More Bites From the Bread-Based Waste Containment Operation… (Update: A Defection)
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
The title of this post is a PG version of a joke Stewart makes at the very end of this clip:
And he is in turn borrowing from this longer clip, where they are explaining that the President is calling Libya a “turd sandwich,” although she was not certain whether Obama personally felt this way or was merely repeating what an advisor called it.
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And of course the man most eager to bite into it was Fast Eddie Schultz. Seriously, I have come to believe Schultz is performance art, creating a leftward parody of what the left believes Rush Limbaugh does. In the latest example of this idiot’s dishonesty, he asserts that if we are opposed to the war in Libya, we are standing with the terrorists and are generally unpatriotic. Yes, really:
(Via: Mediaite.) Now, while I have said this war is unlawful because it has not received congressional approval (here, here, here, here and here), I have always believed that Congress should approve of the mission and we should go kick Gdaffy’s ass. But I don’t think anyone is being unpatriotic to say, “no, we shouldn’t.” For one thing, we are already in two wars. And for another Obama has blown a hole in our deficit, which is another change from 2003. I mean Bush was bad on the deficit, but comparing Bush’s suckitude on the deficit to Obama’s is like comparing a dog that barks all night to a zombie apocalypse. Not to mention the fact that the President himself called it a Turd Sandwich. I mean its hard to call it unpatriotic to criticize a war that the President himself personally called that, even if he was merely repeating the words of his advisor.
Oh, and there is the little matter of the fact that we might be helping terrorists:
Eastern Libya, where the rebels are based, has long been suspected of supplying recruits for terrorist organizations. “Al Qaeda in that part of the country is obviously an issue,” a senior official told the New York Times. At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, NATO military commander Admiral James Stavridis said intelligence reports showed “flickers” of Al Qaeda’s and Hezbollah’s presence among rebel forces. Eastern Libya was the center of Islamist protests in the late nineties, but it’s unclear whether groups here are still tied to Al Qaeda.
Now the truth is we don’t know very much about these rebels, but that didn’t stop Obama from providing covert aid to them:
Sources tells ABC News that President Obama has signed a secret presidential finding authorizing covert operations to “aid the effort” in Libya, where the US is working with NATO, and Arab partners to enforce a no-fly zone, protect civilians, and encourage Col. Moammar Gadhafi to step down from power.
The finding discusses a number of ways to help the opposition in Libya, authorizing some assistance now and setting up a legal framework for more robust activities in the future.
The finding does NOT direct covert operatives to provide arms to the rebels right now, though it does prepare for such a contingency and other contingencies should the president decide to go down that road in the future.
So, um, it’s a secret order authorizing a covert mission, reported all around the world on ABC News. Great. So, let me ask a few questions. First, is this really supposed to be secret, or are they just pretending it is supposed to be? Second, is the secrecy really important? I mean I assume that the actual locations and nature of the covert ops needs to be secret, but is the fact they even exist supposed to be secret? I am frankly skeptical of that, because I had in fact assumed we were already doing that as would anyone with a few years of experience and more than two brain cells to rub together. But at the same time if it was really supposed to be secret, and it really prejudices our efforts to have it outted, will there be any investigation into this leak?
And for that matter, should Jake Tapper have reported it in the first place? I tweeted him a question on the subject, but he has yet to reply, and probably won’t. But then again, if this was a disclosure that he believed to be authorized by the White House, that exonerates him in my book.
Meanwhile, Matt Lauer thinks it is just dandy to intervene in Libya, even if it results in helping al Qaeda, because we will show AQ how compassionate we are:
(Via Newsbusters.) Remember folks, Michele Bachmann is the stupid one.
Update: As if that isn’t fun enough we have recently seen the defection of Moussa Kousa, the Libyan Foreign Minister, to the British. There is a positive side to this in that he is very likely to be able to tell our forces where to drop the bombs. But there is a downside, too:
He was expelled from London in 1980 after giving an extraordinary newspaper interview when he was the head of the embassy in which he said two Libyan dissidents living in London would be killed.
Speaking outside the Libyan embassy in St James’s Square, Mr Koussa told The Times: “The revolutionary committees have decided last night to kill two more people in the United Kingdom. I approve of this.”
He returned to Libya after being given 48 hours to leave the UK, where he was accused of funding terrorist groups.
Mr Kousa was named by intelligence sources in the mid-1990s as the possible architect of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people, and the blowing up the following year of a French airliner in central Africa in which 170 people died
So it looks like neither side in this fight will be terrorist-free. And look, grown-ups understand that sometimes you have to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler, without liking either man. But contrary to what Fast Eddie thinks, or pretends to think, it is not an inherently unpatriotic to say, “yes, sometimes you have to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler, but not this time.”
[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]