Saudi-funded Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich attacks Harvard for Saudi funding.
On Fox News this morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said President Obama “should withdraw” Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. While calling her an “anti-military” nominee for upholding Harvard’s policy of prohibiting employers who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, Gingrich got side-tracked for a moment and engaged in a Harvard-bashing critique:
On the one hand, Harvard accepts money from Saudis. Saudi Arabia, by the way, executes homosexuals. Saudi Arabia represses women. Saudi Arabia does not allow Christians or Jews to practice their religion, but Saudi money is fine.
As ThinkProgress has repeatedly documented, Fox is funded by a wealth of Saudi money. Saudi oil tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns a 7 percent stake in Fox News’ parent company News Corp, making him the largest shareholder outside the family of CEO Rupert Murdoch. Alwaleed has boasted in the past about forcing Fox News to change its content. Gingrich, of course, has been a paid Fox News contributor for over a decade.
Update Laura Bush endorsed Kagan's nomination on Fox News. "I think it's great," she said. "I'm really glad that there will be three [women] if she's confirmed. I like to have women on the Supreme Court."
Super rightwing Justice Antinin Scalia also went to Harvard, as did the hard right fascist-lite Justice John Roberts. Yet Gingrich found no problem with either of those justices or the fact they went to Harvard. Gingrich is often referred to by the media as a Republican intellectual leader. The media said it, Gingrich and his genuflecting followers agree so it must be true.
Glenn Beck's war on the FCC and democratic net neutrality. Beck comes from the Joseph Goebbels's school of extremist right-wing propaganda.
Republicans complain that the Times Square bomb fizzle was pure luck. But why are so many terror plots botched?
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, likewise mocked the administration as charmed rather than competent. “Being lucky can't be our national security strategy," he told CNN. "We were lucky on Christmas Day. We were lucky last week." Faisal Shahzad's plot "wasn't foiled by our law enforcement or by our intelligence community. It was foiled because it appears that whatever training [the car bomber] got in Waziristan wasn't very good. Again, we were lucky."Old Pete has absolutely zero national security credentials. He was in Congress when we had the 9-11 attacks and helped sell the lies about a connection between Iraq and al-Qeada. Why Hoekstra hates America is anyone's guess - mental problems perhaps?
But Sebastian Rotella, an experienced newspaper correspondent who now writes for ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative website, strongly suggests that Obama's luck is actually the residue of aggressive design.
As he notes, the likelihood is that Shahzad was trained by the Pakistani Taliban and may also have established connections with al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations. He adds that while the Taliban’s alliance with al-Qaida threatens intensified warfare against the West, it is reassuring that the effectiveness of their operations abroad has declined. And he says that their weak tradecraft and botched jobs stem from increasing pressure from intensified drone strikes, captured operatives who have provided intelligence data, and ground assaults by Pakistani forces:
During the past decade, militants connected to al-Qaida have repeatedly botched bombings, disregarded their own security guidelines and blundered into the hands of spies. Al-Qaida has not carried out a successful attack in the West since the London transport bombings that killed 52 people in 2005.
In recent years, toughened global enforcement and the missile strikes in Pakistan have depleted the fugitive leadership, targeted training compounds and diminished the flow of aspiring holy warriors from abroad.
As a result, clumsy terror operations in the West are by no means an exception. In fact, mistakes have become almost a signature.
Every time such mistakes ruin a terror plot, it is undoubtedly lucky for the administration as well as the potential victims. But whatever the merits and flaws of Obama's counterterror policy, there is also little doubt that his government is prosecuting a concerted effort against jihadist movements -- with effects that may well include worse training, more blunders and fewer successes.
