Erick Erickson's Blog, page 161

Photos, Geronimo, and the BCS #EERS

We'll talk about releasing photos of Bin Laden tonight, as well as the use of the word Geronimo and the Justice Department going after the BCS.

The show starts at 7:05 pm ET. You can listen live at http://wsbradio.com and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

Consider this an open thread.

Congress to Examine "Inappropriate" and "Devastating" Use of "Geronimo" Codename in bin Laden Mission

As if Congress had nothing more important to do, ABC News brings us word that on the use of the code name Geronimo as a reference to Osama Bin Laden.

"The hearing was scheduled well before the Osama bin Laden operation became news, but the concerns over the linking of the name of Geronimo, one of the greatest Native American heroes, with the most hated enemies of the United States is an example of the kinds of issues we intended to address at Thursday's hearing," Loretta Tuell, the committee's chief counsel, said in a statement.

"These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating," Tuell said. "We intend to open the forum to talk about them."

Some of you are wondering if we can send SEAL Team 6 to Congress. I would never wonder that. I just wonder how exactly Congress ever hopes to improve its dazzling popularity rating when it plays on the hypersensitive humorlessness of lefties race warriors.

CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid

If you haven't read this piece by Dan McLaughlin, consider it your must read of the day.

For the past 48 hours, lefties have been falling all over themselves and contorting themselves in knots to downplay enhanced interrogations and the role waterboarding might have played in getting Bin Laden.

One of the most humorous contortions came from Spencer Ackerman, a lefty hack who has taken one of my favorite blogs and destroyed it with mindless nonsense and leftwing talking points that grossly distort and distract from the awesomeness that had been Wired's Danger Room blog.

To Ackerman, waterboarding had nothing to do with getting Bin Laden. Never mind that his post conflicts with his premise — it is standard leftist trope that waterboarding can never, ever get anything useful and should never be done because it is torture.

Last night, on the NBC Nightly News, CIA Chief Leon Panetta blew more holes in the anti-waterboarding arguments and denials than were put in Osama Bin Laden's head.

Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" were used to extract information that led to the mission's success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.

Panetta, who in a 2009 CIA confirmation hearing declared "waterboarding is torture and it's wrong," said Tuesday that debate about its use will continue.

"Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," Panetta said.

As Dan noted yesterday, it seems some of the information came after waterboarding and not during a waterboarding session. But, to say one had no relation to the other is to leave "with is the contention that when a guy confesses to the good cop, that means the bad cop was not a factor in anything that followed (the phrase "fruit of the poisonous tree" may ring a bell to some lawyers)."

Exactly right.

CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid - TODAY News - TODAY.com

If you haven't read this piece by Dan McLaughlin, consider it your must read of the day.

For the past 48 hours, lefties have been falling all over themselves and contorting themselves in knots to downplay enhanced interrogations and the role waterboarding might have played in getting Bin Laden.

One of the most humorous contortions came from Spencer Ackerman, a lefty hack who has taken one of my favorite blogs and destroyed it with mindless nonsense and leftwing talking points that grossly distort and distract from the awesomeness that had been Wired's Danger Room blog.

To Ackerman, waterboarding had nothing to do with getting Bin Laden. Never mind that his post conflicts with his premise — it is standard leftist trope that waterboarding can never, ever get anything useful and should never be done because it is torture.

Last night, on the NBC Nightly News, CIA Chief Leon Panetta blew more holes in the anti-waterboarding arguments and denials than were put in Osama Bin Laden's head.

Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" were used to extract information that led to the mission's success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.

Panetta, who in a 2009 CIA confirmation hearing declared "waterboarding is torture and it's wrong," said Tuesday that debate about its use will continue.

"Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," Panetta said.

As Dan noted yesterday, it seems some of the information came after waterboarding and not during a waterboarding session. But, to say one had no relation to the other is to leave "with is the contention that when a guy confesses to the good cop, that means the bad cop was not a factor in anything that followed (the phrase "fruit of the poisonous tree" may ring a bell to some lawyers)."

Exactly right.

The Winter of Republican Discontent

Republicans are unhappy with the present crop of candidates for the White House. Over last weekend, while overshadowed by bigger news, Republicans gathered at an NRA event, a Heritage Foundation event, an AFP event, and a few other gatherings. Grassroots activists lamented together about the current crop.

Certainly each candidate has their acolytes, but largely the field is uninspiring. Republicans are on the verge of a self-fulfilling prophecy that their nominee will suck and not beat Barack Obama.

For all the Republicans and Democrats either lamenting or celebrating the invulnerability of Barack Obama, I am reminded more and more of 1991. In fact, I venture to say that 2011 is to Republicans as 1991 was to Democrats.

And as it was, it remains "The Economy, Stupid."

In 1991, President George H. W. Bush had over 90% approval ratings after successfully winning the Gulf War and driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

Democrats, in turn, became largely convinced that Bush could not be beaten. The put up a smattering of candidates. The guy everyone wanted, Mario Cuomo, refused to run (Mike Pence and Chris Christie should take note).

Once and future Governor of California Jerry Brown entered he field. Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Tom Harkin of Iowa and former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts also got in. Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia threw his hat in the ring as well, along with a few other lesser knowns.

There was also a governor from Arkansas no one took that seriously named Bill Clinton.

Clinton was pretty unknown, his claim to fame being a speech at a prior year's convention Democratic convention that went on and on and on. As soon as he got out of the gate, a woman named Gennifer Flowers came out of the wood work. She'd be followed by Paula Jones.

And yet . . . the Clinton message was simple. He made it through the primary as a centrist and pounded on George H. W. Bush as out of touch. His message was the economy.

He won.

Big name Republicans are again this year sitting it out. Chris Christie is nowhere. Mike Pence, the guy a lot of grassroots conservatives wanted to run, will run for Governor of Indiana.

This is the winter of discontent for Republicans. But that is not really a bad thing. It is, after all, the economy, Stupid.

Morning Briefing for May 4, 2011

RedState Morning Briefing

For May 4, 2011

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

1. Inconvenient Facts About The Takedown of Osama bin Laden

2. The Winter of Republican Discontent

3. Obama vs. Panetta In The Kill Obama Decision?

4. 'Why does my gas cost $4.00 per gallon?'

———————————————————————-

1. Inconvenient Facts About The Takedown of Osama bin Laden

We must pity the dilemma of the anti-war Left in facing the enormously popular and inarguably successful takedown of bin Laden.

To the mere Democratic partisan, there is no real conflict: as long as people like the results achieved under President Obama, his party wins. But the anti-war Left spent most of the Bush years shrieking to high heaven about Bush shredding the Constitution, staining the integrity of the nation, yadda yadda yadda. Everything he did in pursuing the War on Terror had to be the WORST THING EVER, and every effort made to argue that you were beyond the pale of civilization if you approved of the Iraq War, the detention of unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay or various secret CIA facilities, the use of "enhanced" coercive interrogation techniques (or for that matter any interrogation outside the Geneva Convention's name-rank-serial number questioning of traditional POWs), or the "assassination" of terrorists. This is the politics of outrage, the idea that you win arguments by being the angriest man in the room, that rather than argue that policies are not worth the costs and tradeoffs that come with every successful policy, they were inarguably wrong in every particular.

Consider the waterboarding debate. As it turns out, the CIA only waterboarded three men (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri), leading to the question of why the Left made such a colossal stink about it in the first place. Certainly, given those facts, nobody on the Right has argued that waterboarding or any other form of coercive interrogation should be the only or even the first recourse in interrogation (or even that they be used at all with criminal defendants or legitimate prisoners of war) - the argument is simply that these are sometimes-useful tools in an interrogator's toolkit and that, in some extreme hard cases, it can be justifiable to use those tools against the very worst hard-core senior terrorist leaders. But critics of waterboarding have mostly long since painted themselves into the corner of insisting that the tradeoffs involved don't need to be debated, because coercive interrogation never yields any information of any use in any situation.

This is poor ground to make a stand on.

Initial reports on the extensive detective work that led to cornering bin Laden have indicated a couple of things that are terribly inconvenient for these arguments.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. The Winter of Republican Discontent

Republicans are unhappy with the present crop of candidates for the White House. Over last weekend, while overshadowed by bigger news, Republicans gathered at an NRA event, a Heritage Foundation event, an AFP event, and a few other gatherings. Grassroots activists lamented together about the current crop.

Certainly each candidate has their acolytes, but largely the field is uninspiring. Republicans are on the verge of a self-fulfilling prophecy that their nominee will suck and not beat Barack Obama.

For all the Republicans and Democrats either lamenting or celebrating the invulnerability of Barack Obama, I am reminded more and more of 1991. In fact, I venture to say that 2011 is to Republicans as 1991 was to Democrats.

And as it was, it remains "The Economy, Stupid."

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Obama vs. Panetta In The Kill Obama Decision?

I don't stand by what follows because I don't know the author or the website. It also falls into the "too good to check" category.

But read and decide for yourself which has a greater ring of truth: the cool, analytical Obama of the developing White House hagiography (or to quote the notorious catchfart Howard Fineman, "President Barack Obama just proved himself — vividly, in almost Biblical terms — to be an effective commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States")? or this story describing the indecisive, goofy wuss whom we've come to know over the previous painful 29 months?

Please click here for the rest of the post.

4. 'Why does my gas cost $4.00 per gallon?'

Everybody is asking that question these days. The average nationwide price for all grades this week is $3.96/gallon; Californians are paying on average $4.26, the highest in the nation.

Why does it cost so much, especially considering that the price was below $2.00/gallon just within the last couple of years?

Nearly seventy percent of the price of a gallon of retail gasoline is the price of the crude oil it is refined from. Two graphs from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) make that point. The first shows the price of a gallon of gasoline (left axis) plotted against the price of a gallon of crude oil (right axis). The two move in virtual lock-step; if you know the crude oil price per gallon, add $1.00 and you'll know the price of gasoline within a few cents. (At $105 per 42-gallon barrel, the per-gallon price of crude is $2.50; add a buck, and you get a gasoline price around $3.50.)

Please click here for the rest of the post.

Waterboarding Works #EERS

Waterboarding led to today. We'll talk about it on the radio tonight. You can listen live at http://wsbradio.com and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

Consider this an open thread.

Morning Briefing for May 3, 2011

RedState Morning Briefing

For May 3, 2011

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

1. On Bin Laden's Death

2. Obama and Staff Claim For Credit Everything

3. Osama is Dead; Obama's Foreign Policy is Still Dangerous and Perverse

———————————————————————-

1. On Bin Laden's Death

I've no wish to be churlish at this moment and I will give a hat tip to the president over having the resolve to actually take action when presented with the opportunity. We arrived at 9/11 because President Clinton refused to do as much. Even so, one can't help but notice that Obama's statement on the death of bin Laden completely ignores the debt owed to the Bush Administration while at the same time taking a couple of oblique swipes. However, the wildcard in this are the actions the administration will take now that bin Laden is dead.

It is pretty well established that the current president doesn't have the stomach for the successful war he inherited in Iraq and the unsuccessful war he has managed to create in Afghanistan. The death of bin Laden is more likely to give impetus to Obama's ambivalence about the concept of "victory" and his deep-seated hostility to the success of American military power and thereby give him the political cover he feels he needs to speed up troop withdrawals from those countries.

I fear the death of bin Laden will give Obama the impetus to do what he has long wanted but lacked the guts to do: wind down the war against al Qaeda, close Guantanamo, and release most of the prisoners we hold a Guantanamo under the guise of "releasing prisoners of war."

If the killing of bin Laden results in the administration declaring our job is done then bin Laden will have done more for al Qaeda in death than he ever accomplished in life.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. Obama and Staff Claim For Credit Everything

Good job, Obama. You got bin Laden.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The most unseemly thing about the entire killing of bin Laden is the pathetic scrabbling about for credit that we're seeing on behalf of both Obama and his staff.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Osama is Dead; Obama's Foreign Policy is Still Dangerous and Perverse

The big news of the day is that Osama is dead as a result of the brave work of our Special Forces and intelligence teams, as well as the Bush administration policies of terrorists interrogations and targeted assassinations. Yes, the very policies that Obama so vociferously opposed for political benefit. President Obama is to be congratulated for disavowing his campaign pledge and continuing those George Bush policies that he had previously repudiated.

The other big news of the day is that the Palestinian terrorists were the first to condemn the assassination, even before Al-Qaeda itself. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh denounced the murder of the "Arab holy warrior."

As the left goes agog with excitement over Obama's victory in the war on terror, they might want to ponder about his broader foreign policy, which is not only insouciant to Islamic terror, but actively supportive of it.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

Obama Captures Osama #EERS

Tonight the whole show is going to focus on Osama Bin Laden.

You can listen live at http://wsbradio.com and call in to celebrate at 1-800-WSB-TALK. The show starts at 7:05 p.m.

Consider this an open thread.

Growing In Office

Say what you will about President Obama, but it is hard to imagine two years ago he would have taken unilateral military action in Pakistan without telling the Pakistani government. He has grown in office.

Ben Domenech has a good take on this over at Real Clear Politics and notes pretty well that Obama continuing to operate out of George Bush's playbook, the very one he intended to throw out, got us to where we are.

Whatever you may think of Obama's domestic policies or diplomatic decisions, his approach to national security has been largely wise and overwhelmingly vindicated thus far. His reconsideration of the promise to shut down Gitmo, his shifting of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed back to a military tribunal, and his reliance on several key personnel under George W. Bush who may disagree (and indeed have disagreed publicly) with him on other matters - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus chief among these, but hardly alone - have projected a far more stable, responsible, and moderate national security approach.

This has not come without cost, mostly from Obama's left flank, where many of his supporters have criticized him for going back on his word. But it's now reported that the bin Laden raid began with the interrogation of a detainee roughly four years ago, and the CIA continued to follow this lead under Obama, in August discovering a compound which stood out in its neighborhood for a number of startling reasons.

My, my how governing is so different from campaigning.