ACORN Resurrection: Bertha Lewis Sends Out ACORN Fundraising Letter

ACORN has risen from the dead to “empower working families”, fight for justice, and help Democrats get elected. The Dems are going to need all the help they can get this Fall.

Matthew Vadum at Big Government reports:

The organized crime syndicate known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been making much ado about its feigned withdrawal from the national political stage, continues doing business as usual.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

You can see a PDF of the fundraising letter at Big Government.

ACORN chief organizer,  Bertha Lewis writes:

ACORN is not dead!

ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.

It’s weird that she felt the need to separate working families from families of color. Colander approves! <<(link fixed).

The worst part:

…the Obama administration has already restored full funding to ACORN, which used to employ President Obama.

The fiscal floodgates are opening for ACORN, the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

Looks like they’re back in business  – and Republicans in Congress are powerless to do anything about it. Why they didn’t cut off federal funding of ACORN years ago, when they held majorities, I’ll never understand.

UPDATE:

Pajamas Media and The Washington Times have picked up the story.

Hat tip: Mark Hemingway, Washington Examiner

Video: Dick Morris Drops a Bomb On Hannity – Janet Reno Blackmailed Clinton Over Waco

I watched this astounding interview live, and now the video is up.

Dick Morris, in discussing Bill Clinton’s attempt to smear the tea party movement on the 15th  anniversary of Waco, claimed that on the eve of Inauguration Day, 1996, Janet Reno told Bill Clinton that either she stayed on as Attorney General or “she’d drop the bomb on Waco”:

Video via Gateway Pundit.

My reaction was the same as Sean’s; “Whoa whoa whoa…back up! What did you just say, there?”

Clinton may have been concerned about this:

The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it “is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours”. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.

The effect of CS gas on an unprotected infant exposed for only two to three hours is discussed in the report; in that case report, dating from the early 1970s, the child’s symptoms during the first twenty-four hours were upper respiratory; but, within forty-eight hours his face showed evidence of first degree burns, and he was in severe respiratory distress typical of chemical pneumonia. The infant had cyanosis, required urgent positive pressure pulmonary care, and was hospitalized for twenty– eight days. Other signs of toxicity appeared, including an enlarged liver.

Professor Stone’s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann’s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.

I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

Perhaps Reno  advised against this, but Clinton authorized it, anyway.

It should be noted that before Dick Morris’s conversion to the conservative side, he was a real dirtbag.

Yesterday, Byron York reported on his role in the demonization of rightwing talk radio, after OK City,  in his piece at The WA Examiner: How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain.

What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton’s presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.)  In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress.

Clinton was in deep political trouble in April 1995.  Six months earlier, voters had resoundingly rejected Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, giving the GOP control of both House and Senate.  Polls showed the public viewed Clinton as weak, incompetent and ineffective.  House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his GOP forces seized the initiative on virtually every significant issue, while Clinton appeared to be politically dead.  The worst moment may have come on April 18, the day before the bombing, when Clinton plaintively told reporters, “The president is still relevant here.”

And then came the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building.  In addition to seeing a criminal act and human loss, Clinton and Morris saw opportunity.  If the White House could tie Gingrich, congressional Republicans and conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh to the attack, then Clinton might gain the edge in the fight against the GOP.

Morris began polling about Oklahoma City almost immediately after the bombing.  On April 23, four days after the attack, Clinton appeared to point the finger straight at his political opponents during a speech in Minneapolis.  “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” he said.  “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

At a White House meeting four days later, on April 27, Morris presented Clinton with a comeback strategy based on his polling.  Morris prepared an extensive agenda for the session, a copy of which he would include in the paperback version of his 1999 memoir, Behind the Oval Office.

I was an avid listener of talk radio at the time, and I still remember the shock and outrage I felt watching an American President target a private citizen (Rush) by name, when he had nothing whatsoever to do with fomenting the sort of murderous rage that possessed Timothy McVeigh

We can thank Dick Morris for encouraging this abominable ploy back in the nineties, as we watch the Obama administration continue the trend by taking every opportunity to demonize talk radio, and Fox News.

UPDATE:

Morris comments on Clinton’s smear of the tea parties on his latest post at DickMorris.com:

It was not anti-government rhetoric that inspired McVeigh to do his dastardly deed. According to the killer himself, it was the action of the federal government during the Waco raid that incited him to violence. That the attack on the Federal Office Building took place on the anniversary of the Waco raid underscores the connection.

Bill Clinton was far from blameless in the Waco attack. While he sought to shift the responsibility to Attorney General Janet Reno, acting as if he were merely a by-stander, subsequent histories make it clear that he was smarting from criticism that the failure of the feds to act and their continued toleration of the siege showed him to be too weak to be a good president. He would often complain about the unfairness of this coverage to me as he recounted the events leading up to the Waco raid.

The Obama strategy of vilifying the tea party protesters and trying to link them to the violence of Oklahoma City is cynical and ridiculous. The tea party protesters are, in many cases, decorated war veterans and can, in the main, only be described as patriots. That Obama needs to paint them as violence prone extremists who are fanning flames that could lead to Oklahoma City-style bombings is offensive and vile in the extreme.

It is as vile now, as it was when he was doing it to smear talk radio.

Dick Morris had nothing to say in his piece about the allegation he made on Hannity’s show, last night.

More On The Political Beating In New Orleans

Governor Jindal campaign official, Allie Bautsch

The Hayride continues to be on the leading edge of this story, and if you’re interested in it at all, you’ve already been checking their blog for updates. If not, do so now, because there is no longer any question that this was a politically motivated attack.

I’ve been keenly interested in this story, myself, for a number of reasons…

#1 -because I was there for the SRLC while this happened, although I didn’t hear about it until the Monday after I got home. I walked the same streets that the young couple who were so savagely beaten, walked. I passed by the anarchists who were protesting the SRLC in front of the Hilton, and later the Republican fundraiser with Bobby Jindal, down the street at the restaurant, Brennan’s. I even took several pictures of them.

#2 – This took place at a time when liberals and the media (but I repeat myself) were building on their narrative of  dangerous, racist, psycho, protesting “tea-baggers” threatening the tranquility of the land. The narrative, took a hit when polls showed that 40% of tea partiers were actually not even Republicans, just disenchanted Independents and Democrats…and that more people identify with the tea partiers than with Obama. But it spiked back up this week, just in time for the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Never-mind that most, if not all examples of actual political violence since the tea party movement began, (or ever) has been perpetrated by leftists, and this episode looks like the latest example.

#3 – It’s fascinating to watch the MSM slowly catch up to the blogs in reporting the key elements of the incident, and it’s a bit disheartening to see the cowardice on so many blogs on the right;  blogs that were too timid to put 2 + 2 together. What were the chances that this was going to be anything but a political attack with the heaps of circumstantial evidence that was so apparent from the very beginning? There is nothing wrong with a blog pointing out the obvious – “Hey, this thing looks like it may have been a political- even partisan attack”.  This is an important story, and one that runs very counter to the narrative that the MSM is pushing, right now. But when big conservative blogs fail to give it the exposure it deserves,  (out of some misguided notion that we have to have the sort of evidence required in a court of law before we can proceed), we lose. This is why the libs have gotten away with spreading their false narratives for so long, because so often, conservatives don’t show up to  fight.

Okay, I feel like it’s safe to post this picture, now:

I refrained from posting it, last week, choosing to link to Free Republic, instead, because it was just a photo, (found by internet sleuths) of a guy from the protest who fit the description of one of the perps to a tee.

Since then, the photo has been shown to Allie Bautsch:

- The picture at left, (above) of which we now have several shots, is of an individual who, if he isn’t the prime suspect in the beating of Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown, sure ought to be. Bautsch told me via e-mail this morning that the suspect she and Joe Brown described to the police “looked exactly like that, and so did the rest of them (with different color hair).” She took pains to say that she can’t make a positive identification of this man as one of her attackers, but he fits the description they gave to the New Orleans police. This is someone who needs to be questioned about the attack; there are two YouTube videos still available on which he appears.

The first one is of the protest as it marched from Lafayette Park to the Hilton.

And the second one is of the protestors as they marched to Brennan’s.

He was on the scene, he was part of the protest and the victims say he looks “exactly” like one of the assailants, right down to what he was wearing.

Apparently no one from the New Orleans Police Department talked to Allee Bautsch at any length until Thursday of last week, six days after the attack.

Linked by Weasel Zippers, thanks!

UPDATE:

Pajamas Media and The Washington Times are now running this story.

UPDATE II:

The latest from The Hayride:

UPDATE, 7:35 p.m.: Not a lot of developments today, but we are reliably informed by very well-placed sources that the official investigation does, in fact, have as part of its focus the angle of the protest and its organizers. Furthermore, the YouTube videos that Daniel Mauch made private (isn’t it just a little ironic that an anarcho-communist who wants to destroy the concept of private property is engaged in attempting to deny the public the use of his intellectual property?) have been captured and downloaded and are in the possession of the authorities.

This is not to say that an arrest is imminent. But while the political angle to the attack is being downplayed by official channels, it is without question a major part of the investigation, which is heating up.

PREVIOUSLY:

Young Republican Couple Savagely Beaten In New Orleans, Friday Night After Protest (UPDATED)

SRLC Brennan’s Beatdown Looking Politically Motivated

You Would Think They’d Be Thanking Him: Obama Heckled At Boxer Fundraiser

Here he is, in liberal nirvana, Los Angeles, just giving your basic, garden variety stump speech for fellow traveler, Babs (don’t call me ma’am) Boxer – she cares about the environment, she cares about clean energy and she’s fighting for you,  she’s passionate about…..what the heck?

Teh gays are heckling the Messiah?

Related:

The definition of pathetic

Rush Stands Athwart The Narrative And Yells Stop

As the nation remembers the Oklahoma City bombing on its 15th anniversary, the left seizes the opportunity to link  Timothy McVeigh to conservative protesters, today. This is a tactic, Bill Clinton had some success with.

John from Powerline reports:

Bill Clinton appeared at a symposium on the bombing sponsored by a left-wing think tank and linked the mad bomber to today’s opponents of the Democrats’ radical agenda.

Just before the symposium, in an interview with the New York Times, Clinton elaborated on the theme:

“There can be real consequences when what you say animates people who do things you would never do,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview, saying that Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, and those who assisted him, “were profoundly alienated, disconnected people who bought into this militant antigovernment line.” …

Rush Limbaugh is having none of it, and reminds listeners what it was that inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit his terrorist act…hint: it wasn’t talk radio:

Via Weasel Zippers:

Limbaugh Blasts Clinton: What Was The Cause Of The Oklahoma City Bombing? Talk Radio Or The Waco Invasion?…

Obama Sets The Tone

When the President isn’t lecturing his opponents on civility, he’s out on the stump (yes, stump – still!), ridiculing, mocking and disparaging them. All American blogger, Duane Lester thinks Obama, well schooled in Alinsky’s tactics, is simply applying rule #5:

I think Obama’s habit of  pitting Americans against each other has created an environment where some of his more violent supporters feel encouraged to act against the enemy – (us). We’ve never heard rhetoric like this coming out of the White House, before, and I think it has contributed to some of the political violence we’ve seen:

RELATED:

Carol at No Sheeples Here, explains why, under no uncertain terms, We will Never Thank Him.

MORE:

I’m “a little amused” that Obama can dismiss dissenting opinions so easily…this report comes via Dave in Texas at AoSHQ:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they do not trust the U.S. government to do what is right, expressing the highest level of distrust in Washington in half a century, according to a public opinion survey.

Only 22 percent of Americans say they trust the government “just about always” or “most of the time,” according to the Pew Research Center survey released on Sunday.

See also:

Bill Clinton Returns To The Scene Of The Crime.

“Clinton knows how false and dishonorable his charges are. But they worked for him, and he is helping Barack Obama set the stage for a similar political comeback in the event that some violent event might occur; or, perhaps, in the absence of any such event. So far, all of the violence associated with Tea Party or townhall events has been perpetrated by union thugs employed by the Democratic Party, but that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from claiming that it is the Republicans who are somehow violence-prone.” Actually, I think there have been some non-union thugs, too.

Lies and smears aimed at their fellow Americans, for short-term political gain. This is who they are, and this is what they do. It worked better, however, when there were fewer alternative channels of communication, and when their character was less well-known.

Via Instapundit

Video: Shocking Potty Language From MSNBC Host Prone To Making Awkward Metaphors

Or….Tingles Decries Tinkles….

Or….Chrissy Gets All Wee Wee’d Up!

Okay, I’m done.

Check it out, Chris Matthews says Republicans are peeing all over Obama…

Found at YouTube while looking for something else.

Now I don’t even remember what I was looking for.

UPDATE:

The segment is from April, 2, which Newsbusters covered, here.

No Thank-You

It’s hard not to be offended by Obama’s stunning hubris the other day:

Did you feel any relief in your day to day lives due to Obama’s purported tax breaks?

I didn’t either. What I did feel was horror as I watched an already bloated big government expand even more. I felt helpless as the private sector continued to bleed jobs, and I felt  angst as I watched what should have been a recovery turn into long term stagnation.

Obama didn’t “save the economy”.  He’s forced his ruinous policies on an unwilling nation, and then told us we should thank him for it.

Darlene Click illustrates our feelings beautifully:

See the Frugal Cafe for a great round up of conservative responses to this latest example of Obama’s famed humility. Do not miss Patterico’s special thank-you to the President.

Video: Rush Thanks The President

Rush reacts to Obama’s taunt: “You would think they would be saying, “thank you”…that’s what you’d think!”

As you can imagine, he’s not amused:

Authoritarian, mocking control.

I love that he threw the perverted “safe school czar” in there. (He hasn’t been fired yet?)

Video via The Right Scoop.

SRLC Brennan’s Beatdown Looking Politically Motivated

(Photo from Jindal’s Facebook Page via The Hayride)

The Hayride has been covering this story since it broke:  a young  Jindal staffer and her boyfriend were savagely beaten after leaving Brennan’s restaurant in the French Quarter, where a Republican fund-raiser was being held. A group of anarchists had been protesting the SRLC  in front of the Hilton, and had later marched down to Brennan’s to protest the “rich Republican plutocrats”.

Allee Bautsch suffered a broken leg, and her  boyfriend Joe Brown suffered a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a concussion.

Here’s latest from The Hayride on the seriousness of Allee’s condition:

Allee Bautsch has seven screws in her leg and five surgical scars. She didn’t just fall down, she was stomped on.

Allee is a tiny woman. There are 3-5 men  being sought in connection to the beatings, one of them was described as a Caucasian male who appeared to be dirty, in his 20’s, 6′1″ tall, thin build with a thin face. He had a beard and auburn color hair in a pony tail. He was wearing a light color T shirt and dark color pants.

2:08 p.m. We’re linked from Yahoo News, whose report contains an account from a friend of Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown which might be of interest:

The friend, who declined to be named because the attackers are still at large, described the group who descended on Bautsch and Brown as “some weird Bobby Jindal protesters” there in opposition to the state’s governor. The friend confirmed the earlier reports that Bautsch “got caught in the middle” of the altercation as she tried to break it up. Bautsch’s friend also reported that she’s in “loads of pain” with “rods in her leg and ankle,” but that she was also “released yesterday from the hospital and is resting at her home in Baton Rouge.”

Keep checking The Hayride for updates.

UPDATE:

A Police report has been released, which Michelle Malkin has transcibed:

“Shortly before 10:30pm, Mr. Brown and Ms. Bautsch left the restaurant and began walking towards St. Louis. Street. Mr. Brown noted there were still several protestors loitering in the area, but not nearly the number which had been present earlier. Soon after leaving the restaurant, he heard what he described as ‘cat calls.’ At an unknown point within the 400 block of Royal Street, both Mr. Brown and Ms. Bautsch then crossed from the Brennan’s side of the street to the Supreme Court side of the street.

They continued to walk towards St. Louis when Mr. Brown began to hear people behind him scream obscenities. Initially he was not sure if thoese were being directed at him and his girlfriend, or if they were simply the outbursts of drunken revelers. As they neared the intersection, Mr. Brown stated he heard subjects state thing such as, ‘Little blonde bitch,’ ‘You’re a fu**king faggot,’ and ‘You think you’re fu**king special.’ At this point Mr. Brown realized these derogatory terms were being directed at Ms. Bautsch and him. He then requested she begin to walk faster toward the Omni-Royal hotel located at the intersection of St. Louis and Royal. Mr. Brown also recalled the farther they got from the restaurant, the closer these subjects got to them. When they reached the corner of St. Louis and Royal, Mr. Brown and his date turned south on St. Louis. It was at this time that one of the subjects pushed him into the iron gate which surrounds the State Supreme Court. He then fell to the ground, and one of the attackers got on top of him and began to attack him. Mr. Brown stated as he was being pushed to the ground, Ms. Bautsch was also either pushed down or fell down near where he was. As he fought to get his attacker off of him, he heard his girlfriend cry out in pain. She then repeatedly stated,”Oh my god, my leg is broken.”

Michelle notes that no overtly political comments were made towards the couple, suggesting a random crime, as opposed to a political hate crime. I think the fact that they said, ‘You think you’re fu**king special,’ and made reference to the victims being “nicely dressed“, suggests the type of class hatred you might expect from  Communist/anarchists  out to punish  “rich plutocrats”.

I continue to believe that there is a connection between the protesters and the assault, especially in light of this latest update via The Hayride:

Lincoln Parish News Online:

In an interview this afternoon, Louisiana GOP Chair Roger Villere, Jr. told Lincoln Parish News Online he and several others were pursued by protesters last Friday night after a political fundraiser, but managed to get into a cab and avoid the mob. “We started to leave out the front door after the event, but the protesters had us blocked – there were six of us in our group – so we went out through the kitchen,” Villere said. Once they got outside, the protesters spotted them and began to pursue them, but they managed to get into a cab and avoid confrontation.

Later in the evening Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown were brutally beaten on the sidewalk outside the Louisiana State Supreme Court building, mere steps away from where protests had taken place.

Obviously,whether the beating was politically motivated or not, it was a heinous crime and the miscreants need to be punished to the full letter of the law.

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

PREVIOUSLY:

Young Republican Couple Savagely Beaten In New Orleans, Friday Night After Protest (UPDATED)

Video: Andrew Breitbart Rocks The Washington DC Tea Party

As Breitbart rolled off noted examples of left-wing violence against conservatives, he neglected to mention the most recent example -  the brutal beating of a Governor Jindal staffer and her boyfriend in New Orleans, this past weekend, which is increasingly looking like it was politically motivated.

You know what had particular resonance with me? Breitbart’s story of his conversion to conservatism, which happened after watching the Dems and the media (but I repeat myself) smear the reputation of  Justice Clarence Thomas’ during his confirmation hearings in 1991.

I was never a lib. I was a young, fairly apolitical  mother of a newborn at the time, and I remember being outraged and appalled by the nasty tactics the left was employing to destroy the character of a good and decent man. What they were doing was so transparent, and so vile, this “high tech lynching” that was taking place. That’s when I discovered the Rush Limbaugh Show, and took delight in hearing my inherent conservative views espoused and defended day in and day out. That’s when I realized that there were millions more like me all across America.  I’ve been hooked ever since.

Crash The Tea Party Efforts Flop

Picture via Weasel Zippers

We did have one obvious infiltrator at the Kansas City Tea Party, a guy perched right in front of the KMBZ radio booth, was holding up an ignorant sign, and really, really wanted his picture taken, which is why I didn’t take it. I do have a photo of him horning in on another pic I was taking, but you can’t read his sign, so it’s not worth posting.

In retrospect, I should have taken his picture, and told him I’d do an extra special write-up about it. But dang, he wanted it so much, I just couldn’t do it.

Moonbattery has some Crash the Tea Party Fail, and plays Spot The Infiltrator.

This tea party crasher epically failed and got himself arrested:

A man dressed in all black and a hood or mask came to the side of the stage by the old county courthouse while a person spoke and held up a sign reading, “Prosperity = White Supremacy.”

The crowd didn’t fancy the man’s sign and cast a round of boos in his direction. Pretty soon, three Greensboro police officers escorted the man away from the protest.

According to arrest reports, Daniel Emerson Stainkemp, 22, of 1602 West End Place in Greensboro was charged with wearing a mask or hood on public property, resisting a public officer, carrying a sign larger than allowed by a local ordinance, and interfering with the protest.

Hope it was worth it.

Michelle Malkin triumphantly announces: The Crashers: They came, they saw, they failed

Of course they did.

UPDATE:

Republican Heretic was at the KC tea party, too, and he got some photos of our infiltrator.

He fooled no one, but it was a valiant effort.

UPDATE II:

See Zombie for a great photo essay:  Crashing the Crashers: Tea Party Infiltrators Outmaneuvered in S.F.

Thousands Gather For Kansas City Tax Day Tea Party At Community America Ballpark

The main tea party event for the Kansas City area,  Tax Day, 2010, was  the Community America Ballpark in KCK,  from 3:00-9:00pm. It was sponsored by KC Political Chips, and MC’ed by KMBZ’s Darla Jaye. KCTV reported “thousands” of tea partiers, so I’m going with that until I hear a more specific number.

The place was teeming with tea partiers, who were treated to a well organized, and very enjoyable event. Speakers included, Kris Kobach, who’s running for KS Sec. of State,  710 conservative DJ, Chris Stigall, and Obama’s dear, second cousin once removed, Dr. Milton Wolf, who really, really doesn’t like Obamacare.

Here are some pix of the crowd, and some of my favorite signs:

Report & Pix: Kansas City Plaza Tea Party (Updated w/video)

A small but lively crowd gathered at noon, today on the Plaza. This one wasn’t heavily promoted, so attendance wasn’t expected to be big, like the one later today at Community Ballpark is expected to be. But I went, took some pictures, and talked to some people. Earl from Kansas Watchdog, and Kansas Meadowlark was there. So was Duane Lester, All American Blogger. Both will be covering the big tea party at Community Ballpark, too.

Here are some pix from the noon tea party:

Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst #69: Nuclear Summit logo is an Islamic-shaped crescent

World leader, known for reminding the Islamic world that his middle name is Hussein, hosts nuclear summit, presided over by large Islamic-shaped crescent:

Photo by Ron Sachs. Post via Error Theory.

It is hard to believe that the State Department could do this by accident:

An Islamic crescent is a very distinct and completely unnatural geometric shape, combining a circular outer arc with a non-concentric circular inner arc. The unnaturalness is an Islamic religious requirement. A lunar crescent has an elliptical inner arc. Using such a natural shape as a religious symbol would risk idolatry (the worship of any actual thing besides God). Thus Muslims use as their symbol the explicitly unnatural circle-in-circle crescent shape.

Sometimes the inner circle sits entirely inside the outer circle. This arrangement is typically used to symbolize Islamic world domination, as seen in the MAS logo. More often the inner circle extends beyond the outer circle, as seen on the last last Ottoman flags:

Turkish flag. Crescent covers an unnatural 2/3rds of a circle of arc, give or take (in contrast to a lunar crescent, which always covers a half a circle of arc).

Obama’s circle-in-circle NSS logo uses a thin crescent to combine the world encompassing aspect of the MAS logo with the more familiar Ottoman crescent, covering less than a full circle of arc.

Obama has ordered his underlings not to notice Islamic connections

Given that the unnatural circle-in-circle crescent is the only widely recognized graphic symbol of Islam, it must have been recognized as such by at least a significant percentage of the State Department personnel who saw it prior to the summit. Why didn’t anyone object, forcefully and publicly if necessary?

It would seem to be the Fort Hood phenomenon, where witnesses to Nidal Hasan’s murderous ideology were afraid that making an issue of it would be career suicide, thereby enabling Hasan’s mass murder of American soldiers. Obama has now made the career suicide threat official, ordering all members of the executive branch to be as oblivious to Islam as possible. The more disturbing the Islamic connection, the more it is to be avoided, to the point where Muslim terrorists, whose reading of orthodox Islamic interpretation compels them to slaughter infidels, are no longer to be called “Muslim terrorists” or “Islamic extremists.” Everyone is just supposed to ignore their Islamic motivation.

Hydrogen atoms and Swastikas

Defenders of Obama’s nuclear crescent (trolls in the comments at Gateway) think that so long as the Islamic-shaped crescent can be interpreted in some non-Islamic way, there is nothing wrong with using an Islamic shaped crescent to represent American hospitality:

Oh please, folks, get a grip. It’s modeled after a hydrogen atom, you know, as in hydrogen bombs?

This issue came up when the Missile Defense Agency’s crescent shaped website logo became a news story in February.

MDA website logo, uses the world-encompassing symbolism of a full circle-in-circle crescent favored by several Islamic terror groups:

Left: Islamic Palestine Block insignia. Center: Hamas insignia. Right: PLFP insignia (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).

MDA spokesman Rich Lehner insists that the world-encompassing circle-in-circle crescent “symbolizes the worldwide protection of our homeland and deployed forces.” But do we get to redefine in this way the only symbol shape that our terror war enemies claim as their own?

By that logic, one could say that the swastika represents a helicopter rotor in motion, making a great logo for our Apache squadrons, but no such interpretation can obviate the established meaning of the symbol shape, and like the swastika, the full circle-in-circle crescent has its own established meaning (a meaning not so different from the swastika). It represents Islamic domination of the planet. For Lehner to protest that this isn’t what the full circle-in-circle crescent means to him is as ludicrous and irrelevant as saying that he sees the swastika as a spinning propeller.

Not that it matters, but the NSS logo fails as hydrogen atom

Most obviously, why the gap in the electron’s orbit? The only purpose of this gap would seem to be to turn the crescent into the familiar Islamic-shaped crescent.

Less obviously, notice that the fattening of the crescent at the lower left indicates visually that the electron is coming closer at that point. That would only be the case if the orbit were being observed somewhat edge-on, but that would make the orbit appear to the observer as an ellipse, not the circle seen in the NSS logo.

By the same token, since the orbit is seen as circular rather than elliptical, that means it is being observed from above (from one of the poles of the axis of rotation), which means the electron is not moving closer to and further from the observer, hence no crescent-like fattening of the arc would be observed.

The only purpose for the unnatural fattening of the circle on one side representation would again seem to be to create the familiar Islamic shaped crescent.

Frank Gaffney was pre-mature in walking back his concerns about the MDA crescent

Kudo’s to Frank Gaffney for forcing our Democrat dominated media to address the crescent shaped MDA logo two months ago. In addition to noting the Islamic shape, Gaffney also noted the likeness to Obama’s permanent campaign logo:

When he discovered that the MDA logo predated the Obama administration, Frank began a walk-back, which he extended to the crescent shape:

It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

No, the crescent cannot be interpreted as the target of the intercepting missile, because the target of the intercepting missile is explicit. It is shooting down another missile. The missile shot in the logo can be interpreted as defending the crescent, but it cannot be interpreted as attacking the crescent because the crescent is not a missile.

Ignorant coincidence, or stealth jihad?

The unanswered question is whether the Islamic-looking logos are the product of ignorant coincidence or Islamic supremacism. There are stealth jihadists who work in the field of Islamic symbolism, like the Los Angeles architect who designed the giant Mecca-oriented crescent that is now being built atop the Flight 93 crash site. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) The planned memorial will be the world’s largest mosque.

Like Gaffney (sorry Frank, but you really wimped out on this one), the defenders of the crescent mosque are willing to embrace untenable excuses for their Islamic symbol shape. Asked how he could abide the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, argued that the almost-exact Mecca-orientation cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it (within 2° of Mecca) would be “disrespectful” to Islam.

After the cartoon jihad, Gaffney and White might be excused for thinking that Muslims will take offense at just about anything, but the fact is, orthodox Islam cares very little about how exactly anyone faces Mecca for prayer. For most of Islam’s 1400 year history, far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca (and God).

So where did Patrick White get the idea that orientation on Mecca must be exact? From a Muslim scholar commissioned by the Park Service to answer just this question. His name is Nasser Rabbat, and he told the Park Service a flat out lie. Why? Rabbat is presumably a stealth jihadist, though he could have also been doing a personal favor for ex-classmate Paul Murdoch, the Los Angeles architect who designed the Crescent of Embrace.

This is why these possibly coincidental Islamic symbol shapes need to be properly investigated: because where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire.

Gaffney was also premature in dismissing the Obama-like character of the MDA logo

Just because the Obama-like logo was not a product of the Obama administration does not mean it was not the work of a freelance Obamaton, or even an Obama-connected logo designer.

Obama started using his logo in early 2007, when it made a huge splash in the logo-design community. The contract for the MDA logo was not let until September 2007 and the logo itself did not appear until October 2008. Thus the MDA logo was designed while Obama’s logo was all the rage, and given Obama’s connections in the advertising industry, his people could even have exercised some direct influence over the MDA logo.

The strong Obama likeness makes it almost certain that the MDA logo was created by an Obama partisan as a tribute to Obama. From that strong prior, the likelihood that the Islamic-shaped crescent was also intentional goes up dramatically. Our president does not emphasize the “Hussein” in “Barack Hussein Obama” for nothing.