Author Archives: Bok
Ben Rhodes Benghazi Memo
The White House was forced to cough up another Benghazi memo this week because of a FOIA request by Judicial Watch. The memo written by Ben Rhodes urged staffers to emphasize the line that the 9/11/2012 Benghazi attack was caused by an anti-Muslim movie and not a failure of policy. The attack killed a US ambassador and 3 others. At the time the president was bragging that he had decimated al Qaeda. The White House feared news of a planned terror attack would tarnish the president’s campaign theme. Rhodes and others prepped Susan Rice for 5 Sunday talk shows with the message that a demonstration against the video got out of hand, causing the violence in the Benghazi compound.
This Catherine Herridge report shows General Robert Lovell testifying that there were no ant-video demonstrations preceding the Benghazi attack.
Benghazi Memo
Charles Krauthammer says the release of the Rhodes e-mail is up there with the discovery of the Nixon tapes.
Last night Bret Baier asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if he changed Susan Rice’s talking points from terror “attack” to “demonstrations” protesting a video. Spokesman Vietor replied, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
Waiving the Individual Mandate for Sainthood
Four popes, two living and two not so much, gathered at the Vatican on Sunday for a papal Hall of Fame induction. The wildly popular and beloved Pope Francis canonized the wildly popular and beloved Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII. It was a two for one not seen since the middle ages. The brains of the operation, emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, assisted. Daily Beast called it a Pope-a-polooza.
John Paul II ended communism. John XXIII ended meatless Fridays. They’ve been called bookends of the Second Vatican Council
Individual Mandate for Sainthood Waivers
John Paul II took the High Speed Escalator to Heaven when Benedict XVI waived the 5 year saintly waiting period. Francis greased the skids for John XXIII by granting a waiver of the two miracle mandate for sainthood.
Here’s Peggy Noonan capturing the sweeping grandeur of the event. And here is Maureen Dowd capturing the sweeping under the rug of the priest sex abuse scandals.
The Tortoise and The Harry
In the old cowboy movies range wars were fought over cows and sheep. Now they’re fought over cows and dessert tortoises.
Thanks to the Cliven Bundy standoff with BLM we learned that the federal government owns 81% of the land in Nevada. Harry Reid owns the rest. Well, not quite but it seems that way.
The 7/8 on the US not under the thumb of the BLM is the “brokest nation on earth” according to Mark Steyn:
I think it’s absurd and obnoxious that an obscure and unaccountable government agency should rule an area the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. What for? Why should the 26th largest country on earth (which the Bureau of Land Management is) be maintained in perpetuity as the world’s biggest nature preserve for the desert tortoise? The seven-eighths of the United States that isn’t under the iron rod of the BLM is the Brokest Nation in History: it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more productive land.
Speaking of Bundy, Steyn doesn’t think his racial attitudes should get the BLM off the hook.
Let’s stipulate that Cliven Bundy is a racist. Let’s also assume, if only to save time, that he’s Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic. So what? Does that make criticizing the Bureau of Land Management “racist” or “homophobic”?
