Susan Rice replaces Tom Donilon as National Security advisor
In a move sure to provoke congressional Republicans, President Obama is nominating embattled U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice Wednesday to serve as his national security adviser.
The White House also confirmed that Mr. Obama is nominating former aide Samantha Power, who once referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “monster” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, to succeed Ms. Rice as U.N. ambassador.
Ms. Rice, criticized roundly for portraying the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi as a mob protest, is to replace National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who is retiring after more than four years in the job.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, still in jail, could not be reached for comment.
If buttercups buzz’d after the bee
If boats were on land, churches on sea
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse
If the mamas sold their babies
To the Gypsies for half a crown
If summer were spring
And the other way ’round
Then all the world would be upside down!
The audacity of pure evil.
You got that, YouTube? Watch yourself.
Samantha Power, who once referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “monster”
Broken clock?
One of the headlines I saw on the Rice nomination was “Failing Up”. It must be nice to be an incompetent and a liar, and still succeed. It seems to be a theme with Barry – if you utterly suck and have a track record of complete failure, you’re perfect for a cabinet position. See Hagel, Chuck, Kerry, John Fing.
Can you say “quid pro quo?”
I knew you could!
It’s like you’re riding in the back of the car, and Obama’s in the seat next to you, putting his hands as close as possible to your face and your ears and your lap, always careful not to actually touch you. Then, when the backlash comes, he’ll claim innocence. “But I didn’t even touch him!”
This pair of appointments is many things, not least a diversion from the Ways and Means hearing yesterday which was the most damning demonstration of Obama’s anti-American intentions yet displayed.
Hard for him to be heard saying that while he’s tumbling down the shoulder at 45 mph.
In order to see the danger those testimonies pose to the Obama administration, to the progressive-Democrats and more generally, to the massive central governing tyranny, look at the smear job taken out on the groups testifying yesterday. The only possible reporting the status quo media can undertake is to attack these people, and do that on the very grounds the IRS attacked them! The offended Tea Party or conservative grass-roots groups oppose big government and therefore must be destroyed.
Of course, this Democrat-Media line is entirely undercut by Obama’s own mouthings against the IRS targeting, saying “that is outrageous, and there is no place for it, and they have to be held fully accountable”.
Must be the Democrat-Media line understands Obama meant nothing of the sort, right?
Susan Rice, National Security Adviser is just peachy, as long as it is for some other nation (preferably a third world one somewhere distant). As I said on a previous thread back when this was first mooted months ago, she hasn’t got the ability to advise on security for a landfill site in the US of A.
. . . she hasn’t got the ability to advise on security for a landfill site in the US of A.
Gotta admit though, she’s pretty damned successful at cooking up disasters on the continent of Africa. “Inept?”, asks some African potentate, “Hells no, she’s ept as all get out where it comes to getting us killed.”
I see her more in the role of peripatetic movie critic.
Are you sure this isn’t psychological warfare? ‘Cuz it really looks like it to me, and I’m not even degreed, much less a psychologist.
Does the question of the extent to which science — or endeavors called science — claims a right to make political determinations enter into the wider question “what has happened to our politics? Why is our politics become degenerate?” occur to nominal scientists like psychologists or psychiatrists as they make their efforts to make political determinations?
Sdferr, see here…
Inept?
Inept at what? She’ll do what she’s told and do it gladly.
That’s as “ept” as these gangsters want.
Chris Christie flips the bird at New Jersey Republicans (well, Republicans everywhere really).
It’s not psychological warfare, Lee. It’s them, O and his henchmen, doing as they damned well please and if we don’t like we can STFU because they’re in charge here. So like it or lump it.
Sometimes it is what it is and that’s all that it is.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
— Dr. Freud
What I see is that the question I posed must be very poorly posed to be so misunderstood, is what I see. I’ll make an effort to improve.
Psychologists and psychiatrists are in the business of studying human behavior. Or at least they used to be. Sociologists and political scientists are the bug-bears who are the architects of our current political mess.
Psychologists (or more narrowly psychiatrists) were once called, at the dawn of the creation of these “professions” or “sciences”, ideologists. Then Napoleon came along, and ideologist was no longer suitable, so a new name was born. But we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about the depth of penetration of various sciences and scientific “specialties” into the sole position of legitimacy in politics. After all, these are the “best” of us. And we must not be permitted to forget it.
Well sdferr, you and leigh have only convinced me not only is psychological warfare being waged against us, but it’s highly successful.
There has been an erosion of personal and societal ethics that came along with the idea that science superseded religion with its teachings of morality and a sense of personal responsibility in the common man. (E.g., most of us, regardless of our status as betters or lesser.)
Better to be in a state of perpetual childhood and all its attendant obnoxious behaviors than to grow up and become an adult because being an adult is difficult and boring and makes one worry too much so, let the benevolent Government take care of all that nasty responsibility. Worrying too much is bad for you (Science!) and the people in Washington wouldn’t be there if they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s only logical.
I weep for my little tattered country.
That was an exaggeration. I only need to look around to know that. We are beset on all sides, from the long march through the institution, the obvious propaganda and agenda of the MSM, the homosexual agenda, class warfare, and on and on.
If you think this is all just coincidence and happenstance, I’m afraid I can’t take you seriously.
I think William James and Freud both dabbled in what we might call “applied social psychology.”
But Lee, still, that wasn’t the point of the original impetus to the question at all. I had thought that questioning the sense of “as good a theory” would have been enough to wonder whether the “good theory” wasn’t in fact, if not the source of the difficulty, at least a major player par excellence in the difficulty?
Lee, you have grasped onto this psychological warfare thing about a week ago. I don’t think there is anything to it, but more information may come to light that may change my mind. My concern for you is that you are working backward from a conclusion you have already arrived at and filling in information to fit your POV. People do this all the time, me included, so it is not unusual. The danger is in putting up blinders to other causes of our current state of affairs than the one you find to fit your theory.
Of course, you could end up being right and then you can rub it in forever. A satisfying outcome, for sures!
Seriously, jump ahead to an hour and eight minutes of the video I linked above.
1:07:30 actually
Freud was a pioneer and a genius. James was an unethical asshole who should have been institutionalized if not in an asylum, then in a prison.
Heck, I thought Freud was a genius secret novelist writing case-studies in accordance with a Rousseauvian model, hardly deviating a particle from Rousseau’s magnificent opera.
I spy a new biography, sdferr.
“Lee, you have grasped onto this psychological warfare thing about a week ago”
No, I linked an article yesterday that Sdferr dismissed out of hand because it was written by a psychologist.
I guess all this talk about a Marxist in the white house, the long march, brainwashing and thought control of school children, it’s all just hyperbole, and really we are just beset by opportunistic petty tyrants.
Reminds me of all the people crying that we had to win the election of 2012 or America was over, then when we lost, they immediately started talking about the election of 2014 being crucial.
No, this too shall not pass. We’ve lost the country, sorry. It’s just a matter of how long the body goes through death spasms now.
I didn’t dismiss it out of hand though Lee, not at all. I pointed to the basis for its construction, and wished to undercut pseudo-scientific political thinking in the process. That doesn’t mean “dismiss” pseudo-scientific political thinking. It means examine it more seriously. Not less.
You said he was a carpenter seeing only nails. I guess I missed your intent.
Yes, you did miss my intent.
Ablow isn’t a politician, for starters. He isn’t a particularly skilled political thinker, for seconds. He certainly isn’t as knowledgeable of the political fundamentals of our once shining polity as were the men in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, who were not pseudo-scientists of any sort in their capacity there; nor as knowledgeable of political philosophy, in specific, were we to put a name to the highest skills possessed by some of those men in Philadelphia, besides simply designating them patriots and lovers of freedom and justice. Or lawgivers, to put another stamp upon them.
What is it exactly he said that you disagreed with is more important to me than what you think of his qualifications for giving an opinion.
I disagree with his entire premise. Psychological warfare assumes a captive audience with no way to affirm or deny the information that is disseminated by the administration and his minions. It assumes that we are all in thrall to the meandering speechifying of the Won, so much so that we accept each and every word he prats out as TRVTH. It assumes we are a bunch of dolts who wandered in the darkness until the Won came along to lead us to his light. His light, not THE light.
I reject this premise as bullshit. Certainly half the country and possibly much more who are not that vocal about their politics and beliefs for their own reasons reject it. Everyone here who believes in our founding documents and the American Experiment should reject it.
Talk about setting the bar low. Aren’t there any grownups left in D.C.?
I disagree with Ablow in many things, but to sum generally of that piece of work, I think it’s best, if one wants to plumb Obama’s intentions, to look to Obama’s declared intentions, rather than paste on him some pseudo-scientific gobbledigook of one’s own making, no matter how carefully that gobbledigook is sculpted or fashioned to fit the tiny range of phenomena chosen to represent Obama’s intentions. Is what.
But possibly better still, to look away from Obama (who after all, we wouldn’t think to look to for a “good account” of the best in political matters) to seek what’s actually better about politics in the wider, more true to political sense. Or, so to say, not to fix too narrowly on reactionary (and too probably faulty) business, but on action itself, for the sake of what’s best. And on that account, to leave the psychiatrists and psychologists to their own special work, whatever that may be — which I took to be dealing with individuals, rather than nations or polities.
Leigh,
‘psychological warfare‘
(noun)
1. the use of propaganda, threats, and other psychological techniques to mislead, intimidate, demoralize, or otherwise influence the thinking or behavior of an opponent
I think you assume a definition of the term all your own. It would hardly need to be warfare if we were all dolts under the thrall of the Won, now would it?
Plus, do you imagine our opponent is solely Obama?
We’ve talked about this a lot on this site. Obviously, Obama is not the only opponent.
You sdferr asked about his objection to Ablow’s piece and I was responding to that and not to the literal definition of psychological warfare, but to Ablow’s use of Obama as the prime mover.
You *asked*sdferr, etc.
In my opinion, if you think the Obama administration ISN’T conducting psychological warfare on conservatives and traditional American Ideals, you need to go see a shrink.
Psyops encompasses anything meant to leave the target convinced his options are more limited than they are, so that he cannot resist effectively by circumventing your prepared countermeasures. Period.
And it’s a common stratagem in any adversarial situation, from world conquest to board games.
“. . . if you think the Obama administration isn’t . . . etc.”
That’s still not it.
It isn’t that I think or that Ablow thinks or that you think this or that about the things the Obama administration is doing that I’m concerned with, but with the too narrow “frame” the Obama administration (would be happy for us) and Ablow (and you and I, if we follow him) take to speak about, or think about, politics. The basic phenomena (what is done in public view) are available to anybody to see and experience. It’s the meaning of our interpretations, their depth and breadth, that’s in question.
really we are just beset by opportunistic petty tyrants
We are.
AND they’ve been engaging in propaganda/psychological/ wars.
Psychological warfare assumes a captive audience with no way to affirm or deny the information that is disseminated by the administration and his minions
That sounds more like “brainwashing” to me, such as what you see in North Korea.
They are most definitely doing their dead-level best to mess with our heads, from the Orwellian abuse of the lexicon to the Goldsteinian appropriation of our signifieds (like that, Jeff?) to the Alinskyite mockery and whip-saw, to plain old-fashioned pathological lying.
They ARE doing what they damned well please, knowing they’ll never be called out except by Visigoths.
They are also screwing with us mentally, as well as they can. That some are able to escape their influence does not mean their methods aren’t effective on a sufficient number of the susceptible. This IS Obama’s second term, after all, and the IRS scandal is being spun as “of course rape is despicable, but the bitch had it coming.”
This IS Obama’s second term, after all, and the IRS scandal is being spun as “of course rape is despicable, but the bitch had it coming.”
Second term with fewer popular votes than his first. A first of its own! I suspect massive voter fraud, but what else is new with that crew? Breitbart is claiming the IRS knew about the IG’s report prior to the election. So, more fraud. There are too many fires to run around stamping out at once.
Obama is all set to kick over his own house of cards.
Oh, I really believe we are dealing with much, much more than that.
This isn’t opportunistic at all. There is a strategy of constant pressure applied to create incremental opportunistic gains to be sure, but it’s not just happenstance that these particular people fell into a situation they could take advantage of.
Where we are is the result of powerful people with a poisonous ideology carrying out a multigenerational plan to destroy us from within. Like the devil his self, their greatest psyop was convincing the world no such thing exists.
Well it does, and they have defeated us. Unless talking about a post-constitutional country is just hyperbole, Which it ain’t.
tag fixed by meddler with admin privs, 9:13 pm
Dammit, that was supposed to blockquote di’s last comment.
From adversity oftentimes springs opportunity.
Obama & Company (insert various cabal members here) may yet be made to serve a better purpose than the one they propose. By overreaching on nearly every front and do such a cock-up job of it, they are finally receiving the scrutiny they have earned. Not only have they lied, they have made fools of many of their supporters. I await the wrath of the press and it is picking up.
The bigger problem is the economy and the global mess that has been made of monetary policy. There are too many players and too many moving parts. Too many crimes, too many cover-ups. We don’t even know the half of it yet and it may be that we never do.
I’m not ready to give up.
No. Next question?
I’m not saying give up, I’m saying the US as the constitutional republic of our forefathers is gone, and it’s not coming back. May as well face it. We still must fight for the best we can get.
We may be able to recapture some essence of it…after going through another civil war of secession, but short of that, we are past the point of repealing Obama care, much less rolling back the other million government agencies, programs, public union bureaucrats and regulations that have snatched liberty from us.
What you call overreach is not, it’s just they recognized where we are before you are able to accept it. If you think anything is going to change because of the IRS, the wiretapping, or the dead ambassador in Muslim lands, you’re dreaming.
It’s hard to tell whether you can distinguish giving up from giving up Lee. The indicators all seem to point in the same direction to the same conclusion, i.e., give up.
Someone should do a cartoon of Kruschev’s ghost at a UN table looking smug and pointing to his shoe on the the table and saying “You finally buried yourselves last year, saving us the trouble”.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Qui iudicat kangaroos?
Lee, we can agree to disagree without your telling me that I need to “see a shrink”, “accept” your version of the facts as gospel, and “stop dreaming”. That’s not necessary and as you once told me long ago, apropos of something else, “not how we do things around here”.
Juste iustitia est solum inter tumultum.
St. Thomas of Aquinas or St. Augustine?
Depends on what we’re supposed to give up on.
Taking back the gubmint through electoral processes? Definitely give up on that. We’ve been coyote-walking through the air for several cycles on that.
Waiting for people — and/or the press — to wake up sufficiently to put a stop to all this nonsense? Best not hold out much hope. Even with Leno landing significant blows lately, and even with the severity of the corruption, those who are capable of being awakened are already awake. Loud noises don’t raise the dead or comatose. Being stood up against a wall, maybe, but then it’s too late for them to be useful to the Republic.
Hoping that we can turn this juggernaut around, thus avoiding the Econopalypse? We’ve missed all the exits on that route, and the momentum behind the bad financial practices will keep us airborne juuuuuust long enough to crash hard into the ocean instead of setting down gently in the trees.
Nope, hoping to avoid the inevitable result of 40–100 years of bad policy, bad education, and immoral propaganda is no longer an option. We’re already in the death spiral, but the turns are still gentle enough not to induce nausea except in the very sensitive.
All we can hope for is to brace for impact and then begin to rebuild the Republic, albeit with less real estate.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “give up” sdferr.
Promoting the possible by defining the impossible is not the same as lying down and dying.
And leigh, I don’t believe I ever said that long ago or any time, and as far as the rest, my opinion is just that, don’t like it, don’t read it.
Oh, shoulda refreshed, thanks di, for saying it better than I.
I hope you understand that by “the indicators” I was referring to the very list you gave Lee, not to any amorphous collection floating on air someplace or other. Hence, that I’m not advocating giving up in any sense, but merely suggesting that we shouldn’t presuppose such things as repealing ObamaCare, for one example, (the rest included) are beyond reach already. Possibly beyond reach in the middling near term, but not so beyond reach as to require a shooting civil war. That’s one of the things militating against progressivism, I think, namely that the future toward which progressivism is aimed is so damnably murky, much more so than the past, which isn’t exactly a bug under a well-illuminated microscope itself.
What makes you think they’ve made a cock-up job of it? For that matter, what makes you think they’re finally being scrutinized?
Lovers’ quarrel. I understand that the make-up
sexfawning that follows is supposed to be fantastic.Whether we are past the point or no return or not, a reckoning will happen at some point because ‘the facts of life are conservative’.
However, no matter when and how it happens, all the rebuilding we do will be for naught if we do not rebuild within ourselves. We must flush all Leftist Thinking from our minds and all Leftist Feelings from our hearts. We’ve all been infected – the only differences are in how much each of has. We’ve all had our souls corrupted by the Leftist onslaught that has been going on since Rousseau.
We must recapture Virtue.
We must restore The Permanent Things to their proper place.
We must rediscover our Moral Imaginations. Russell Kirk defined this as follows:
To possess a Moral Imagination is to not deny man as he is; it is the rejection of the idea that man can be perfected; it is the acceptance of Reality and the striving to make institutions reflective of time-tested Truths.
We must seek and find our Moral Imaginations again.
But, more importantly, when we find our own, we must then pick-up and wield The Sword Of Imagination and restore proper order to Mankind.
Chicago and Seattle roll into the 14th inning, score 0 – 0, and Chicago proceeds to score 5 runs in the top of the inning. So what happens? Seattle scores 5 in the bottom. And they go into the 15th tied.
“merely suggesting that we shouldn’t presuppose such things as repealing ObamaCare, for one example, (the rest included) are beyond reach already”
Well I gotta ask, can you name one government agency that once established, has been ended?
Last serious attempt that I know of was Reagan, coming off a historic landslide election, but couldn’t rid us of the Dept of Education. And worse still the only ones even talking of reducing government are republicans, yet it was Republicans who gave us two of the last three major expansions, Nixon with the EPA and Bush with the DHS.
No, my friend, I think it a farfetched hope indeed that government will shrink at all, much less to significant effect.
I just don’t take the world quite so deterministically, mainly because I don’t think I know such stuff. I think, change happens, as the imposition of larger government indicates. What we want in politics is change for the better, and not the worse. Which, the worse, is what we believe we see in the enlargement of government. So, it isn’t unreasonable to think that diminishing government will be a change viewed to be the better course, and therefore to think that this is the course which may reasonably be chosen. Thing is, the choosing, such as it is, is to be done by many millions of people, and we don’t know with any precision how they will view the matter. Part of our aim might be to help them see what we think we see. Somehow, telling them that change can’t happen strikes me as a poor way to go about that.
“Well I gotta ask, can you name one government agency that once established, has been ended?”
the icc
“I just don’t take the world quite so deterministically, mainly because I don’t think I know such stuff”
Nice backhand. That’ll learn me.
As if I said “change” can’t happen…
It’s the aspect of government shrinking as a kind of change that you seem to rule out of bounds, whereas this is precisely, on the one hand, the change we desire, and on the other, the change or kind of change we think will improve our lives and government, to the extent our government impinges greatly on our lives. I’d guess, however, that if you say government can’t be shrunk, you wouldn’t think that means it can’t grow larger — in which case some change would necessarily look possible to you.
This is another of those circumstances that I think might be best handled by a few shared beers and watching a game on the TV.
Honestly, I think we’re noticing the failures of the medium as much as anything else half the time lately.
‘. . . watching a game on the TV”
Well, the Astros have 6 homeruns through the 5th, but it doesn’t mean I’m climbing the walls right now. It just means I want to put Freddy Garcia in a boiling pot of blubber, that’s all.
You guys ever think such things?
It’s sorta the inverse of the mob mentality. There we find ourselves totally in tune with others and act thusly and it creates problems.
Here, virtually, online, it’s impossible to read a facial clue, some hint or a sly smile. This creates other problems. We have to use emoticons or, alternately, craft a level of writing that very, very few can manage.
Writing is hard hard hard, at least as I view it, and I reckon I’m pretty crappy at it on the whole, so the more feedback as to particulars, the better I understand the simpler things at hand. Too much that matters passes me unnoticed, I’m certain of it.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?
(Comic book nerds mostly.)
Qui iudicat kangaroos? Who will judge the kangaroos?
(Other newer better kangaroos who are down with the struggle and who can spot a wrecker or a free rider from a mile off.)
Juste iustitia est solum inter tumultum. Real justice only serves the revolution.
Ixnay on the emoticons, bh. Just my 2¢.
Qui iudicat pikachus?
pikachu jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead
What I believe as beyond hope is ever restoring the country to the limited government proscribed by the constitution.
Admittedly, Lazarus probably believed rising from the dead was beyond hope til it happened to him, but I still think it a good bet to not count on it.
Truth is I lost hope when Romney was nominated, because national healthcare is the death of limited government and individual sovereignty, and there was only a narrow window of time to stop it. When the GOP nominated the architect of the thing, I knew it was over.
The ruling elite have moved on to demolishing national sovereignty with immigration reform now. Maybe your hope for a reduction of government will be realized there, when they abolish the border patrol. Winning!
I’ve coped with this by being impossible to take seriously.
I’m still learning to cope, McG. One day…
I used to be pretty skillful at coping joints, like say in an ogee cap trim meeting in a wall-corner, but I fear I’ve lost the touch for want of practice anymore.
It’s like riding a bike, sdferr. Measure twice,cut once.
TS Andrea’s pulled in winds are picking up rapidly here, out of the eastsoutheast to east, steady at 15mph gusting 20-25 or so. She’s due to run up the eastcoast, clipping nFl and sGa tomorrow, then right up SC, NC and Va coasts later Thurs. through Fri. Minor wind and major rain, they’re saying.
That was one, here’s another.
Seems that a lot of work was done to delay all information till after the inauguration.
National Soros Radio says there are precisely 5 ways to look at this
1. Obama values loyalty.
2. Obama to GOP: In your face.
3. It’s all Benghazi, all the time.
4. The White House has its privileges.
5. Then there’s the diversity issue.
johnny is a joker [he’s a bird]
a very funny joker[he’s a bird]
but when he jokes my honey [he’s a dog]
his joking ain’t so funny[he’s a dog}