Well, I'll Cry Tomorrow: Medea, Debo Get No R-S-P-E-C-T
This week President Obama, following a long string of bloopers that the media underplays or ignores, spelled respect "R-S-P-E-C-T'".
It was a fitting blunder in a week in which he and America's left wing took a series of pratfalls.
To start off, Medea Benjamin, master media manipulator and water carrier for countless leftist tyrants, winged into Cairo apparently to lend her inestimable support to the Moslem Brotherhood.
The Egyptian government treated her less courteously than did the Democrat legislators who regularly let her and her pinko buddies disrupt Congressional hearings. In one instance her team, which had certainly been invited in by Democrats on the Committee, even physically menaced Condolezza Rice, screaming “war criminal” and moving right up into her space with fake blooded hands.
The Egyptian police incarcerated Benjamin at the Cairo airport and perp-walked her to a plane destined for Turkey. She seethed at the outrage to her person, tweeted about her predicament, claiming her shoulder had been dislocated by the harsh treatment. She showed far less sympathy or concern for the women of Iran who were executed by being hung in public squares from cranes when she had earlier dropped in there to support the Mullahs. As to the rough treatment she received, I’ll cry tomorrow.
At the same time Medea was wailing, the IDF intercepted a shipload of missiles from Iran headed to Gaza and perhaps the Sinai as well. This might also explain why the Egyptians were particularly unimpressed with and intolerant about her stunt,
The incident -- which is not the first time that a Hamas-bound Iranian arms shipment has been intercepted by Israel -- has the potential to reverberate regionally. Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), quickly called attention to a potential Egyptian role in the operation. Iranian-born analyst Amir Taheri cited sources in Tehran suggesting that some of the missiles may have been bound for the Egyptian-controlled Sinai Peninsula. Cairo’s army-backed government recently escalated economic and political moves designed to limit Hamas’s capabilities. The Egyptians accuse the group of facilitating the transfer of jihadist personnel and materials into the Sinai.
I’ll cry tomorrow, too, for Debo Adegbile and Harry Reid. This week Harry Reid got a long overdue taste of his own nuclear medicine. If you recall, he pushed through a Senate rules change respecting the number of votes needed to confirm Presidential nominees for office, thinking it would block the Republicans from stopping Obama's nominees .
It was in November that Reid and the Democrats invoked the so-called nuclear option, depriving the Republicans of their ability to block nominations on what is called a cloture vote -- a vote to end debate and bring the nomination to the floor. Before the change, it took 60 "yes" votes to invoke cloture, so that a unified minority party with at least 41 seats could prevent nominations from coming to the floor. Democrats have held the majority throughout Obama's presidency, but they've been below the 60-vote threshold for most of that time. Under the new practice, a simple majority is enough to break a filibuster, so that cloture is tantamount to confirmation.
That means that if the Democratic majority stays unified (or has few enough defections -- currently five -- to leave a majority in support), it can confirm any Obama nominee.
This week Reid assumed that Democrats in the Senate would continue to vote as a unified bloc and ram through a continuing series of highly partisan leftist hacks. Only Obama went a hack too far -- nominating Debo Adegbbile to be Assistant Attorney General for the already too partisan and crazy Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Vulnerable Democrats panicked. It is not -- as Obama fans might have suggested -- that Debo represented an unpopular defendant, and Debo’s rejection represented a sign that counsel for unpopular clients risk career advancement. Mumia Abu-Jamal, the proven cop killer who was Debo’s client became the lead arsonist of a misguided "racial firestorm" that Debo tirelessly fanned for the same reason Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton fanned similar factually baseless racialist antagonisms. It’s time such hate-inspiring propaganda ceased to be a career boost, and that was the Senate’s message, at least for the moment, when seven Democrat Senators think it’s not in their own career interest to keep promoting race haters.
There were warnings by people smarter than Reid that the nuclear option he created would only expose the most vulnerable of the Democrat senators (and would set an unwelcome precedent for the Democrats should they lose a majority in the Senate). But Reid ignored those.
In other respects, he has tacitly acknowledged the vulnerability of many Senate Democrats and blocked from vote taking on the Senate floor numerous bills passed by the House which would expose those senators and lead to a shift in the Senate's majority party. On the occasion of nominations, though, he was cocky and pushed ahead. This time seven Democrats (undoubtedly with rational nightmares of moving vans at the door taking them home) jumped ship and voted against the nominee. The defeat of Debo’s nomination was a major embarrassment for the White House and Majority Leader Reid. It is to be wished it’s a harbinger of things to come as the fallout from Obama’s truculence and incompetence continue to inspire widespread disaffection for him and his party.