The Spirit of Kwanzaa

On December 27, 2010, in Politics, by Henshaw

This morning I was tearing off days on my favorite calendar. I love Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine, but even his calendar isn’t immune from political correctness. The calendar includes the Kwanzaa observance. This fake holiday was created by the New Left and it’s not observed by anyone with a lick of sense. Kwanzaa is what happens when progressives’ white guilt reaches a fever pitch after Christmas.

For those who are unaware I will touch on the spirit of Kwanzaa. Maulana Karenga is the father of Kwanzaa. He’s a former member of the Black Panthers and also a convicted felon. What did he do, you ask?

According to a Los Angeles Times account of testimony published at the time of the trial, Karenga and the other men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman’s mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman’s big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga’s former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman’s stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose, according to the Times.

“Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know,” Karenga allegedly told the women, the Times reported Oct. 7, 1970, shortly after Karenga’s arrest.

Mel Gibson is unable to star in the sequel to The Hangover because of his threats of violence and racist comments. Maulana Karenga, on the other hand, was a proud member of a racist organization and tortured women. Why anyone would even think of observing his ridiculous holiday is beyond me. Perhaps Mel Gibson can star in The Kwanzaa Story as Maulana Karenga. The man is a monster, but somehow the touchy-feely ideas represented by Kwanzaa live on despite the fact that it’s pointless and offensive to anyone with a brain.

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obama and the cia

On April 22, 2009, in Politics, by Henshaw

Our new president once promised to unite the country. Any hope of that occurring has gone out the window. Over the past week team Obama has initiated a firestorm that must be stopped. Obama’s actions on interrogation techniques are dangerous, partisan, and ignorant. I have never addressed the “torture” issue directly here because it’s a non-starter. It’s the fueled delusion of a Bush hating mob on the left. To get some perspective let’s think back to 2001. The angry mob on the right demanded that Bush investigate the Chinese influence on the Clinton administration, especially in the area of weapons secrets. To be frank there were a whole list of things Bush could have investigated about the Clintons, but he didn’t for good reason. It doesn’t accomplish anything except serve as a distraction.
President Obama
There will never be prosecutions over interrogations. Obama knows this, Bush knew this, and everyone who has any common sense knows that no laws were broken.

Contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” wrote then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005 memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then Assistant Attorney General (now federal Judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that “the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm.”
The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other “high-value” detainees, that “an improvised thick collar . . . was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls.”
As the Bybee memo notes, the “wall” was a “flexible false wall . . . constructed to create a loud sound”; that “it is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall”; and that the purpose of the collar was “to help prevent whiplash.” If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.

Obama is doing this because he’s still running against Bush. Obama was elected due to Bush, he blames the economy on Bush, and he goes around the world blaming Bush for everything. This isn’t the hopeful, unifying, or forward looking Barack Obama from 2008. He’s a divisive, stuck in the past, and borderline incompetent. What sense does it make to release our interrogation techniques? It’s woeful inept act by a president who doesn’t seem to get it.
Obama wants this issue to go to hearings where nothing will be done. The sole purpose is to keep this in the news, to keep Bush in the news, and to keep Obama’s approval rating from sinking like the Titanic. It’s time for this whole thing to be exposed. Since the president caved to the delusional mob the truth needs to get out about how these interrogations kept the nation safe, how key Democrats signed off on them, and why Obama has made a terrible mistake releasing the information.

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guantánamo bay meets geneva convention

On February 21, 2009, in Politics, by Henshaw

It’s sure a good thing that Bush is gone so Obama can close that evil torture facility in Cuba. Everyone knows that Guantánamo Bay is what made us lose favor with the rest of the world. Wait… you mean that the facility meets the Geneva Conventions? That means that all these crazy liberals were wrong again? Totally shocking.

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.

For the New York Times and liberals this is bad news. The narrative they’ve enjoyed the past six years is more important to them than the actual truth. This sheds light on how ridiculous it was for Obama to sign an executive order about a topic he knew nothing about. It also explains why the executive order delayed an actual decision. Hot Air has more.