The Foundation

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Editorial Exegesis

“The Transportation Security Administration’s demeaning new ‘enhanced pat-down’ procedures are a direct result of the Obama administration’s willful blindness to the threat from Islamic radicals. While better tools are available to keep air travelers safe, they would involve recognizing the threat for what it is, which is something the White House will never do. El Al, Israel’s national airline, employs a smarter approach. Any airline representing the state of Israel is a natural – some might say preeminent – target for terrorist attacks. Yet El Al has one of the best security records in the world and doesn’t resort to wide-scale use of methods that would under other circumstances constitute sexual assault. The Israelis have achieved this track record of safety by employing sophisticated intelligence analysis which allows them to predict which travelers constitute a possible threat and which do not. Resources are then focused on the more probable threats with minimal intrusion on those who are likely not to be terrorists. Here in the United States, these sophisticated techniques have roundly been denounced as discriminatory ‘profiling.’ … TSA believes an 80-year-old grandmother deserves the same level of scrutiny at an airport terminal checkpoint as a 19-year-old male exchange student from Yemen. This policy not only is a waste of time and resources, it denies reality. … Despite all the government bureaucracy and TSA’s intrusive inspection practices, [al Qaeda underwear bomber Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab’s attack was only foiled because of a faulty bomb and the actions of alert passengers. Now all passengers have to pay the price by having their privacy (and their privates) invaded, which is the Obama administration’s alternative to instituting a policy that will target the source of the problem.” –The Washington Times

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Upright

“The trade association of U.S. airlines – the Air Transport Association – says that it expects that about 24 million Americans will take to the air over the Thanksgiving holiday. That would be about 3 percent more air travelers than flew last Thanksgiving. I hope they are wrong. Travelers should drive, take the train, bicycle, walk or just stay home. Just don’t fly. If we stay on the ground, the message may finally get through to our government: stop harassing us and concentrate on finding the bad guys.” –columnist Jed Babbin

“Mr. Obama’s continued pursuit of romance with the Islamic world, little short of abasing both himself and his country, isn’t winning him a lot of points from Muslims at home. … The special pleaders are clear about the price they exact for returning Mr. Obama’s respect and attempts at affection. They define ‘progress’ as withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan, shutting down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay at once, ‘protecting’ the civil rights of Muslim Americans, and compelling the Israelis to commit suicide. Do all that, Mr. President, and we’ll love you – maybe for a whole day. But eventually you’ll probably have to put Michelle in a burqa.” –Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

“After being chastened by the voters in one of the greatest electoral reversals in American history, the president flew away on the most expensive foreign junket ever taken by an American head of state. But his appearances … in India, Indonesia and South Korea have made it vividly clear to all that Obama is incapable of shaping events.” –columnist Oliver North

“President Obama’s fiercest obstacles as chief executive are neither recalcitrant Republicans nor the increasing complexity and demands of the job; they are his ideology and his political allegiances. Newsweek sees it differently. In its latest issue, it laments: ‘The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world. … The issue is not Obama, it’s the office. … Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency?’ Can you imagine any ‘mainstream’ media publication interposing such a lame excuse for a Republican president’s failures in office?” –columnist David Limbaugh

The Demo-gogues

Election rewrite: “Campaigning is different than governing. [Republicans] are flush with victory after a campaign of just saying ‘No.’ But I’m sure the American people did not vote for more gridlock.” –Barack Obama

“We didn’t lose the election because of me. Our members do not accept that. So, I’m not looking back on this. They asked me to run, I’m running. We don’t let the Republicans choose our leaders, and again, our members understand, they made me a target because I’m effective, politically and policy-wise.” –soon-to-be-former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

“The election was no ringing endorsement of Republicans. We do not accept their version of what this election means. It’s not about rejecting what President Obama has done. It didn’t go fast enough to create jobs. That’s what it’s about.” –Nancy Pelosi

Stimulus rewrite: “[T]he stimulus prevented bad things from happening. There are about 10 million people probably who are working now who would not have been had we not passed those laws but they don’t know who they are.” –Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

“From everything I can see, this decision was not one designed to have an impact on the currency, on the dollar.” –Barack Obama on the Fed’s decision to devalue the dollar

“We’re trying to make sure we’re building bridges and expanding our interactions with Muslim countries so they’re not solely focused on security issues.” –Barack Obama

World’s Smallest Violin: “I am being denied the right to have a lawyer right now because I don’t have the opportunity to have a legal defense fund set up. And because I don’t have a million dollars to pay my counsel. … All I am asking for is fairness. … Can you tell me under what theory of fairness would dictate that I be denied due process, that I be denied an attorney, because it’s going to be the end of the session? … My reputation, 50 years of public service, has to suffer because you have concluded that this matter has to end before this Congress ends.” –Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who was found guilty on 11 of 13 counts of ethics violations

Dezinformatsia

A new level of budget cutting: “I said something deliberately provocative on This Week, so I think I’d better clarify what I meant (which I did on the show, but it can’t hurt to say it again.) So, what I said is that the eventual resolution of the deficit problem both will and should rely on ‘death panels and sales taxes’. What I meant is that (a) health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re willing to pay for – not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care.” –New York Times columnist Paul Krugman

Whose money is it? “You know while you’re making these proposals, the Congress is about to come back and talk about whether to extend the tax cuts first passed under President Bush. By extending them, that’s going to cost about $4 trillion, about the amount that you save. Couldn’t some of this be avoided by keeping the tax rates where they are? I mean, by letting them go back to where they were in 1998 when you were White House chief of staff?” –ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles

Denial: “You wrote a book last year, I believe, that predicted 40 more years of Democratic dominance in Washington. Given what happened not long ago in those elections, do you stand by that prediction?” –ABC’s Dan Harris to former Clintonista James Carville, who responded in the affirmative

Historic defeat: “Nancy Pelosi did two things for which she will go down in history. She was an incredibly effective majority leader when, and speaker, there was an opposition president. She helped make the majority. And when she was in the majority, she was the hammer that got through President Obama’s agenda and sent it to the Senate. However, that is a completely different role than what she wants to do now. For which, I think she’s kind of like Winston Churchill. I mean, she accomplished historic things for the Democrats, and they should be sending her off in a blaze of glory and adjusting for this new regime.” –Fox News Sunday and NPR’s Mara Liasson (Her greatest accomplishment was that she turned the majority into the minority.)

Village Idiots

The BIG Lie: “As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.” –Homeland Insecurity Secretary Janet Napolitano

Watered down? “I think that this is, there’s a silver lining for the Democrats in this election. The Blue Dog Democrats, the conservative Democrats, lost by a huge margin. The majority of them, in fact, were thrown out of office last week. That’s a good thing for the Democrats. That’s good because so much of what the Democratic caucus has had to do is to sort of placate these conservative Democrats and they watered down these bills so they’ll be happy. Well, they’re gone now. The Progressive Caucus – there’s about 80 members in the Progressive Caucus in Congress – only three of them lost election, lost the election last week. So it’s going to be actually a more liberal Democratic group, more progressive group.” –documentarian Michael Moore

Government as charity: “[The government doesn’t] really need to give money to us to give away, they should be giving money. I set up this charity so that I could help people and a lot of charities are set up, by you know, the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the Clinton Foundation because they want to help people and it seems that individuals are trying to help people where as government should be doing our job for us but unfortunately they’re not so we’ve got to step up to the plate and try to do as much as we can.” –uber-wealthy singer Elton John, complaining that the government doesn’t take enough from some people to redistribute to others

Delusions of grandeur: “I’m the next president. I’ll be 35 … just before November, so I was born to be president. I’m the man. I’m the man. I’m the man. Greene’s the man. I’m the man. I’m the greatest person ever. I was born to be president. I’m the man, I’m the greatest individual ever.” –former South Carolina Democrat Senate candidate Alvin Greene

Short Cuts

“[Barack Obama] used his Jakarta platform to complain about Israel building apartments for her growing population. Where? In Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. To make matters even worse, Jakarta is a city no Israeli is allowed to enter!” –columnist Ken Blackwell

“President Obama stood in front of India’s congress and bowed low before he gave a speech to them. The gesture didn’t work. The lawmakers still observed the Indian custom of putting the American on hold for twenty minutes before they’d listen to them.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“Obama’s overseas trip has been such a disaster that people in Kenya now claim that he has an American birth certificate.” –comedian Jay Leno

“Time was that telling a government agent not to ‘touch my junk’ was so obvious that citizens didn’t need to bother. Thanks to Janet Napolitano, now we have government agents groping nuns and taking naked pictures of the rest of us.” –columnist Bryan Preston