CNN just had a lengthy piece with No Quarter’s Larry Johnson as one of their “experts,” where he used the phrase “Obama bin Laden” instead of Osama bin Laden and never caught himself. He had to be corrected by the bobblehead.
He was not asked about the Whitey Tape.
jeffreyw
Good morning, Mrs J begins her last day of work today!
asiangrrlMN
@jeffreyw: She’s retiring, yes? I remembered that she WAS going to retire, but then…did something happen?
Man. The news over there in the States is as fucking depressing as ever. I think I need to eat a fresh pastry to help me cope with the pain.
SGEW
An “expert” on what?
Tomlinson
@SGEW:
Republican talking points?
NobodySpecial
@SGEW:
They found out the bomber really WAS Chief Korir, and who knows more about him?
donovong
Glad I missed that. I turned the teevee when the CNN crew began asking why Hillary Clinton isn’t showing up to join in today’s obsessive discussions about the crotch bomber.
Couldn’t Michael Jackson die again, just to distract them? Is Balloon Boy on vacation?
Stroszek
He was on PBS the other night too.
jeffreyw
@asiangrrlMN:
Yeah, she’s retiring effective 1 Jan. She has planned all along to pull the plug soon as she turned 55, but there was a snag in that she was laid off 1 Nov and there seemed to be some issues with her company paid health insurance as a benefit if she retired while on laid off status. She had decided to put off retiring until called back in the spring (she worked as control room operator in a gas fired electrical generating plant – the company decided to go to seasonal operation due to slackening electrical demand). The company realized it would be to their own benefit to bring her back to active and let her retire as planned, rather than force her to come back in the spring and then retire, meaning they would have to then hire a replacement and train them up to speed while the plant was in operation.
El Cid
The callers to C-Span’s Washington Journal are at least a tiny bit less freaked out than they were when the Senate passed the health care bill, but it’s awesome to listen to crazy people say how a guy whom Dutch security let on an airliner with a home-made bomb means Obama is a failure on national security.
But then, even the Financial Times understands how our crazy ‘security’ discourse goes:
Republicans seek political advantage
By Anna Fifield in Washington | Financial Times | December 30 2009 02:00 | Last updated: December 30 2009 02:00
Republicans have seized on the Christmas day attempted terrorist attack as evidence that Democrats are weak on national security issues, as they seek to bolster their credentials ahead of next year’s congressional elections.
As the Obama administration’s investigation into how a 23-year-old Nigerian was able to carry explosives on to a US-bound aircraft gathers pace, a slew of Republicans have criticised everything from the timing of the president’s first public comments to his plans to close the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
“Soft talk about engagement, closing Gitmo, these things are not going to appease the terrorists,” said Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina.
“They’re going to keep coming after us, and we can’t have politics as usual in Washington, and I’m afraid that’s what we’ve got right now with airport security,” Mr DeMint told Fox News.
Barack Obama, US president, answered such critics yesterday with a surprisingly blunt admission that “human and systemic failures” were to blame for allowing the 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to board the aircraft.
His insistence of a preliminary report on investigators’ initial findings by tomorrow will also go some way to rebutting some analysts’ suggestions that the president is gaining a reputation for taking his time to consider before making security decisions.
Security has been tightened at airports across the US and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting an inquiry into how the incident happened.
Republicans had been emboldened by the administration’s faltering response to the attempted attack. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, on Sunday said “the system worked” but later performed a U-turn, saying that it did not work and “no one is happy with that”, comments that were reinforced by Mr Obama yesterday.
Peter Hoekstra, a congressman from Michigan and ranking Republican of the House intelligence committee, said the suspect should have had a red flag next to his name.
“You would have thought this would go right to the top of the list,” Mr Hoekstra told CBS yesterday. “This threat is real . . . We need to be on offence.”
Americans traditionally perceive Republicans to be strong on national security issues. But the party’s tactics in this case could backfire.
“If this line of attack continues, it is going to reveal problems not just with the Obama administration but with the homeland security system, a system that was put in place by President [George W.] Bush,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University.
“If Republicans want hearings into what happened, it could very well raise questions about Bush-era failures and that would be politically dangerous.”
Some Democrats are already pointing to Repub-lican obstructionism on national security matters.
More than 100 Republicans in the House voted against the Department of Homeland Security’s 2010 appropriation bill funding airport security measures, including explosives detection systems.
Soft talk. Emboldening Jim DeMint. Appeasement.
The Financial Times is wrong, though, because even though Bush Jr. cannot be blamed for what happened 8 months into his Preznitzy, Obama can be blamed for what Bush Jr. did several years ago, and for what might very well have happened but didn’t, whereas Bush Jr. could list this incident among its “successfully avoided” terrorist attacks.
Tomlinson
You know, what pisses me off about this coverage is that we lucked into a clear win against Al-Q. They looked like fools, which must have really pissed them off. The terrorists who burned their own nuts off.
We then proceeded to violently wet our pants about the whole thing instead of laughing at it.
So now I’m sure they are extremely pleased with themselves. And the nut burner is no doubt looking forward to a long and platonic relationship with his promised 72 virgins.
El Cid
Bizarre: FoxNooz correspondent Catherine Herrera on C-Span’s WJ is making strange amounts of sense — mentioning, for example, that you can’t catch every single incident before it happens, or that our reactions have to be made in the character of who we are as a country, which sounds to me like a dangerous invoking of the notion that citizens have rights & shit when we know that mentioning the Bill of Rights makes Bin Laden win.
asiangrrlMN
@jeffreyw: I’m glad it worked out for her.
Lord, I can’t believe the press is still going on and on and on about the crotch-burner. Give it a rest, guys and gals! Such bullshit.
El Cid
C-Span caller: this Nigerian crotch-bomber is because Obama ‘clipped the wings’ of the CIA and FBI, and threatened them with lawsuits (Obama did), and they’re having to be “PC” now, and thank god we didn’t have to read Miranda rights on the battlefield in WW1 and WW2! Ha! We like bein’ stupid!
El Cid
Meanwhile, in the land where THE SURGE (TM) proved that America could do counter-insurgency right, 2 suicide bombers kill at least 20 in Iraq.
rob!
Laugh now, John, but that “Whitey Tape” is a-comin’, and when it does boy oh boy will it ruin Obama’s chance at the White House!! McCain/Palin 2008…er, 2012!!
El Cid
3rd caller whining that ‘now we got to read Miranda rights to the terrorists’. You know, because some how just shooting the Nigerian crotch-burner in the head the moment you grab him, or putting him on the rack would have somehow prevented what he had just failed to do.
Also, fair trials and standards of evidence aren’t standards to which we hold ourselves, they’re just gifts we give to evil villains because our hearts are made weak by hippies and the ACLU.
Jim
The only unpardonnable sin that gets one ripped out of the great Beltway rolodex is having been right about the Iraq War, apparently.
Earl
I believe it’s:
i.e. where Larry lives…
…and I just realized what that says about CNN…
GregB
If these sick as hell rightwingnuts get back behind the wheels of power in this nation, I would encourage every Muslim and Arab American to head for the fucking borders because these sadistic monsters will be firing up the car batteries and tazers for use on their children.
-G
Will
For Larry, there was nothing there to catch…
Zach
And here I was thinking letting Taylor Marsh back on TV was a bad idea. I mean, I live in the greater DC metro area, am sufficiently telegenic, and can speak coherently… where does one sign up to be an on-air expert/consultant/etc?
Searching “obama bin lyin” at noquarter turns up dozens of results so it’s not like this is unprecedented or anything. There’s also a defense of accidentally calling him obama bin laden there as well.
beltane
Larry Johnson is a certifiable kook whom I remember best for posting a picture of David Brooks’ mailbox. If CNN and PBS put this nutter on TV as an esteemed “expert”, it makes you wonder how many of their other experts are similarly insane.
slippy
@SGEW:
Advanced motorized hairstyling devices. That’s what, motherfucker!
Hob
@El Cid: You could put that exact same Financial Times headline on half of the stories in the national news…
licensed to kill time
I remember back when I’d just heard about Barack Hussein Obama and thinking that any guy with that name would be virtually unelectable in ‘Murka. I’m not defending Larry Johnson but I have been known to scramble Obama/Osama at times myself.
It’s a funny world we live in. Firebaggers, crotch bombs, pissy pants kooks…I’m glad I have a twisted sense of humor to keep me sane.
slippy
@SGEW:
He’s the leading consultant on automated hair styling devices, that’s what.
4jkb4ia
Yes. I saw that at the deli. I said, “Isn’t that special. Larry Johnson is on TV”. I supposed that they could not get anyone with a less tainted reputation during a holiday week.