Even The President's Friends Think ISIS is More Important Than an Exhibition Baseball Game....And Tango Lessons...And Golf

In the past month or so, ISIS has unleashed a number of deadly attacks across the world: 

• In late February, two ISIS bombs killed over 100 Iraqis.
• Dozens of people died in two ISIS-related suicide bombers attacks over the past couple of months in Turkey.
• And this past week, ISIS struck in the heart of Europe in Brussels, with two bombs going off at the airport and one going off in a train car, killing dozens and wounding over a hundred including Americans.

ISIS is on the move, spreading their violent wrath of terror and death across the Middle East and Europe. Innocent people are dying, fear is being spread, ISIS’s influence is growing in multiple countries and this week, President Obama:

• Attended a meaningless baseball game in Cuba immediately after hearing of the death and carnage in Brussels.
• In a political speech in Cuba, spent less than one minute discussing the major terror attacks in Brussels.
• Flew to Argentina where he spent some time learning how to dance the tango as body parts were being cleaned up in Brussels.
• He eventually returned to Washington DC where he decided going golfing would be a good thing to do.

I know I feel like many other Americans when I say that I was disgusted by this lack of compassion and concern of this President. Rather than showing any sympathy and concern immediately after the attacks, he was sitting in a baseball stadium doing the wave and laughing it up with Cuba’s Communist dictator. Despite having the information on the attack, he still allowed himself to be seen learning to dance the tango. Heartless behavior of a human being in my opinion, never mind the President of the United States.

But it is just not me that seems to have a problem with this behavior. His usually loyal political allies in the media and news industry also called him out for his cold heartedness:

- Veteran NBC newsboradcaster Tom Brokaw: “So much of politics and national security is a combination of symbolism and reality,” Brokaw said Wednesday. “The reality is that we did have that attack yesterday. It was unnerving to us, it was devastating in Europe.”

“But at the same time, the symbolism is that the president stayed at the baseball game all day long where you would have thought he would have said, ‘Look, we’ve got more business that I have to deal with, I wish you well,’ get on the phone. We’ve got to put together some kind of a bulletproof syndicate to deal with all this.”

“There’s a real urgency about it, and he has got to convey that, not just to the American people but to the world. I think it was Mike Hayden who said he is the leader of the free world, and this is the time to be the leader because this kind of attack can occur again and again and again.”

“This is the time to be the leader.”

- Democratic strategist David Gergen, speaking on CNN: “I think people now, after all the attacks, we’ve had an attack a day around the world for the last 12 days, but after San Bernardino and Paris and Brussels and Ankara and Istanbul, people are looking for more forceful action to actually drive back ISIS and right now, we’re not winning against ISIS.” 

“When you go to a baseball game, it looks a little frivolous.” When you’re dancing like that. I — I even think the hard call, he should have thought about coming back and gathering — people are looking for leadership here. I thinks that’s a critical issue for him. Restraint does not equal leadership when you’re under attack like this.”

- Co-host of the TV show, “The View,” Jedediah Bila (keep in mind that “the View” is usually a lovefest when it comes to President Obama): “He’s the leader of the free world … I want my president front and saying ‘Islamic extremism is at the root of this. ISIS claimed credit for this, and we are not going to take this. We are going to fight back.'” 

- Co-host of the TV show, “The View,” and CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin: “Jed and I love each other and we don’t always agree. But when I saw President Obama … I didn’t not like seeing him do the wave in Cuba at a baseball game when Americans were injured and over thirty people were killed. You have to be a little more presidential acting than that because optics really matter.”

- MSNBC (keep in mind that MSNBC has also been an Obama cheerleader since day one of this administration) show host and commentator Chris Matthews: "I grew up in a big city, Philadelphia ... when there was a big fire, you want to see the mayor on the other curb, watching it. You want to see the police chief, standing there, the fire chief, you want to see them standing on the curb. You don't want to hear they phoned it in. The president was off base. He wasn't there. What could he have done better by taking a minute away from a baseball game? He had to do something."

- President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, speaking on MSNBC: “It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work. But you have to be careful of these, these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tangos, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day.” 

When you long term political allies are saying you are not a leader, you are not Presidential, you are not serious, you are frivolous, etc, you know that you really screwed up. 

Maybe the best summary of this less than stellar performance comes from Fox News and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, never a fan of Obama, who probably summed up many Americans’ feelings best: “The increasing tempo and sophistication of its operations suggest that it may be poised for a continent-wide guerrilla campaign. In the face of this, Obama remains inert, unmoved, displaying a neglect and insouciance that borders on denial. His non-reaction to the Belgian massacre — his 34-minute speech in Havana devoted 51 seconds to Brussels — left the world as stunned as it was after the Paris massacre, when Obama did nothing.” 

Inert, unmoved, neglectful, non-reactionary, not Presidential. Unfortunately, we have a President who is either uncaring or one who has checked out already in the final year of his term. In either case, the world and the rest of us, including many of his political allies, are constantly disappointed by this President’s lack of compassion and inability to recognize “bad optics.” And in this world of a growing terrorist threat, our safety in his dispassionate or disinterested hands, a very scary proposition.

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:

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http://www.reason.com
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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