Fear And Loathing - The RINOs Versus The Lions

Strange days indeed, when Republicans eat their own over something that seems to be a no brainer - defunding the deeply unpopular ObamaCare and avoiding a national trainwreck.

The GOP establishment, which seems to have difficulty finding its behind with both hands is facing mounting discontent over President Obama's signature achievement. In fact, it's this president's legacy, if you don't count unprecedented debt, Benghazi, Syria, Fast and Furious, lavish vacations, IRS-gate and a slightly improved golf score.

But for most Americans, who now have taken ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's advice and are finding out what's actually in ObamaCare now that the bill's passed and the legislation is taking effect, it's a nightmare. The most conservative estimates are that ObamaCare will increase healthcare costs for an average family of four by $7,450 between 2014 and 2022..if you can manage to see a doctor in anything like a timely manner.

And those figures do not account for the additional costs incurred if the president gets his way and legalizes 11 million plus illegal migrants, virtually all of whom will qualify for the taxpayer funded subsidies.

Even President Obama's allies the unions are jumping ship on ObamaCare at this point.

When conservative Republicans in the House and in the Senate actually took a look at the poll numbers and spoke to their constituents, it seemed like a no brainer that with President Obama pushing for yet another expansion on his credit card to raise the debt ceiling, this would be an incredible time to own this issue and connect with the American public by funding the government but defunding ObamaCare.

When the GOP establishment proved reluctant, the conservatives in the House and Senators like Utah's Mike Lee and Texan Ted Cruz led the charge to mobilize conservatives. They got well over a million signatures on an online petition and defied expectations by succeeding in getting a budget through that defunds ObamaCare.

And that when the RINO crap hit the fan.

The bill has to go to the Senate, where the Democrats will need to get 60 votes for cloture in order to end debate so Democrat majority leader Harry Reid can pass a new budget that funds ObamaCare by a simple majority and send it back to the House. If Reid
can't get cloture, the budget bill stays in the Senate and forces Reid and the Democrats to publicly own both ObamaCare and the onus for shutting the government down. Senator Cruz explains this admirably to FOX News commentator Chris Wallace here:



Guess who Reid's allies are in getting cloture?

None other than Arizona RINO John McCain, his sidekick Lindsay Graham and the rest of the RINOs on the so-called Gang of Eight. And they're not limiting themselves to merely disagreeing with Cruz and conservatives. They're trying to destroy them politically.

As Chris Wallace revealed, the RINOs actually sent him opposition research on Cruz prior to his interview with Cruz on his Sunday show, which Wallace, being an actual journalist refused to use or reveal where it came from. And as Tammy Bruce correctly surmises, if they're sending it to Chris Wallace, they're sending it to everyone.:

“This has been one of the strangest weeks I’ve ever had in Washington. As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats, but from top Republicans to hammer Cruz. Why are Republicans so angry at Ted Cruz?”

Well, for one thing, it's not all Republicans, but the RINO faction led by John McCain. They loathe Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and others from the Tea Party class of 2010 because they're conservatives first rather than Republicans, and came to Washington to govern and try to take back the country rather than going along with the Old Boy network and business as usual. Like the members of the House, they haven't been in Washington long enough to become insulated within the DC bubble from the people that sent them there, and they still retain the principles they ran on.

Worst of all, they refuse to show deference to their 'betters', carpet chewers and sell outs like McCain.

ObamaCare is a particular sore spot with the RINOs because the waiver Obama gave Congress applies to the RINOs and their staffs, and they damn well don't want to lose it because of what McCain famously called 'wacko birds'. So they're willing to break Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment in spades and provide oppo research to damage fellow Republicans.

Sarah Palin, as usual has the right of it. She demands that Wallace reveal which Republicans sent him the material intended to damage Senator Ted Cruz (h/t The Noisy Room):

Sarah Palin        ✔ @SarahPalinUSA

@FoxNewsSunday Keep it TRULY fair & balanced. Release the GOP names encouraging you to trash @SenTedCruz. No more anonymous sources.

7:13 AM - 22 Sep 2013

1,139 Retweets 295 favorites

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As I mentioned previously, defunding both the mandatory and discretionary funding for ObamaCare is definitely possible. Congress does exactly that with the Hyde Amendment, which prevents funds going to MedicAid from paying for abortions with exceptions for incest and rape. It's done via a rider that is attached to the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services and has passed every year since 1976.


The RINOs, short sighted as usual, would rather not make waves.Losing elections has taught the Stupid Party nothing, although Cruz and his fellow lions appear to have learned something.

At the very least, this would put President Obama and Harry Reid in the uncomfortable position of having to whip their fellow Democrats into line to support shutting down the government to save a piece of legislation the vast majority of American hate...with the 2014 midterms coming on. The results of this might end up being surprising.

On the other hand, we have, apparently, a contingent within the GOP who have no allegiance to small r republican principles, or really, any principles whatsoever aside from getting re-elected again. Something is going to have to give, and it may just be the Republican Party.

That sharp, cracking sound you hear is the political borders re-aligning, and it may just be the start of the GOP establishment going the way of the Whigs.

John McCain Continues To Soil Himself On Islamists And The Middle East

What are we to think about Senator John McCain?

Two weeks ago, he denounced Senator Rand Paul in the harshest terms for bringing an amendment before the senate that would have cut off all aid to Egypt.

And now, he's mouthing off over at CNN and calling his good friend President Obama 'weak and indecisive' because he hasn't cut off aid to Egypt!

John McCain remains the media's favorite Republican. Aside from being willing to savage members of his own party to get airtime or a photo-op, he's so stupid, duplicitous and contradictory that he provides a useful brush for the media to paint all Republicans with.

But wait, there's more. You see, by not supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, to McCain we're “not sticking to our values.”

In this dandy little interview, McCain compared President Obama’s threat to cut off aid to Egypt that he later backed off from to the president's “red line” nonsense about Syria.

Asked by CNN host Candy Crowley if the president had been weak in the Middle East, McCain said, “There is no policy. And there is no strategy.”

“We are much more hated and much less respected than we were in 2009,” in the Middle East region, McCain said.

This is the same senator, who, accompanied by his poodle Senator Lindsay Graham went to Syria, shilled for arming the rebels, claiming we were capable of 'telling the good guys from the bad guys'..and got photographed arm in arm with an al-Qaeda commander!

As I've already reported, the Saudis and GCE countries  are backing al-Sissi and tre current Egyptian government to the hilt to destroy the Brotherhood and keep Egypt in the Sunni camp as part of the civil war now raging in Islam.They've pledged up to $40 million in aid, which is why al-Sissi isn't taking Obama's calls and the president's previous  threats to cut off aid were ignored.

Yet this useful idiot for the Brotherhood who sits in the Senate on the foreign relations committee is still flapping his mouth and is still  touted by CNN and the Politico as someone who actually knows what he's talking about!

The 'lack of strategy' and the 'hatred' of Americans is as much due to Senator McCain and his pals as it is to President Obama.Just ask anyone in the region who isn't an Islamist.

From his championing of amnesty ( because the owner of  Spanish language network Univision is one of his cheif financial backers), and his willingness to attack Republican conservatives to his clueless championing of Islamists, the Senator from Keating is a disgrace to the people of Arizona, his country and to the office he holds.

Since he apparently lacks the dignity and the sense of shame to simply retire, it's way past time for the voters to simply remove him.

Clueless As Usual - McCain And Lindsay Graham Meet With Muslim Brotherhood In Egypt

The Daily Beast has what it says is an exclusive on Senators McCain and Graham holding forth upon their return from Egypt, where they met with the members of the new Egyptian interim government including Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi and military leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi,who ousted Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi from power.

And of course, with whom McCain and Graham refer to as 'senior-level Muslim Brotherhood people'.

According to the pair, the 'high level people' requested they be anonymous,but are demanding that Morsi and the other Brotherhood leaders be released and not tried, and that Morsi and the Islamists be returned to power.

“We told [the Muslim Brother leaders] that in our view, the best way to resolve this issue was to renounce and condemn violence, that they should be willing to negotiate if some of the brotherhood were released from prison,” McCain said. “We were not negotiating, we were just saying what we thought had to be done to get back to the negotiating table.”

“The situation is very difficult here,” he said. “The two sides are polarized, and the Morsi supporters are still demonstrating, and the military and the new government are keeping a lot of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in jail without communication in unknown places. It’s not a good situation, and we’ve recommended that some of them be released as a goodwill gesture. The only way this will get resolved is if both sides are willing to make some concessions.”

And the threat the two senators are holding over al-Sissi to try and force him to negotiate? Officially calling what happened in Egypt a coup and using it to withhold the $1.5 billion in military aid we give them.

“We told [General al-Sisi] exactly how a lot of members of Congress felt and we want to see negotiations and some release of political prisoners,” he said. “He did not say whether he would or he wouldn’t.”

President Obama tried the same threats and was told to go pound sand. And with the GCE countries including the Saudis stepping in over $13 billion in aid Egypt needs to keep going during the transition, I'm surprised al-Sissi even wasted time listening to these buffoons.

This is the same not-so-dynamic duo whom were perfectly willing to send Morsi and the Islamists F-16s and ignore the Brotherhood's repression and political prisoners they were holding.

Even our State Department and the notoriously clueless John Kerry, our Secretary of State have avoided threatening the Egyptians at this point, trying to hold on to whatever little influence we have with them after President Obama's epic fail in trying to save the Muslim Brotherhood government he helped install in power.

The two senators claim they weren't sent by the president, but they arrived after a two hour special meeting with Obama and - just by coincidence, y'know - at a time when our Deputy Secretary of State William Burns is trying fruitlessly to bust the Islamists out of jail and back into power. They even met with Burns, in an obvious attempt to play good cop/bad cop with al-Sissi that failed miserably.

The Brotherhood in Egypt are attempting to wage guerrilla war in Egypt against the army with riots and sabotage, and as I predicted they're being crushed, in spite of Obama's efforts to salvage them.

Let's parse what's really going on here.The Morsi regime managed to win an election and gain power thanks to President Obama's assistance, but became vastly unpopular once the Egyptians realized what Brotherhood rule actually meant. They were becoming increasingly friendly with our enemies in Iran, were destroying even the mild liberties associated with Egypt's former constitution, and were openly aiding and abetting terrorists in the person of Hamas, the Brotherhood franchise in Gaza.

They are a genocidal and ruthless organization who stand against everything America ought to stand for, and their tactics differ from those of al-Qaeda only when it comes to timing and application. Both groups take their inspiration from al-Banna and Qutb, and both favor an Islamic caliphate. That was something our president and his allies were willing to help them put together in Libya, Egypt, Syria and the Arab-occupied parts of Palestine in the mistaken idea these people can be 'worked with', especially if the Obama Administration continues its work of destroying our current alliance with Israel.

Our two Senators are obviously part of this group, and you might recall McCain's outspoken championing of Hillary's Muslim Brotherhood connected aide Huma Abedin, these senators voting to confirm Chuck Hagel and Samantha Power to sensitive national security posts and McCain's push to arm the al-Qaeda and Brotherhood rebels in Syria, among other things.

The Egyptian military were the spear point of a reaction against that, a part of the real issue in the Middle East these days, the proxy war between the Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia and the Shi'ite bloc led by Iran that has come to a head in Syria.

The Brotherhood and Hamas were also ousted from Qatar, one of their major financial supporters as a new Emir took over, yet another sign that the devil's bargain between the Brotherhood and Arab autocracies like the Saudis may be coming to an end.

As for McCain and Graham, the less said about them the better. They long ago passed the point of farce and are now are an actual problem, one I hope the people of Arizona and South Carolina resolve at the next opportunity to boot them out.

McCain Says We Can Identify The 'Good Guys' In Syria, After He Unwittingly Meets With Jihadi Terrorists

This would be hysterically funny if it wasn't for the fact that Senator McCain is pushing for us to supply US funds, arms and even boots on the ground to support an al-Qaeda and Islamist takeover of Syria. Senator John McCain claim's that we can identify who the jihadis are, except...while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims…:

“A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the Senator complied,” Rogers said. “If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohamed Nour, that is regrettable. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms,” Rogers said.

Well, yes. But the point is that he wants us to spend American blood and treasure to support replacing a Shi'ite theocracy's client state with an Islamist, salafist dictatorship and even Senator McCain, who claims to be well informed is clueless when it comes to telling who's 'moderate' and who isn't.

The arguments he makes above for an American intervention are ludicrous.

At 2:40, he says that we can “handle this". In other words, we ought to get involved regardless of whether it makes sense or not, but just to show we can. If Russian missiles shoot down out planes, then what? And if we send in the 1,800 American Marines based on Jordan's border with Syria in to fight Hezbollah, Assad's troop and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, is Senator John McCain going to guarantee that they don't go in handcuffed by the same ridiculous Rules of Engagement they're saddled with if Afghanistan that's gotten so many of them killed and maimed?

With this particular Islamist friendly commander-in-chief in the White House?

McCain has been sitting in the Senate while Christians have been ethnically cleansed from Iraq and hasn't said word one about it to my knowledge, let alone trying to do anything about it. Ditto with what's going on with the Copts in Egypt. Does he have any bold plan to stop the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Alawites, Druse and Christians in Syria when his Jihadi friends take over? Is it really worth us fighting a war to add another piece to the emerging Islamist caliphate? As bad as the status quo is, how does it help our interests to spend blood and treasure to change it? It doesn't, not in the least.

McCain is even more farcical when he tries to talk knowledgeably about how we can 'weed out' jihadis from the rebels. He says there are only 7,000 fighters in the openly al-Qaeda faction al-Nousrah (more like 10,000 according to my sources) and that we can avoid the arms and money falling into their hands. How, exactly? If you give an anti-tank weapon to someone, what guarantee do you have he won't sell it or transfer it? None whatsoever in those conditions. Has he not been paying attention to what's going on in AfPak?

Also, he seems to forget that the vast majority of the fighters actively involved are jihadis and Islamists even if they’re not in al-Nusra. Even Libyan arms dealers selling off the arms they got from Khaddaffi's armories thanks to President Obama's intervention couldn't care less about the distinction:

[F]irst, the Libyans wanted to know who the Syrians were exactly and which rebel group each represented. There was a representative from Jund-Allah (Soldiers of God), which operates in and around the capital Damascus; a commander from Ansar al-din (Supporters of the Faith) in Lattakia province; and most significantly a man who is one of the seven members of the political office of Jabhat Syria il-Islamiya (the Syrian Islamic Front), one of the country’s largest, most cohesive and strongest Islamist militant coalitions, led by the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. (The extremist al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra is not part of this alliance.) Coffee was ordered — Turkish coffee for the Syrians and cappuccinos for the Libyans. The Libyan from Zintan, wearing faded black jeans, a cream-colored shirt stretched taut across his waist and a gray sports jacket, did most of the talking. He fingered black worry beads, while his colleague from Benghazi listened. His first question was about whether the men around him recognized the FSA and its 14 provincial military councils. All said they did not. “Their commanders are failures, they are corrupt,” the Syrian from Ansar al-Din said. “There is not even one battalion, in all honesty, that they can control,” the Islamic Front representative said. “These people [senior defectors in the FSA like the one the Libyans had met the night before] were placed as facades, in the beginning, as media personalities, but as real commanders on the ground? Not at all.”

The Free Syrian Army, which is also dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood is commanded by General Idris, who McCain met with in Syria a few days ago and who he’s pushing as some kind of moderate 'freedom fighter'. In reality, the FSA is rapidly merging with jihadis like al-Nousrah and Idris is just a figurehead, a convenient mask.

McCain actually says, at 4:40 that the rebels “are trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for for well over 200 years.” I wasn't aware that America made a practice of fighting for sharia rule, the suppression of women,the murder and ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians or Islamist theocratic fascism. But then John McCain is a sitting Senator, and he undoubtedly knows better than me. Talk about calling someone else 'wacko birds'...!

 Senator McCain, it's past time for you to resign. Please, for your own sake and ours. Just go. (H/t Allah,via Ace's place)