One of the first things George W. Bush did when he took office was put an end to U.S. taxpayer dollars funding abortions overseas… well it looks like Comrade Obama is salivating over the thought of having us pay for overseas abortions again.
The “change” that President-elect Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail will likely include overturning President George W. Bush’s 2001 executive order to prohibit the use of federal tax dollars for performing or advocating abortion as a means of family planning in foreign countries, Obama’s transition team has said.
“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” John Podesta, head of Obama’s transition team, said when he appeared on “Fox News Sunday.”
One of those executive orders is the Mexico City Policy, or as critics call it, the “global gag act,” a U.S. policy first put into place at an August 1984 Conference on Population in Mexico City by President Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan policy required all non-governmental agencies, or NGOs, that received population aid dollars from the United States to agree to not perform or actively promote abortions.
In what has become a partisan tradition in the first days of both Republican or Democratic administrations, President Bill Clinton removed the order shortly after taking office in 1993, and Bush reinstated it on Jan. 22, 2001.
Way to govern from the center, Comrade. I guess “hope” is not something the unborn are entitled to.
Tags: abortion, partisan
November 12th, 2008
This story from the Washington Post clearly proves how today’s objections to waterboarding, particularly from Congressional Democrats, is purely political grandstanding. When briefed on the interrogation techniques used against captured terrorists, the reaction from those in the room “was not just approval, but encouragement.” Even current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was there and “did not raise objections at the time.”
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
[...]
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”
And where does this newfound disapproval come from? The answer is obvious, and I’ve been saying it for a long time. Democrats have forgotten 9/11 and the lessons they should have learned from it.
“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ ”
Only after information about the practice began to leak in news accounts in 2005 — by which time the CIA had already abandoned waterboarding — did doubts about its legality among individual lawmakers evolve into more widespread dissent. The opposition reached a boiling point this past October, when Democratic lawmakers condemned the practice during Michael B. Mukasey’s confirmation hearings for attorney general.
This article also proves that Republican lawmakers were speaking truthfully when they said members of Congress had been fully briefed on the interrogation methods used against captured and suspected terrorists. Opposition to the practice makes for good political theatre when trying to make a spectacle of Mukasy’s confirmation hearings, or what is bound to happen over the issue of the destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. The bottom line is this: Democrats knew about waterboarding and supported it. Their opposition to it today comes from their desire to further politicize the war on terror, and undermine our national security.
Tags: flip-flopping, Global War on Terrorism, Iraq Campaign, Mukasey, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Deceptions, partisan, torture
December 9th, 2007
Yep:
In the weeks and months after September 11, Democrats and Republicans put aside our partisan divisions and stood united as Americans. As late as October 2002, a Democratic-controlled Senate voted by a wide bipartisan margin to authorize President Bush to use military force against Saddam Hussein.As the Iraq war became bogged down in a long and costly insurgency, however, and as President Bush’s approval ratings slipped, Democrats moved in a very different direction—first in the presidential campaign of 2004, where antiwar forces played a decisive role in the Democratic primaries. As you may recall, they also prevailed in Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary last year.
Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.
Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.
Part of the explanation for this, I think, comes back to ideology. For all of our efforts in the 1990s to rehabilitate a strong Democratic foreign policy tradition, anti-war sentiment remains the dominant galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base.But another reason for the Democratic flip-flop on foreign policy over the past few years is less substantive. For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn’t pacifism or isolationism—it is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular.
Really, that is all there is - no rationality, no convincing alternative policy…just a hatred of a party in general and a man in particular. So ingrained is this hatred that there was actually a proposal to impeach Vice President Cheney this week…which, if you are a lunatic Bush-hater, would be the first step on the path to impeaching President Bush, ’cause you don’t want to remove Bush and get stuck with the even more evil Cheney, right?
As Senator Lieberman points out elsewhere in his speech, President Bush’s overall war policy is decidedly liberal - in the sense that our goal is to bring liberty to a benighted area of the world. President Bush was able to adopt this policy because he is not a conservative - not in the sense that, say, William F. Buckley is a conservative. While a man of conservative instincts (especially on life issues and matters of taxation), President Bush is really just a center/right American politician…akin, in a lot of ways, to the center/right governing ideas of an Eisenhower or, to a lesser extent, the center/left ideas of a Truman. In other words, President Bush is just a regular American - not of the left, but not too right, either. And yet he is hated with a white-hot passion on the left. Why should this be?
Quite honestly, it is Florida, 2000. First and foremost, the people of the left have not forgiven President Bush for winning the 2000 election. To this day they will mindlessly repeat the laughable falsehood that the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush; that Gore would have won a recount in Florida, if he had only been allowed to try. There is a great deal of mercilessness in American life these days - an unwillingness to forgive, a definitive desire to see everyone paid out to the last penny for what they have done. In my view, this is the result of a rise in paganism and barbarism in the American body politic - elements very strong in the left, but not unknown on the right.
Joe Lieberman hopes his Democrats will recapture their past glories and become, once again, defenders of American ideals. I fear that he will be disappointed - but we do need to change the dynamic of our political debate; we need to figure out how to get the poison out of our system, lest it destroy us eventually.
Tags: Dick Cheney, Iraq Campaign, Joe Lieberman, partisan
November 8th, 2007
