June, 2015, Politicians Say The Darndest Things: Still Delusional, Still Out Of Touch With Reality

Ever so often we run a series of posts under the theme, “Politicians say the darndest things.” It is a parody of an old television show, “House Party,” where host Art Linkletter would ask simple questions of young kids and wait for their often funny responses. This segment of his show was called “Kids Say The Darndest Things.” 

Unfortunately when kids say silly or dumb things, it is funny. When politicians say silly or dumb things, there are usually serious ramifications across the land that often involve stupid laws, wasteful spending, self delusion of a politician’s intelligence or abilities, or a continued lack of faith that today’s politicians are smart enough to get anything right.

So let’s take a look at the latest darndest things that American politicians are saying today:

1) “People don’t remember, but when I came into office, the United States in world opinion ranked below China and just barely above Russia, and today once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth.” Barack Obama. As is often the case, when a politician says something you recall the old saying, “you cannot make this stuff up.” Are you kidding me, more respected, most respected? Consider the following realities in the real world and not in his head:

• Putin and Russia respected him so much that they marched into a neighboring country without fear, the Ukraine, and have set up a puppet government loyal to Russia.
• China respected him so much that they are creating man made islands across the Pacific Ocean and daring the anyone, including Obama, to stop them from claiming that those islands give them territorial rights over much of the Pacific and much of the world’s shipping lanes.
• When Obama invited the six leaders of Persian Gulf countries to attend a Camp David summit he was hosting, only two leaders decided to attend and one of the non-attendees decided that a horse show in England was more worthy of his time than a summit with Obama.
• For the first time in decades, Egypt is using Russia as a source of weapons vs. once being exclusively a U.S. supplied military.
• The President of Brazil blew off a state dinner at the Obama White House as a protest against the Obama administration spying on her and her government.
• Despite U.S. protests, Saudi Arabia is reportedly in negotiation with Pakistan to purchase nuclear weapons from that country if the U.S. folds in its negotiations with Iran.
• Israel is now working with Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations against a common enemy, the nation of Iran, leaving the U.S. and Obama out of that equation.
• The U.S. asked Arab countries not to get militarily involved in the Libyan disaster after which some of those countries started bombing terrorist positions within Libya.
• Iran’s leadership often and openingly mocks the Obama administration and right now seems to be taking it to the cleaners in its nuclear arms discussions.

Does not seem like Obama and his administration is getting a lot of love and respect around the world, despite him saying the darndest thing.

2) “You know, I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office. For people to say that I am anti-Israel, or, even worse, anti-Semitic, it hurts.” Barack Obama. Really, the closest thing to being a Jew? Again, delusional on so many planes:

• Obama has openly stated that Israel should return to its 1867 borders, a geographic step that would ensure its annihilation, given the missile technology that has developed since 1967. 
• Obama has dissed the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu more than once by not taking a meeting with him even when the Prime MInister was in the U.S.
• Obama dispatched, probably illegally, political operatives into Israel prior to the last Israeli national election to help prevent a Netanyahu reelection.
• Obama has had a long and strong affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, a devout enemy of Israel.

Delusional and preposterous to think that this President is more of Jew than any other President.

3) "I think sometimes people want to be in public service just because they like seeing their name up in lights; they like being important And that's a bad reason to go into politics; you should be like an actress or a singer, or make a lot of money." Barack Obama. This from the current narcissist in chief in the White House. A President who gave a speech at the funeral of Senator Daniel Inouye but ended up mentioning his own self more than the late Senator. A President whose portrait in the White House is larger than any other Presidential portrait. A President who disrespected Neil Armstrong by displaying a picture of himself looking up to the skies in his Armstrong comments on the astronaut's death.

4) “I say to every Israeli: Today we have the ability to stop them if they decided to move quickly to a bomb. And I absolutely guarantee that in the future we will have the ability to know what they’re doing, so that we can still stop them if they decided to move to a bomb.” John Kerry. Of all the quotes we will go over in this post, this one is the most idiotic. 

First of all, the Iranians have already publicly stated that they will not sign an agreement if it involves inspections and searches for nuclear weapon research and manufacturing on their military bases. So if they get such a condition in any agreement, all they have to do is do move all of their nuclear weapons work on military bases. In which case Kerry’s “guarantee” is nothing but hot air. The U.S. could not stop India, Pakistan or North Korea from getting nuclear weapons, and will not be able to stop Saudi Arabia from getting them from Pakistan, but somehow Kerry thinks the U.S. can stop the nut jobs running Iran from getting nuclear weapons? 

No way Kerry has “the ability to stop them [Iran]” or can ”absolutely guarantee” they “know what they are doing.” This is the darndest thing and most delusional quote of the whole post.

5) ”I said earlier that when we celebrated Robert Kennedy’s 50th anniversary of his swearing in 2011, people said that was the golden age for the United States Department of Justice. Well, I think 50 years from now, maybe even sooner than that, people will look at the work you all did and say this was another golden age.” Eric Holder. This was part of the speech Holder gave when he stepped down as the U.S. Attorney General.

He obviously has a different definition of “golden age” than I do since during his tenure as the top law enforcement official in the country:

• He allowed the illegal Fast and Furious operation to go on, breaking both international and domestic law, getting dozens if not hundreds of innocent people killed with U.S. weapons he sanctioned and then covered up the illegalities from Congressional investigators.
• He allowed the IRS to destroy emails and other documents, clear violations of Federal law.
• He allowed the IRS to harass and impede the First Amendment rights of citizens and organizations that held contrary views of this administration.
• He refused to enforce the DOMA legislation which was the law of the land at that time.
• He made little or no effort, and had little or no success, to prosecute criminals that steal upwards of $200 billion a year from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and other Federal programs.
• He threw the full weight of the Justice Department into investigations of the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown but gave no effort to investigate the murders of white victims by black police officers or black perpetrators.

Yep, he and I both have a different definition of “golden age.”

That will do it for this rendition of “politicians say the darndest things.” A lawless attorney general who thinks he presided over a golden age of law enforcement, a clueless Secretary of State who thinks the Iranians are going to allow him to inspect anything he wants, and a delusional President who thinks he has been a friend to Israel, a humble public servant, and who has led the country to respectability in the eyes of the world. Politicians do indeed say the darndest, and most idiotic things, yet believing their own insanity at the same time.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Embarrassed By Fake Zombie Attacks, Hackers, Snipers, and a Better Russian Foreign Policy

This is our fourth post this month in our monthly series on political class insanity. It highlights how the American political class continually wastes our tax dollars, implements idiotic programs, and cannot operate any government program or project without incompetence and waste. The first post in this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/03/march-2014-political-class-insanity_2.html

You can review previous month’s instances of political lunacy at the beginning of every month from the listing on the right side of this page.

1) Recent news reports have been reviewing the massive political and liberty problems going on in the Ukraine, formerly a part of the Soviet Union. It appears that the ruling political class in the Ukraine was very corrupt which ruled a country that was on the verge of bankruptcy. When mixed in with the split between those citizens in the Ukraine that wanted to align the country with the West and those that wanted to align the country with Russia, you ended up with a very volatile situation.

The country eventually exploded into street riots, fighting, deaths, and the eventual overturning of the current government. And as of the past few days there are reports that Russian military forces have entered the country and have taken control of at least two airports. This intrusion was relatively simple since the Ukraine and Russia share a geographic border and the area where the intrusion occurred is the part of the country friendly to Russian influences.

Which gets to our Secretary of State, John Kerry. Kerry wants to put up a billion dollars worth of U.S. taxpayer money in a guaranteed loan to the Ukraine to help it survive all of the turmoil including its dire financial situation. Any number of problems with this insanity:

• The Ukraine interim government says it needs at least $35 billion so $1 billion would be like spitting on a forest fire, a total waste.
• Kerry does not specify what the money will be used for or what conditions would be imposed, just wants to give them a $1 billion, a sure fire way to waste it.
• Given that Russian troops are already on the ground in the country, seems like giving a weak interim government would be like giving the Russians the money directly since it is Russia that will eventually have the major influence on what goes on in the country.
• Our national debt is now over $17 TRILLION, we cannot afford to be given away billions of dollars into situations that the political class has no plan or end game for.
• Maybe if this administration had had an effective and proactive foreign policy and strategy to begin with, all of this may have been averted and the billion dollars not put at risk.

I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, outside influences are driving their eventual fate. But giving their new, inexperienced leaders a billon dollar loan guarantee, while it may feel good, is nothing more than flushing a billion dollars down the drain. 

The Obama administration has no plan and really no leverage on the situation while the Russians are right there, on the ground, in the country, and pulling all of the strings in connection with their grand plans and strategies. Lack of planning, lack of ability to plan, that is the American political class ineptness in this foreign affairs crisis.

2) In yesterday’s insanity post we described a situation where an 84 year old nun and two accomplices had easily penetrated a government nuclear facility and had gotten inside where they caused cosmetic damage in protest of nuclear technology. We pointed out that the Federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to protect the country from terrorist attacks, hundreds of billions of dollars that was easy defeated by an 84 year old nun.

Well, it appears that an elderly nun is not the only one that proved our domestic protection plans can be easily defeated despite the huge expenditures. Consider an excerpt from a Business Insider article about an April, 2013 sniper assault on an electrical substation in California:

The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

The sniper or snipers put the substation out of service for months. So now we have a nun and a few snipers that have proven how defenseless our national defense is against terrorists despite the inept Washington political class spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to prevent just such attacks. Insane.

3) But our expensive defenselessness does not stop with a nun or solitary sniper. Consider a minority Senate report headed up by Senator Tom Coburn and published in February, 2014 on how defenseless our government’s cyber secrets and information processes are. The following examples of government computers and files being hacked comes directly from his report, The Federal Government’s Track Record on Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure:

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission stored sensitive cybersecurity details for nuclear plants on an unprotected shared drive, making them more vulnerable to hackers and cyberthieves. 
• The Securities and Exchange Commission routinely exposed extremely sensitive data about the computer networks supporting the New York Stock Exchange, including NYSE’s cybersecurity measures. The information the SEC exposed reportedly could be extremely useful to a hacker or terrorist who wanted to penetrate the market’s defenses and attack its systems. 
• Last January, hackers gained access to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' computers and downloaded an entire non-public database of information about the nation’s 85,000 dams — including sensitive information about each dam’s condition, the potential for fatalities if breached, location and nearest city.
• Last February, hackers reportedly broke into the national Emergency Broadcast System, implemented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the federal government’s tool to address Americans in case of a national emergency. The hackers caused television stations in Michigan, Montana and North Dakota to broadcast zombie attack warnings. “Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” an authoritative voice stated in the hacked broadcast message, while the familiar warning beep sounded. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”
• Last March, hackers exploited a vulnerability on web servers belonging to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal government’s authority for federal and private-sector cybersecurity. The servers, which hosted the federal government’s database of known software vulnerabilities, had to be taken out of service for several days. 
• In addition, hackers have penetrated, taken control of, caused damage to and/or stolen sensitive personal and official information from computer systems at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, State, Labor, Energy, and Commerce; NASA; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Office of Personnel Management; the Federal Reserve; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Food and Drug Administration; the U.S. Copyright Office; and the National Weather Service, according to public reporting.

Hundreds of billions of dollars every year and this political class cannot even protect the country from being hit by fake zombie attack warnings. Pathetic.

Obviously, the zombie attack hacking was not serious. But the other hacks that Coburn uncovered are very serious threats to Americans’ safety, threats that have obviously existed for years and which currently still exist. In fact, Coburn’s research found that the Federal government has spent $65 billon over recent years trying to secure the government’s computer systems, an effort and expenditure that has obviously failed in so many ways.

The Senator found out why the $65 million has not been effective, as he points out in his report: “And yet [government] agencies — even agencies with responsibilities for critical infrastructure, or vast repositories of sensitive data — continue to leave themselves vulnerable, often by failing to take the most basic steps towards securing their systems and information.” 

“Fail to take the most basic steps.” Sounds about right when discussing any government entity and its functions, a shortcoming that should be corrected by our elected officials but which never happens, possibly because they are too busy raising campaign funds for their next election.

Defeated by a nun, hackers, bogus zombies, and incompetence. Probably makes the Ukrainians think twice about allying with us, given how insanely inept the American political class and the government operates are. Last set of insanity tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w