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Look at what the President’s Russian friends are suggesting:
The UK Telegraph: Julian Assange should be awarded Nobel peace prize, suggests Russia:
Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.
In what appears to be a calculated dig at the US, the Kremlin urged non-governmental organisations to think seriously about “nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate”.
“Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him,” the source from inside president Dmitry Medvedev’s office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-EU summit yesterday , the source went on: “Maybe, nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate.”
Because Obama makes a habit of wrongly apologizing for America’s past on the world stage, (often to anti-American audiences), Nile Gardiner at The Telegraph thinks it would be appropriate for the Obama Administration to apologize to Britain an over the WikiLeaks débacle:
In the case of Britain, whose partnership with the United States is vital to the defence of the free world, the WikiLeaks disclosures are particularly sensitive. As The Guardian has extensively reported, WikiLeaks has made public a number of diplomatic cables between the US Embassy in London and the State Department, which report private discussions between US officials and senior Conservative Party shadow ministers in advance of the 2010 general election. These included meetings with William Hague, now Foreign Secretary, and Liam Fox, now Defence Secretary.
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These documents have been released together with more recent sneering assessments from a senior US diplomat of Britain’s deep interest in the Special Relationship, amid concerns in the UK that the Obama administration would downgrade the alliance with London, fears which are described as “paranoid”. British fears about Washington’s distinctly cooler approach towards the UK have of course been subsequently realised with the White House’s assault on BP, and Hillary Clinton’s stab in the back over the Falklands, both of which have gone down badly across the Atlantic. And the official view of the Obama administration was summed up by a senior State Department official in March last year who told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
The sneering assessment came from Richard LeBaron, the US deputy chief of mission, who said the obsession with the US/UK alliance would “be humorous, if it were not so corrosive”.
“More than one HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] senior official asked embassy officers whether President Obama meant to send a signal in his inaugural address about US-UK relations by quoting Washington during the revolutionary war [against Britain], while the removal of the Churchill bust from the Oval office consumed much UK newsprint.”
He added: “This period of excessive UK speculation about the relationship is more paranoid than usual… This over-reading would often be humorous, if it were not so corrosive.”
Mr LeBaron continued: “Though tempting to argue that keeping HMG off balance about its current standing with us might make London more willing to respond favourably when pressed for assistance, in the long run it is not in US interests to have the UK public concluding the relationship is weaking, on either side.
Larry Elder at TownHall: The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush
The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — and intended to restart his program once the heat was off.
President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous “16 words”: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson sprang into action and, in an op-ed piece, in effect wrote, “No, the Cheney administration sent me to investigate the allegation — and I found it without merit.”
Elder goes on to remind readers how the MSM took Wilson at his word, heralding him as a heroic whistleblower, even though the British stood by the intelligence on which Bush made the claim, and a Washington Post editorial concluded that Wilson had lied about the Iraq-in-Africa-for-uranium claim because he had told the CIA the opposite when he reported back from Africa.
In July of 2008, the US had shipped over 500 tons of yellowcake uranium to Canada for storage, but the media didn’t report on that with anywhere near the fervor they reported Wilson’s lies.
Elder continues:
Wired magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman — a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution — researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here’s what he found: “By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”
In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq — on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels — what even The Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”: 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: “The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam … would have been too big a risk.”
Bush’s wikileaks vindication ties in nicely with J.R. Dunn’s analysis at The American Thinker: WikiLeaks, Stuxnet, Cyberwar, and Obama
These lefty turdburglars are not getting the results they were hoping for:
It has been an axiom of the left since the days of the New Masses and the Daily Worker that if “the people” knew what was “really going on,” what decisions were being made and crimes committed “in their name,” they’d simply rise up in their wrath to smash the pillars of the temple and smite the evildoers.
This is the impulse behind the Pentagon Papers, all those flicks that end with the main character pausing meaningfully before entering the Times building, and, for that matter, the entire Plame saga, now appearing in a multiplex near you. That is the role that Assange is playing in real time and on the world stage.
And yet… far from ushering a new non-Matrix reality, he’s cowering in a British hoosegow waiting for the Swedish cops to get the spelling right on his rape warrant, his site is being locked out from every host and service on the net, from Amazon to PayPal to XXX Real Live Bondage XXX for all I know, while the world awaits his next info-bomb not with dread or exultation, but with much the same sense of titillation as greets the antics of Britney or Jon Gosselin.
The information is trivial. There are no blockbusters or nation-breakers in the material yet released. No secret fleets of black helicopters. Karl Rove is not scheming to sell humanity to the aliens. The CIA is not transplanting children’s brains into chimpanzees in the Langley basement. What we have learned instead is that the Saudis are terrified at the prospect of a nuclear Iran, that the U.S. is cutting quiet anti-terror deals with countries such as Yemen, and that Hamid Karzai is as corrupt as he is charismatic. In other words, nothing at all new to anyone paying attention to media reports. The big disclosure is how little of this stuff needed to be secret in the first place.
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Now onto Big Government’s Pigford coverage. Here’s the latest, by Gary Hewson: The Pigford Killings: Double-Murder, Double-Cross, and Decapitation in
As we have been chronicling in our Pigford coverage this week, the amount of evidence suggesting massive fraud is staggering and will continue to build and build.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came out last week to say there have only been three cases of fraud out of the 20,000 claims.
Well Mr. Vilsack, why don’t you try this on for size? And by the way, we will be bringing more crime rings your way very soon.
More Pigford coverage this week at Big Government:
The Daily Mail:‘Vandals have hacked at the heart of Christianity’: 2,000-year-old Holy Thorn Tree of Glastonbury is cut down
Vandals have destroyed one of the most celebrated Christian pilgrimage sites in Britain and chopped down a tree said to have sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea 2,000 years ago.
The Holy Thorn Tree of Glastonbury, Somerset, is visited by thousands every year to pay homage and leave tokens of worship. Those visiting today were moved to tears on finding the tree cut to a stump.
The sacred tree is unique in that it blossoms twice a year – at Christmas and Easter – and sprigs taken from the thorn are sent to The Queen each year for the festive table.
The big question, I think, is whether the former junior senator from Illinois can swallow his rage. This is a unique situation for him, I think. He’s never been in a situation where he’s had to treat the Republicans seriously. Up to now, from his early days in politics to the White House, the GOP has been a curious abstraction to him, the way that any alternative lifestyle is an abstraction to those who don’t follow it. He comes from a safely Democratic state, a state where the Republicans know that they are in the minority and thus have to spend much time treating with the majority to get what scraps they can get. Whether he realized it before or not, Chicago-style politics only works in a one party state where there is no one to check the knife wielders. Come January 1st, that will not be possible. John Boehner does not need the One’s good will to flourish politically; the people of Ohio sent the future Speaker back to Washington to thwart the One and all his doings. Watching the former junior senator’s attempts to get what he wants from a now hostile House of Representatives should be very interesting and make for very interesting television. I’m still waiting for Olberman’s head to make like Vesuvius.
Via Cold Fury, Stanley Kurtz continues his “no labels” assault debate with Frum at NRO: David Frum’s Wrong Direction:
Frum fails to plainly state the core findings of my research: that Obama was an orthodox Marxist-Leninist in his early college years; that he certainly attended two socialist conferences, which converted him to community organizing; that these conferences sketched a vision of socialist-friendly political coalitions led by African-Americans who would emerge from the ranks of community organizers; that the groups, strategies, and theologies Obama spent a lifetime cultivating were presented at these conferences as the program of a modernized socialism; that Obama worked for his entire career with the very stealth-socialist community organizers in Chicago who had authored the political strategy presented at those early socialist conferences; that these stealth-socialist community organizers sponsored Obama’s political rise; that Obama supported these socialists by channeling foundation money their way for years; that Obama worked closely with this stealth-socialist community-organizing network throughout his time as an Illinois state senator; that Obama has hidden, and particularly in the case of ACORN, bluntly lied about these radical connections; that the tactics, policies, and strategies crafted by Obama’s stealth-socialist organizing mentors have guided his entire political career, including his presidency; and that the same stealth-socialist community organizers who inspired and sponsored Obama’s political career advised his 2008 presidential campaign and continue to work with him at shaping and marshaling support for his presidential agenda. All of this is obscured or rendered invisible by Frum’s thin and mangled description of my book. Frum gets pretty much everything wrong, from details like how many socialist conferences Obama was certainly at (actually two, with a third also possible) to the much more significant issue of my discussion of Obama’s writings, legislative record, and presidency.
Nice Deb 
