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Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Obama was tortured by the British!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, so it was Hussein Onyanga Obama, the president-elect’s grandfather. But it was a little more extensive than forcing him to watch endless reruns of the Benny Hill Show.
“Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.
Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.
“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said.
The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly anti-British. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”
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Did the Chambliss victory send a message?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Fox News they’re asking whether voters were trying to send a message by re-electing Saxby Chambliss and denying Democrats a 60-vote margin in the Senate.
The answer is yes.
And no.
Georgia voters were sending the message that they like Republicans more than Democrats. But it’s the same message they sent two years ago and four years ago and six years ago.
This is Georgia, the very red state that George Bush carried by more than 16 percentage points in 2004.
When people do the same thing over and over again, and then do it one more time, there’s no message being sent. The fact that Jim Martin was able to push this to a runoff in the first place was the surprise.
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Plaxico Burress, NRA poster star?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Plaxico Burress, for you non-sports-fans out there, is a star wide receiver for the New York Giants who caught the game-winning pass in last year’s Super Bowl. But his season and perhaps his career have been cut short after a handgun in his possession discharged accidentally in a New York nightclub early Saturday, wounding him in the thigh.
Burress has since been arrested and charged with illegal possession of a handgun, a charge that under New York’s strict law carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three-and-a-half years in prison.
To Cajun Boy in the City, that raises an interesting question: “What would Charlton Heston do?”
As Cajun Boy puts it (H/T to Andrew Sullivan):
“Where is the statement expressing outrage from the NRA that a humble American gun owner like Plaxico, who was just trying to protect himself and his family by carrying a hand gun, is being mercilessly persecuted by The Man and his Draconian gun control laws?”
That’s a darn good point: How come Wayne LaPierre isn’t rushing to defend Plaxico? The man was just exercising his Second Amendment rights, after all!
It’s also interesting to point out that a lot of state legislators in Georgia want to allow concealed-weapon permit holders to legally take loaded handguns into bars and nightclubs. They think that’s a good idea, that it’ll make people safer somehow.
Personally, I think that’s nuts.
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Change that even Bush’s top people can believe in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the Bush administration in its waning days, its own top national security people are publicly embracing positions much closer to those of Barack Obama than to George W. Bush.
For example, Obama and his nominees have stressed the importance of “soft power” — diplomacy, outreach, and other ways of winning hearts and minds — rather than relying so heavily on hard military power.
Michael Chertoff, Bush’s hard-nosed secretary of Homeland Security, now embraces that position as well, says the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s point man in protecting America against terrorism says U.S. investments in safety should not be restricted to airport screening machines or border fences. Michael Chertoff says the U.S. also should spend more on foreign-aid programs, scholarships for foreign students and other tools of so-called soft power….
Mr. Chertoff said he came to his views over the past six months or so, when he finally had time to think about big-picture challenges. Now, he said, “a lasting victory in the safeguarding of the country” can be achieved only by marrying traditional security with winning “a contest of ideas, and a battle for the allegiance of men and women around the world.”
“I don’t believe you can placate your way out of threat by terrorism,” Mr. Chertoff said. But at the same time, “if you can affect the recruiting and the sympathy and the pool of people in which terrorists recruit, from a long-term standpoint, that’s the effective strategy.”
And Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Department and injected some much-needed sanity into our military policy, has made it clear he will feel right at home staying on in an Obama administration:
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said closing the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is a “high priority,” and he called on Congress to work with the new administration on legislation to make it happen.
Mr. Gates also said he is now comfortable with President-elect Barack Obama’s call for U.S. combat forces to leave Iraq by the middle of 2010, after earlier questioning Mr. Obama’s withdrawal timeline during the presidential campaign.
Mr. Gates, who will remain in his post in the Obama administration, was one of the first senior members of the Bush cabinet to push publicly for the Guantanamo prison’s closure, but his calls largely fell on deaf ears.
Some people, particularly on the right, claim to wonder where Obama’s much-promised change might be found. I think it’s pretty damn obvious myself.
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