Rand Paul Calls Benghazi ‘worst tragedy since 9/11’

Well I’m back. After giving my brain a rest for a few weeks I could no longer hold in my frustration over the climate of American politics. With gun control debates in full swing and the media humping every opportunity to cover a school shooting I just needed to step away from the news and relax, just kind of clear my head for a bit.

But today I came across this interesting little piece about the Benghazi attack that happened last year. Rand Paul actually said that it was the ‘worst tragedy since 9/11’ and puts the blame squarely on Hillary Clinton’s shoulders.

For those who forgot, the Benghazi incident occurred on September 11^th 2012 in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where armed group of people killed four Americans. “Between 125 and 150 gunmen, "some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants," are reported to have participated in the assault.^[24][25][26] Some had their faces covered and wore flak jackets.^[27]”

The thing that bothers me about this is the fact that Benghazi really wasn’t the worst terror attack since 9/11. There have been so many others, and many Americans have died in terror attacks after 9/11 while under Bush’s administration. Have we all forgotten about that? Have we forgotten that terror attacks have been down since the tail end of the Clinton administration? 

The 9/11 terror attacks were on US soil, and approximately 3,000 people were killed, hundreds more injured, and many more died later because of diseases they contracted from the dust and debris of the fallen towers. That truly is the worst attack against this country since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

And it’s not like this sort of thing didn’t happen after 9/11. 19 US Consulates have been attacked since 1979 and seven of those were under the Bush administrations watch. Why is it that no action was taken against the Bush administration? Why is it that when stuff like this happens when a Democrat is in office that suddenly this sort of thing is bad and isn’t just a fact of life?

Fox News is acting like the Benghazi attack was some horrible attack the likes have never been seen before on or off the battlefield. But when you think about it this sort of thing has been happening since before Bush’s time, before Obama’s time, before Clinton’s time. This isn’t some new phenomenon that is somehow only now manifesting itself because there is a Democrat in office.

I think saying that this attack is worse than 9/11 is pure 100% political exaggeration on the part of Republicans. We’ve had a lot of good Americans die on their watch, and several US Consulate attacks in which Americans lost their lives, and we are going to focus on this one now because Obama is in office? When Bush was in office and the Dems tried to condemn him for attacks that occurred under his watch did the right-wing not say that there was no way to know when an attack is going to happen and that all attacks are tragedies but we are in a time of war and these things happen and you shouldn’t say disparaging things about your President?

Well hey, guess what folks? We are still at war! No matter how much we Democrats would like to believe that Obama has ended the war in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t mean that it’s so. We still have military presences there, and we are still fighting people there. Just because Obama sent some troop’s home doesn’t mean the climate of the war has changed. And the right-wingers are right too, these things happen during times of war. So why is it that they can say that and get away with it when their guy is in office, but when a Democrat is in office it has to be the ‘worst tragedy since 9/11’?

I’ll tell you what the worst tragedy since 9/11 was, it was the war in Iraq. 3,542 American soldiers died in combat while serving in Iraq, some of them had their bodies dragged through the streets and hung from large over passes as trophies as their charred guts spilled out onto the street. War is hell and is the ultimate tragedy which trumps any US Consulate attack.

Those Americans who died during this attack were brave people. You have to be brave to be a diplomat in a potentially hostile foreign country. You don’t just hide behind the curtains; you have to mix with the people, mingle with them, and get to know them. That is the function of a diplomat, and that is a pretty scary thing to do if you think about it. Your life is at risk every moment you are putting yourself out there, making yourself vulnerable in the name of diplomacy and peace.

This is just another case of politicians using certain events for their own gain. The Democrats are doing the same thing right now with gun control, and now the Republicans are doing the same thing with Benghazi. Pointing at each other and trying to point out flaws and place blame.

The blame should really be placed on all of our shoulders, meaning the American people. Either way you slice it we are allowing this type of bullshit to propagate, this he said she said, diversionary tactics type of bullshit which all politicians use against use. To say that the attack in Benghazi was the worst tragedy to happen since 9/11 is like saying that an assault rifles ban will stop school shootings. It just isn’t real, folks.

Presidential Failure! Obama Starts Off Second Term on Wrong Foot

So who heard about what Obama signed just recently? Do you have any ideas? Was it a world peace treaty? Did he sign a bill that made the Federal Reverse illegal, thus eliminating the national debt? No, none of that. What he did was something sinister in my eyes, something that the people who voted him in did not want to see happen.

Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2013, thus continuing to allow indefinite detention of American citizens and the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay. This comes after the President said that he would veto the NDAA bill, leaving some to believe that Obama gave into GOP pressures, especially after the tense fiscal cliff debate which was never solved on time due to some major conflicting politics.

FROM THE ARTICLE:

"President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day,” American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended.”

Can you imagine how pissed off I am right now? Maybe you can’t, because maybe to you this doesn’t matter and you think our President can do no wrong because you’re a Democrat and everything he does is golden. But this isn’t the first time the President has said he was against something or for something than gone completely back on his previous word.

Remember in 2009 when the health care debate was a hot button issue? One of the major talks was about a Public Option for health care which Obama supported during his run for office for the 2008 ticket. While the debate was happening Obama came out and said no to a public option, saying that he never campaigned on that issue and was never one of his causes.

Luckily for us Rachel Maddow from MSNBC remembered exactly what Obama said, she even replayed some of the Obama campaign videos in which he clearly states that he is in favor of a public option. Maddow played this clip repeatedly, but did it make anyone change their minds about the President. No, of course it didn’t. Many people probably don’t even remember it.

The problem with this President is that he gives in too easy, and on top of that he’s just a politician like all of the rest. At the beginning of 2012 Obama was completely against gay marriage, and boom just a few months before the election he says he is in favor of it. If you were ever looking for a quicker way to get the majority of intelligent homosexuals to vote for you that’s the way to do it, and boy did it work out well for him.

But now we have this President who we voted for because we wanted less war, less power to government authorities who can drag us out of our house and lock us up for no reason without a trial, and the closure of the Guantanamo detention center. Did he do any of this? No, instead he signed the bill allowing the government to lock us up indefinitely, and will keep Guantanamo open for an undisclosed amount of time.

Doesn’t this just kind of go to show us something here? First the President wants to take our guns away and now he is backing the NDAA bill, which he wanted us to think he would veto. Hmm, disarm the public then make it legal to detain them for ANY REASON you want.

 Think that the war on drugs is bullshit and are talking shit on it? Pull that asshole out of his house and throw him in a cell.

Think the Administration of this or future White Houses is corrupt? Break that terrorists door down, gag him, and make him disappear.

Don’t agree with the newest law that was passed limiting you’re free speech? Label that douche an anti-patriot socialist and let society shun him.

This is what I’m talking about here, the government’s resistance to its own people. And to think we voted for Obama because we thought he was enlightened and would steer us away from this, but alas we were dead wrong.

The scary thing is that many people who voted for Obama who were against NDAA and indefinite detention and Guantanamo and pretty much all of those things in the PATRIOT ACT which the NDAA will be extending will still be in support of Obama. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we truly believed that Obama would repair the mistakes that were made by the Bush Administration, but instead he is going to extend those mistakes and just act like he never did it.

Obama even said that he has “reservations” about the NDAA bill, and also said that no one from his administration would ever invoke the indefinite detention part of the bill. But that is just his opinion on the law, not the law. He leaves the door wide open for another administration to interpret the law a different way. What if the next administration will invoke the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial? Does that mean that Obama’s administration is clean of any wrong doing? Oh my god, hell no! You still signed the damn thing into law! You may not use the law you just signed in but who says other people after you won’t? What would you say then, Mr. Obama? “Uh, oh well.”

This is what Obama does into his second term? Is he really going to spit in the faces of those who got him elected by doing exactly what they DIDN’T want him to do?

Still, I think Obama was a better choice than Romney for obvious reasons, but why the hell would we want to vote him in for a second term is he is going to be “Romney Lite”? We didn’t vote for a Republican, we voted for a Democrat, a Democrat who made promises to not be like his opponent but then gets voted in and becomes a carbon copy of what we didn’t want. Hey at least he pretended to be on our side, right?

The reason we are mad about this is mainly because of some of the wording we see here in bills like the NDAA. It basically states that shall the President believe that anything he signs into law is unconstitutional then he can treat it as non-binding. So it basically means that the President can choose what he wants to do whenever he feels it is necessary.

 “I know I said I was against using this law, but I have decided it would be a good idea to use it against this list of people right here. Still, this does not affect the majority of law abiding citizens in America so everyone needs to calm down because this isn’t some indiscriminate search and detain mission…or is it?”

I am pissed. The man I trusted with my country, twice now, has gone across the line this time. All we wanted was for him to do what the people want, and he can’t even do that. This is a democracy, isn’t it? Then why do I not have control over my government? Why is it that I vote in a guy who says he is on my side and then breaks his promises to me? Why did you have to be all sneaky about it and sign it into law when everyone was still rearing over the Sandy Hook events and the fiscal cliff debate? It was almost like one was used for the cover of another, and if this was a plan then it was executed without nearly any hiccups. This is not the man I voted into office, this is some Republican “Body Snatcher” who has hijacked Obama. Damn, if that were only the case.

So what do we do as the American people? I mean, we don’t want this law, do we? If we don’t then why don’t we do something about it, like send letters to him and our representatives? We need to do something. We need to let Obama know that he is OUR President and he does what WE want him to. We did not vote him in to make decisions for us, and this is the message that we need to send to this administration. 

SOURCES:

Huff Post News Article

 The New Turks Video

President Obama's Broken Promises Video

Using Newtown Shooting for Political Purposes? You don’t say!

(Any comments would be much appreciated.)

We are now two days away from Christmas and the people of Newtown Connecticut and the entire nation are still reeling from the horrible tragedies that took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary school. So much has unraveled since that terrifying day when dam Lanza killed twenty-six people before doing himself in, many of those things I have covered here in this blog. But one thing I haven’t been covering as much is the use of the tragedy by politicians for their own purposes. I did say in an earlier blog that we shouldn’t expect too much from politicians as they will only offer us sympathy and promises with no real solutions.

The political tension in the wake of Sandy Hook is rising as Democrats and Republicans are both coming up with their own ideas as to how these tragedies can be prevented and how their own agenda can be furthered. Republicans are saying that armed guards should be present in all schools for protection, while Democrats are saying that gun control laws are too lax and that further regulation of firearms and ammunition is needed.

But this is the perfect time for either party to take a shot at one another as well. In an article I found on Yahoo! News Grover Norquist accuses President Obama and Democrats of using the Newtown tragedy to push their gun control agenda. 

Grover Norquist on ABC accusing Obama and Dems of using Sandy Hook for political purposes

 FROM THE ARTICLE:

"We ought to calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes," Norquist told me on "This Week." "President Obama has been president for four years. If he thought some gun control could solve this problem, he should have been pushing it years ago."

I love that first part of the sentence, "We ought to calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes”, as Norquist himself is actually endorsing an NRA recommendation to place armed guards in our public schools for protection. So who should be calming down? The guys who want to regulate guns more, or the guys who think armed guards should be in every school? In my opinion, both. 

NRA recommends all schools have armed guards.

When you’re anti-something, there is always going to be another side to the issue, a pro-something side, like anti-gun/pro-gun, and people who are anti-gun will call for the amount of guns to be reduced while pro-gun people will call for a proliferation of guns. And after an event like the Sandy Hook shooting the anti-gun folks are going try to make you believe this happened because there are so many guns in the country and they are easily obtainable, while the pro-gun people will try to get you to believe the tragedy happened because there aren’t enough guns.

And now it’s time to point the fingers in the political world and blame each other for taking political advantage of a horrible occurrence even though both sides are doing the same exact thing.

How can Norqusit come out and accuse Obama and other Democrats for using the Sandy Hook event to push gun control laws when he and Republicans are using the event to push gun proliferation? Norqusit says he thinks Democrats should “calm down” and not turn this into a political hot button and at the same time saying that we need to put armed guards in every school to protect our children. 

Retired marine Staff SGT standing guard at local school

Don’t both of those ideas sound the least bit alarmist to you? I mean, how can we be so fearful as to put armed guards in our schools yet tell others they need to clam down about the ease in which guns are available?  Or vise versa.

The gun control debate itself doesn’t seem to be centered around a all out ban of hand guns or assault weapons, although those ideas are being vocalized by politicians, but rather on the ban of extended magazines and high capacity ammunition clips.

One writer believes that giving up these extended clips is the real solution and that focusing on mental health is just a distraction.

FROM THE ARTICLE:

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said that LaPierre's suggestion that the effect of a violent culture on the mentally ill has contributed to increased gun violence, but she believes that Congress should pursue some gun control measures.

"I am for the banning of the extended magazines and extended clips," Noonan said.

Editor and Publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel said that focusing on the mentally ill is a distraction from the issue of gun violence.

"The mental illness argument has been used to evade action," vanden Huevel said. "More guns and bullets, more dead children."

The idea that more bullets and more guns equal more dead children is absolute horse shit. According to this writer the ban of extended mags and high cap clips will reduce the amount of children being shot up in school violence. I hate this argument, because if I was out of my mind and wanted to hurt somebody I DO NOT need either of those extended capacity ammunition clips, PERIOD.

When we look at these shooting incidences we see that they all have one major thing in common; they are all suffering from some type of mental issue or some case of extreme anger in which case therapy or any other type of help was not sought or was not successful. These events don’t just happen at schools either, as proved by the recent shootings at malls and movie theaters by deranged psychopaths who have no sense of wrong or right and simply put are deluded individuals. The excuses, “I wanted to see what would happen” or “I wanted to kill all the phonies” or “I was upset with the way my life was going” or the excuses of people who have little to no moral compass or little to no understanding of the consequences of their actions (unless of course they do understand their consequences in which case they just don’t care or are planning to off themselves anyway at the end of their deed).

I guess what I am saying here is that we shouldn’t get caught up in thinking that only one side of the political spectrum is using this event for political gain. They both are, and it is quite evident that they are.

Norquist was right about one thing though, we do need to calm down, all of us. Those who want guns in our schools for protection and those who wanted to place regulations on firearms. The presences of armed guards in schools won’t limit tragedies, and neither will a ban on high capacity ammunition clips.

If we have armed guards in school surely they may not be able to react quickly enough to each and every instance. The idea that a bad guy with a gun can only be thwarted by a good guy with a gun is pretty accurate, but what if the good guys couldn’t react in time and a few people died?

The ban of high caps won’t do shit. As I said, if I truly wanted to hurt someone I can do it without a lot of ammunition. If Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook with only one hand gun and a regular capacity ammunition clip he would have STILL KILLED PEOPLE. Sure it may not have been as many, but the deed would still have been done, nothing can stop that. And if an armed guard was on the premises maybe he would have gotten to Adam sooner and only a few people were injured or killed, but still the act was accomplished, people died.

Adam Lanza was in fact a troubled young man. According to reports he hardly spoke to anyone and would rarely if ever look them in the eyes. He was hiding from the world, descending into his basement room where he would hide every day and immerse himself in the fantasies he created that he was more able to cope with. He was truly a young man who was in need of some serious therapy, which his mother tried to provide for him.

There are many people who knew Nancy Lanza that are being quoted in news articles saying that Nancy was trying to find help or Adam, and a conflicting report that she had considered to commit him to a mental institution.

With that being said, why are people trying to say that the mental health argument is just a distraction from the real cause? The real cause IS mental health, and this needs to be addressed in our country.

What I do find funny is that the Republicans are the ones who are really saying that this is an issue of mental health rather than firearms regulation, yet the Republicans are responsible for 4.3 billion dollars worth in cuts for mental health programs.

So yes, this is very much a matter of mental health and it should be treated as such. No need to go into a fear mongering campaign by either trying to reduced or increase the amount of weapons available to the general population. The more people who have healthy minds the less senseless violence will occur. 

SOURCES: 

Yahoo! News Article

Conservative Media: Obama Supports One-World Government

This is aboslutely stupid. The conservative media is sugguesting that Obama supports a one-world government. They say that Obama is working his way toward repealing the Declaration of Independence, and taking away our right to bare arms. This is all an attempt to control the people through a type of socialist/fascist/nazi/marxist governemnt. Funny though...Nazism and Fascism are the same thing...and socialism and Marxism are the same thing. Ihonestly think they are trying to throw all those words together becuase the truth is many people don't know what they mean. So when you use four words that all mean the same thing you can scare a lot of people.

Fox News is behind this as well. Things were doing great while Bush was in office, but now we are three months into Obama's Presidency and the world is just falling apart. I honestly know that Obama will lead this country in the right direction. And what's funny is after Obama's term the conservatives will say, "remember when we were communists? Thank god those days are over." But we aren't! Nor will we ever be!

If anyone is responcible for America becoming a fascist nation it's the republicans. They profiled people they don't like who are "possible terrorist", they threw them all in CAMPS, where they tortured these people. And the Republicans have also been pushing this National ID card, which will have RFID tracking chips on them. They're plan is to have EVERYONE use these cards EVERYWHERE. And soon it will be in our money as well. They will know EVERYTHING about you, what you buy, where you go etc. And if you protest, they will simply turn off your chip and you are no longer a citizen. You can't buy things, work, drive, or go ANYWHERE.

From the article:

The one-world government rhetoric has been advanced by some of Fox News' most familiar faces. For instance, in an April 6 column headlined, "The Declaration of Independence has been repealed," Fox News contributor Dick Morris claimed, "On April 2, 2009, the work of July 4, 1776 was nullified at the meeting of the G-20 in London" -- an assertion Morris repeated on that night's edition of Fox News' Hannity. Additionally, on the April 2 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly stated that "[s]ome believe Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D-CA], Senator Harry Reid [D-NV], and President Obama himself are sympathetic to the one-world, global-justice view," which O'Reilly had earlier described as "requir[ing] that a one-world government seize private property and distribute it so that every human being has roughly the same amount of resources." O'Reilly then demanded to know: "Where does Barack Obama stand?" And on the April 1 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News host Glenn Beck asserted, "The Constitution is being taken apart piece by piece through international coalitions, through international law, and through the United Nations."

I hope people in America are smart enough to not listen to these crazy fascists. But the sad thing is many Americans are not that smart thanks to Republicans. It's the Republican's idea to teach Creationism in classrooms as a science. It's Republicans who don't want to teach your kids about sex education. It's the Republicans who's rhetoric basically states that ignorance is bliss, therefore why would you want to be smart? Just sit back and let us control your lives. And that's what they are trying to do. Control you by making you think that Democrats like Obama are trying to take your rights away, even though they are trying to give them back to you.

It's all spin. Spin that we as Americans have to learn and stop. Don't let these Republicans control you with lies. GET WISE QUICK PEOPLE, because they ARE wise and know you are not. Stick it to them by showing them that YOU can make a difference.

Please, read the article and learn what tactics they are using against YOU.

FULL ARTICLE <<<<<<<<<<