile, seems tough, decisive and a self-sacrificing team player.

The first 18 months of the Obama presidency have played perfectly to Hillary's 2008 pitch: Obama is not man enough for the job, but she is.

It's not just the 3 a.m. calls that Obama seems to struggle with. Whether it is an emerging crisis, like the explosion of an oil platform, or a long-standing problem, like the stalled American enterprise in Afghanistan, Obama prefers to let all the calls go to voicemail.

Obama likes to talk about comprehensive, abstract solutions to concrete problems. You say "border security" and he says "path to citizenship." You say "plug the hole" and he says "global warming." You say "unemployment" and he says "economic sustainability."

It's no wonder that in a poll by Rasmussen Reports, 57 percent said Hillary was qualified to be president compared with the 51 percent who said Obama has what it takes.

We've felt a few tremors of ambition from the former first lady in Foggy Bottom.

She has stampeded the administration on announcing some topics near to her heart, particularly the awarding of partner benefits to gay federal employees and filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona's illegal-immigration crackdown.

There has also been the occasional Clinton insider whispering to a friendly reporter about how the secretary is left out of the Obama inner circle and can't overcome Obama's aloofness.

Also note well where she has made her friends in the administration. She is chummy with the warriors -- siding with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and keeping lots of channels open to the trigger pullers, including the recently ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

But that's the kind of maneuvering that you'd expect inside an administration.

Her husband, though, has not been so constrained of late.

When you heard Bill Clinton tell Wolf Blitzer that he felt bad for Obama about the pounding he was taking on the oil spill he might as well have been saying "I told you so."

Bubba's pitch two years ago was that Obama might make Democrats feel good, but that he couldn't deliver.

When Clinton then suggested that it might be time to bring in the Navy to blow up the leaking oil riser and then dump a million tons of stone on the hole, he showed that there was another way to handle the situation than holding meetings on whose ass to kick.

Billy Jeff Clinton has been everywhere lately: Taking the heat for the administration's effort to bribe Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary. Saving Blanche Lincoln's candidacy in Arkansas. Blowing his vuvuzela with Nelson Mandela in South Africa for the World Cup. Laughing off Valdimir Putin's denials about the recent Russian spy bust.

But the big moment came when Bill endorsed former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, who is running a campaign to knock off Obama's man, Sen. Michael Bennet.

Clinton's endorsement came when Romanoff needed it most -- just at the end of the fundraising cycle when Romanoff needed a boost to show he was viable against the White House-backed Bennet.

It was a neat play for Clinton. By lobbing a grenade into the race, he shows that he's hip with the more "progressive" Romanoff and that he has his own mind on politics. Rather than just running Obama's errands and trying to get people out of races as he did with Sestak, Clinton is bucking the system.

Just as he did in 2008, Bill is testing the limits of how hard he can hit Obama without causing a backlash.

If Obama continues to weaken, count on Bill to take heavier shots.