Barack Obama, Election 2008

Obama: Flimflam man?

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Flashback 2004: Newly elected Sen. Barack Obama, explaining why he won’t run for president in 2008:

“I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. Uh, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the senate. Now, there’s some people who might be comfortable doing that, uh, but I’m not one of those people.”

Here’s the video:

Obama has missed 248 votes (44.8%) in the current Congress, from January 2007 through June 2008. So, the question is, between starting his first job working in federal government on January 3, 2005, and essentially abandoning his duties as senator in January 2007 to “apply for a job” as President of the United States, where’s the evidence that he “knows what he’s doing?”

I made a few more observations over at Family Security Matters.

Boumediene v. Bush, Hamdan, unlawful combatants, War on Terror

America owes no quarter to unlawful combatants

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I am a former soldier, not a lawyer. I view the recent majority rulings of our Supreme Court concerning unlawful combatants such as in Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene as adding, not detracting, to the bloody chaos of war. In addition, the entire debate about using intelligence as evidence against the unlawful combatants, even that which was derived by coercive techniques, is flawed. Perhaps we should not pull the wings off flies like Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during this War on Terror but misery should be an unlawful combatants only lot in life.

Beyond extending our Constitution protections to non-citizens outside our borders and territories, we have ceded legal protections to unlawful combatants that wholly operate outside modern civilization’s Laws of Wars. Lawyers, including many who have worn military uniforms for decades, seem to have lost all sight of why those laws evolved and deliberately left unlawful combatants unprotected.