Alexis McGill Johnson Doesn't Know What Words Mean

Legal Insurrection: (h/t Protein Wisdom)

During a Great American Panel on Hannity tonight John Fund and Hannity were hammering the point that Obama doesn’t know how to negotiate in good faith. One of them mentioned Donald Trump’s criticism that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing because Obama’s never done a “big deal.”

Panelist Alexis McGill Johnson of the American Values Institute responded:

"He got bin Laden."

Leaving aside the rhetorical effectiveness of Obama's manful crowing about "getting" bin Laden, Johnson seems to have been unaware that Trump meant "big deal" in its literal sense: large-scale financial negotiations. Sending Seal Team Six to whack bin Laden has nothing whatever to do with finance or with negotiation, so far as anyone knows.

So either Alexis McGill Johnson lacks the contextual awareness to pick up on the ordinary plain meaning of words, or she's playing a desperate game of distraction on behalf of Emperor Golden Dancer.

Up to you.

It's Funny Cause It's True...

Stacey McCain reveals the true info source behind the Bin Laden Raid.

The ISI are Spies. This is What Spies Do.

The pundits are aflutter with the question "What the Hell was Osama doing in Pakistan?" (Not small-arms training, obviously.) Everyone's bubbling with consipiracies about what the Pakistani ISI knew and when they knew it. Michael Ledeen runs this to the hilt, suggesting that not only might the ISI have a motive for betraying Osama...

There are many possible reasons.  One is that things were going badly with us — look at all the tough language coming from the likes of General Petraeus and from leading members of Congress and several spoon-fed journalists — and the gift of bin Laden would make for a happier Obama administration.

...so might Al Qaeda:

The war in Afghanistan is going badly for al-Qaeda. We’ve been slaughtering them for many many months, just read the military reports. So their recruitment is down, their fund-raising is down, their morale is down. Inevitably, this sort of thing produces divisions within the organization. Some of them want to fight on, others say let’s cut our losses and focus on the opportunities elsewhere…the world is changing, after all…

It's not that implausible. On the other hand, Five Rupees points out that intelligence organizations often have blind spots:

Look, if the mil-ISI knew everything there is to know about everything, there’d never be another terrorist attack in Pakistan (they’d just be restricted to Afghanistan and India). Clearly this is not the case. They are evidently caught off guard time and again. Just a couple months ago, there was a suicide bombing inside an army compound in Mardan. More relevantly, less than two years ago was the raid and hostage-taking attack at the army’s headquarters! The headquarters! And this is leaving aside all the terrorist attacks on civilians targets throughout the country that these brilliant and resourceful organizations should ostensibly have intimate knowledge of.

We Americans regard the CIA with the same dualism: All-Powerful Secret Masters of the Land one minute, and Bumbling Blinded Toadies Unable to Locate Their Posteriors with Both Mani and a Torch the next. They can't both be true.

So while I suspect the Pakis knew what was going on and looked the other way because they decided that Osama was worth sacrificing, I'm not going to rule out the possibility that they simply had no idea what was going on. I'm not a spy, so I don't know, and given the poor information control the White House displayed with regard to the raid, I'm not certain the spies know any better.

Corrections and Other Failures of Prophecy -- My Self-Criticism Session

Anyone who presumes to pontificate on the subject of politics runs the risk of sending the Rake of Truth right into their lying face. So, going over what's been going on of late, I'm noticing these things that I have been dead smacking wrong about:

1. I probably overreacted to the news of Obama's quiet burial at sea. We don't want to have a known  burial spot after all. And the Islamic world seems perfectly willing to believe that we did what we said we did. I still think giving him full Muslim burial is excessive, but I'm not going to jump up and down about it.
2. The Bloom has been dusted off and put right back on the Rose. Apparently the Media Industrial Complex has only been looking for a reason to rediscover their fond adoration of Fearless Leader. Wacking Bin Laden seems to have given all the major talking heads in the Democratic Party a raging assassination boner profound appreciation of Obama's Leadership.
3. Donald Trump is not going to go away anytime soon. Going all High Noon on Obama has put him right in the spotlight, which is right where Trumpy likes to be. I'm pretty sure its not going to matter, electorally speaking, but that's a subject for a different blog post, wherein I shall denounce not merely Trump but Trumpism. Just as soon as I define it.
4. P.J. O'Rourke is not only not decrepit, he's lost none of his old Parliament of Whores rage at our mountebank aristocracy. Behold the opening paragraph of his latest philippic:

Wipe that smirk off your face, Mister President. “We cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society.” Is there some Sidwell Friends night school class liberal politicians take to perfect an expression of smug disdain? When Teddy Roosevelt was demagogue-in-chief he at least had the nerve to come right out and call the successful people he despised “malefactors of great wealth.” He didn’t simper and moue at his audience. Go ahead and say it, President Obama: Let’s steal from the rich and give to the poor. Never mind that we’re doing a pretty good job of it already. The top 5 percent of the nation’s earners are being soaked for almost 60 percent of America’s tax revenue.

Read the whole thing.

When You Kill a King, You Do It in Front of Everybody.

Look, I was kidding about displaying Bin Laden's corpse to the four corners of the realm. We didn't need to mount his head on the Pentagon. But burial at sea without showing that we have the body? That's just dumb. That throws away all the propaganda value of killing him.

And handled with accordance to Islamic tradition and practice? WHY? Who that would be offended by our killing him could possibly be mollified by that? Again, not that we had to piss on it or bury it face down in a vat of pig's blood, but seriously? What do we gain by that?

Just when I was prepared to give Obama a thumb's up, too.

On the other hand, the claim that he was hiding behind women? Only to be expected. But now our enemies won't believe us.

Thoughts on Bin Laden

1. It's obviously true and totally irrelevant that Al Qaeda and the Taliban will continue just fine in his absence, just as Iraq continued bloodily after Saddam was caught and hung. It matters not. This man declared war on us, and now he is fodder for worms. The message is clear: you may run, and you may hide, and the long years may seem to stretch on, but one day you will turn around, and one of ours will be behind you, and he will put two in the back of your head, and we will take your gangly corpse and display it to the four corners of the realm. Sleep tight.
2. Teleprompter hiccups aside, Obama looked presidential last night. He's milking this win for his own political capital, and there's no reason he shouldn't. As he said, he gave the order, and it redounds to the Commander-in-Chief's credit. Democrats are going to use this as evidence that The Shadow Way, the Non-Invasion Way, is the better way to defeat terror. After all, Bush missed Bin Laden for eight years, and Obama got him in two. But there's no way we would have done so without the assets that Bush put in country. Obama relentlessly praised the men and women, military and intelligence, who made this happen. We should not pretend that they started in January 2009, whatever Double Secret Probation that the President ordered then.
3. On a religious note, I don't really care all that much about Bin Laden's Final Judgment. If he should be barking in Hell, so be it. If I should run into him in Purgatory, and we stare dumb-foundedly at one another as the last of our wickedness is scorched away from us, so be it. Bin Laden's death means that he is no longer a problem for me and my countrymen. That is enough. The Almighty has His own purposes.