Bring Back the Complaint Department

Conceptual
(Secretary of State John Kerry) added that President Obama had charged his aides with “coming up with any concepts that will, in fact, work, and which could help change the situation on the ground.” (New York Times, 11/24/2015)

Kerry and Obama nail exactly what is required in the fight against ISIS: concepts that will in fact work.

How these geniuses ever got to the pinnacle of power is something that future historians will study.


Shady
“One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don’t want intelligence shaded by politics. I don’t want it shaded by a desire to tell a feel-good story,” he said. (New York Times, 11/23/2015)

So is this why Obama told the American public that Al Queda was neutralized and ISIS contained? It would be just like him to throw the military under the bus. It may be difficult to find out the truth because it would also be just like him to lie for political reasons.

“It’s not as if I’ve been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of what’s been going on in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “At my level, at least, we’ve had a pretty cleareyed, sober assessment of where we’ve made real progress and where we have not. (New York Times, 11/23/2015)

So upon further review, Obama seems to be saying that he did NOT get "feel-good" assessments about Iraq and Syria. He got the truth. That his policies have created chaos and put American lives at risk. And he did what?


It's Working! (Part 47)
UnitedHealth is the largest U.S. insurer by enrollment, and the company is warning it may withdraw from ObamaCare in 2017. The insurer has already suspended advertising for its ObamaCare coverage and stopped paying commissions to insurance brokers for signing people up. It literally doesn’t want consumers to buy its products. (Wall Street Journal, 11/23/2015)

Don't forget to sign up for Obamacare. While there are still insurance companies.


Deceivers
Texas and a handful of other states — including Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana — have moved to eliminate Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood amid the controversy. Secretly recorded videos that were released starting in July purported to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of aborted fetal tissue and discussing the issue with abortion opponents who posed as representatives of a biomedical firm.

Planned Parenthood said that the videos were deceptively edited and that the group did not do anything illegal or unethical. (New York Times, 11/24/2015)

Whenever Liberals are caught red-handed on tape they resort to their standard defense: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Of course, the full, unedited videos are available and prove that Planned Parenthood officials were doing exactly what it is they were alleged to be doing.

Lying does not matter to Liberals because Planned Parenthood is serving a higher purpose: ensuring that the government continues funding abortion.

Wanted: An Apology From Democrats For Giving Us Obama

Twisted
The latest twist came just hours after Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing, that the president was likely to receive recommendations about how to mount a rescue operation in the next several days. He said those recommendations could have included the use of American ground troops.

But Mr. Rhodes made those comments as the secret team of Marines and Special Operations forces were already on Mount Sinjar, in the middle of a 24-hour trip to talk to the displaced people and pesh merga fighters. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

So now it is official. As these two passages note, the Obama administration left hand does not know what the Obama administration right hand is doing.


Mindful
Mind you, Obama does deploy grand words proclaiming grand ideas: the “new beginning” with Islam declared in Cairo, the reset with Russia announced in Geneva, global nuclear disarmament proclaimed in Prague (and playacted in a Washington summit). But, untethered from reality, they all disappeared without a trace.
...
He thus admits that Russian and other outside support was crucial to tilting the outcome of this civil war to Bashar al-Assad. Yet he dismisses countervailing U.S. support as useless. He thus tells the world of his disdain for the traditional U.S. role of protecting friends by deterring and counterbalancing adversarial outside powers. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 8/14/2014)

Leave it to Charlemagne Krauthammer to expose Obama's foreign policy incompetence. (See the following for more on Obama's incompetence...)


Poll Tested
Senate Republican strategists like Mr. Dayspring cite several recent polls as evidence that the results will turn on doubts about Mr. Obama’s competence, chiefly a late-June survey by Quinnipiac University in which 54 percent of registered voters said the president was not “competent in running the government.” In mid-July, 57 percent said “no” when asked in a CNN/ORC International poll if Mr. Obama “can manage the government effectively,” and 53 percent said in a Pew Research Center poll that he is not “able to get things done.” (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

More than one-half of the people think Obama is incompetent. But that is not even what excites the editors here at RedStateVT the most. What excites us is that the Liberal media is even willing to talk about Obama's competence. 


Logjam
Since becoming secretary of state in February 2013, John Kerry has carved out a deserved reputation as the ultimate road warrior. Before his current diplomatic trip, Mr. Kerry had traveled 519,136 miles to 51 countries, logging 230 travel days. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

The New York Times has just got to get a new measure of the success of a secretary of state. With Hillary Clinton we got endless recitations of how many countries she visited and how many miles she traveled. 

As if these constitute success. 

Now, coming after his astonishingly dismal performance in the Middle East, the Times touts "road warrior" Kerry. We suspect that Woody Allen was right: 90% of life is just showing up. 


Injection
While opportunistic civil rights leaders and liberal commentators are pretending that policemen not only routinely kill black people but do so for no reason, the New York Police Commissioner decided to inject some common sense into the discussion.

"What we've seen in the past few months is a number of individuals failing to understand that you must submit to arrest. You cannot resist," said Mr. Bratton in a radio interview Tuesday. "The place to argue your case is in the court, not in the street." (Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

Wonderfully stated by Bratton. Award-winning MSNBC host and revered holy man Al Sharpton could save black lives if - instead of ginning up racial conflict - he urged black teens not to confront police. 

Not What You Think

Ventilator
At the end of a week of frustrating developments for the White House, at home and overseas, President Obama took time on Friday afternoon to vent.

The president revealed a long list of gripes in a nearly 50-minute news conference: a recalcitrant Congress that is refusing to deliver the amount of emergency funding he requested for a border bill; crises in the Middle East and Ukraine that defy quick or simple solutions; even a press corps that neglected to wish him a happy birthday. (New York Times, 8/2/2014)

The Whiner-in-Chief.

Note to Liberals: this is what you get when you give the country an untested politician just so that you can feel good about yourselves.


What He Did
“Well, you know what?” the president said. “What we did worked, and the economy’s better. It shows you that if you stay at it, eventually we make some progress.” (New York Times, 8/2/2014)

Almost six years after Obama takes office unemployment is over 6% and the Federal Reserve is forced to keep interest rates at near 0%. 

And then there is this (also from the New York Times):

Here’s an unusual but extraordinarily graphic description of the current state of the labor market: If you lined up all of the unemployed shoulder-to-shoulder, the queue of people looking for work would stretch all the way from New York out past San Francisco. (Justin Wolfers, New York Times, 8/1/2014)


Folksy
"We did a whole lot of things that were right [after 9/11], but we tortured some folks," Mr. Obama said at a news conference Friday. (Wall Street Journal, 8/2/2014)

And, to be clear, by "folks" Obama means violent Muslim terrorists committed to the destruction of America and who wantonly slaughter innocents. Those "folks."


Devotion
...the Democratic Party’s activist core is incurably devoted to identity politics — the proposition that people are whatever their gender is (or their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or whatever seems stupendously important at the moment). (George Will, Washington Post, 8/1/2014)

Will sums up the guiding principle of Liberals.


Generally
When as respected and scrupulously independent a national security expert as David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from the usual suspects. This is general amazement at Kerry’s cluelessness. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 8/1/2014)

Krauthammer manages to eviscerate both John Kerry and fellow WaPo opinion writer Ignatius in two sentences!

The Level of the Gods

Liberal Logic
The Hamas apologists in the Liberal media are at it again. Today on NPR, one actually defined Israel's actions as genocide. Well Israel knows a thing or two about genocide. Actually it knows 6 million things about genocide...the body count of worldwide Jewry in World War II. Yes, Israel which phones the occupants of buildings it is about to bomb warning residents to vacate the premises... 

The same Liberals call for "proportionality" from Israel which apparently means they should strive to keep the body counts on each side the same. 

This is how Liberals believe wars should be fought.


Bernie Folds
House and Senate negotiators reached agreement during the weekend on a legislative package intended to stabilize the Department of Veterans Affairs’ sprawling and embattled health care system, according to people briefed on the deal.

The leaders in the negotiations — Senator Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, and Representative Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican — plan to outline the agreement at a news conference Monday afternoon.

The legislation is expected to include provisions for emergency relief that would allow veterans who live far from a V.A. facility or who face wait times that exceed a certain duration to see private doctors, and have those visits paid for by the government. The measure is also expected to set aside billions of dollars to hire new doctors and nurses; build or lease dozens of additional buildings needed to treat patients; and upgrade the department’s outdated scheduling system. (New York Times, 7/27/2014)

So - if we have this correct - Colonel Bernie Sanders has admitted that government run health care is not the answer and he now endorses a voucher system. So he will also change his vote on Obamacare, right?


Pick One
In Afghanistan and Iran, John Kerry brings some reasons for hope (Headline of David Ignatius column, Washington Post, 7/24/2014)

The world is aflame and our leader is on the 14th green. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 7/24/2014)

OK, which is the more accurate depiction?


Conveyance
The United States has concluded that Russia violated a landmark arms control treaty by testing a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile, according to senior American officials, a finding that was conveyed by President Obama to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a letter on Monday. (New York Times, 7/28/2014)

Obama has now called for a RE-RESET with Russia. Hillary Clinton could not be reached for comment. 


High Times
The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests
1926: Marijuana ‘Is Reported Safe’
Marijuana Is a Welcome Wedding Guest in Colorado and Washington State

At the New York Times (7/29/2014), it is All Dope - All the Time(s).

And to think this was once the country's premier newspaper...

Full Bore

Lately
The United States came “late” to efforts to find a political settlement to the war in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday, as the crisis there deepened with the political uncertainty in neighboring Turkey.....his remarks carried the implication that the Obama administration had moved too slowly in its first term to seek a negotiated political solution to a conflict that erupted more than two years ago and turned into a war. (NYT, 6/3/2013)

Usually it is politicians up for re-election who attempt to distance themselves from the policies of an unpopular president. In this case, it is a member - and a new one at that - of the president's cabinet.


Secrets
The court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, whose secret release of a vast archive of military and diplomatic materials put WikiLeaks into an international spotlight, opened here Monday with dueling portrayals of a traitor who endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers and of a principled protester motivated by a desire to help society who carefully selected which documents to release.
....
Inside the courtroom on Monday, as Private Manning sat quietly, David Coombs, his defense lawyer, told the judge that his client had been “young, naïve, but good-intentioned” and that he had tried to ensure that the roughly 700,000 documents he released would not cause harm.

“He was selective,” Mr. Coombs said. “He had access to literally hundreds of millions of documents as an all-source analyst, and these were the documents that he released. And he released these documents because he was hoping to make the world a better place.” (NYT, 6/3/2013)

Well that changes everything for us. Had we suspected for just one moment that Manning - in releasing only 700,000 documents - was being so selective we would never have been so harsh on him. And besides, he just wanted to make the whole wide world a better place with more harmony and other good stuff. 

For more Liberal wisdom on one of America's foremost traitors, see below.


Allegations
Rather than agree to what strikes me as more than adequate punishment, prosecutors insist on trying to convict him under the 1917 Espionage Act as, essentially, an enemy of the state. Which I don’t believe he is.

I say this even though Manning is allegedly responsible for the biggest unauthorized release of classified documents in the nation’s history. (Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, 6/3/2013)

WaPo's Robinson is conflicted on the Bradley Manning case. How do we know? Well he tells us so himself. It's that old Liberal compassion for criminals. Ultimately Robinson comes down in favor of 20 years with credit for time served. That's certainly more compassionate than we would recommend. Namely, the firing squad.