Report: WND Founder And Birther Leader Stopped At Airport With Loaded Gun
Joseph Farah, the co-founder of the conservative website now known as WND and one of the guiding lights of the birther movement, was caught by TSA agents at Dulles International Airport on Sunday with a loaded .38-caliber revolver in his carry-on bag, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority told the SPLC that Farah was released pending a summons, and is facing a class 1 misdemeanor charge for carrying a gun in an airport terminal.
According to the SPLC, The Washington Post first reported the incident on Monday but misreported the age of the individual involved. The SPLC said an airport spokesperson had confirmed that the person cited for the weapon charge was Joseph Francis Farah, 59.
As the SPLC points out, this wasn't Farah's first run-in with the TSA. In 2010, Farah wrote a column about his own "little TSA mini-nightmare." That incident involved a broken suitcase zipper, rumpled clothing, and bad customer service, plus "systematic violations of Americans’ constitutional rights." At the end of the column, Farah urged his readers to sign a petition to end "gate rape" and "virtual strip searches" at airports.
Farah has published two columns on WND since Sunday. One, published Monday, was titled "ISIS Rising - What It Portends." The second, published Tuesday, was titled "Why I Will Never Be A Presbyterian, Again." Neither mentioned the TSA.
This is One of the Craziest Fox News Rants Ever, and It’s Not Hannity or O’Reilly
Bob Cesca on June 23, 2014
Judge Jeanine Pirro’s television career began as the host of a reality courtroom show not unlike Judge Judy or any of the dozens of other knockoffs. But for the last few years, she’s become a regular contributor to NBC’s Today as well as the host of Justice with Judge Jeanine, Saturday nights on Fox News Channel. Frankly, we hadn’t heard of her until this past weekend when she delivered a rant about President Obama and the fiasco in Iraq. Based on the reactions online and in social media, the segment has elevated her within the hierarchy of sociopathic rogues, screechers and former morning zoo deejays [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJkxBLgd5Hs (next below)]
in the far-right media.
Pirro’s five-minute tirade had everything: finger-wagging, fear-mongering, misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, the phrase “cut and run” and, naturally, ball-shaming [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/is-this-the-craziest-rant-a-fox-news-host-has-ever-done ]. It’s a cocktail of Obama Derangement Syndrome delivered with laser-like precision directly into the outrage cortexes of typical Fox News viewers, likely inducing octogenarian white-guy erections with tensile strengths not experienced since Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronyn splashed around in that magical pool in Cocoon.
Let’s [cough] dive in, shall we [the video next below embedded; included here as a full post of it from YouTube]?
*
Judge Jeanine Pirro: ISIS is Coming for US, the Infidels
Judge Jeanine, in her strongest anti-Obama tirade ever. Rich, powerful, and well-organized, ISIS is beheading its way across northern Iraq using weapons we paid for and showing a brutality the likes of which none of us can even imagine.
In the meantime, says the judge, Obama is in denial, clueless, a paper tiger, who only knows how to cut and run.
1) They’re coming to get you! Usually when fear is used as a rhetorical weapon, it’s dropped with a little more subtlety than Pirro’s opening hit:
“I told you that you need to be afraid because they are coming for you.”
Yes, you personally. Doesn’t matter where you are or what you do, they are coming for you — clearly because they hate viewers of Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday night show.
2) Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. And bomb. There was a brief glimpse of sanity when Pirro said she’s opposed to sending ground troops. But this dollop of rationality ended when she went off on a bomb binge:
“My resolution? Air strikes. Bomb them! Bomb them! Keep bombing them, bomb them again and again. And I don’t care how long it takes. Just take out ISIS. Take out their convoys, and take out those troops.”
This would be fine were it not for the fact that ISIS is also deeply intertwined in civilian populations, complicating the air strikes option. Air strikes require surgical caution and planning, not indiscriminate bombing of anyone that looks like the enemy. First of all, there isn’t sufficient intelligence to pinpoint the location of all ISIS forces. Plus, if we take out their convoys, they’ll figure out a way to move in smaller groups. And if the Iraqi security forces continue to bail out of the fight, airstrikes wouldn’t really stop the ISIS advance. Plus, as we’ve witnessed in the past, the Fox News hosts who are calling for air strikes today will surely rip Obama to shreds afterward for doing exactly what they called for.
3) Here’s a great big lie.
“The head of this band of savages, Abu al-Baghdadi, was released by the Obama administration and started ISIS one year later in 2010.”
4) As if Obama was watching her ridiculous show. Next, Pirro shifted into addressing the president directly.
“Now, Mr. President, you may see yourself as a war hero. The truth? There has been a 60 percent increase in radical Islamist terrorism since you’ve been in office.”
It’s unclear which study she was talking about, but the only report we could find [ http://news.yahoo.com/study-reports-60-rise-terrorism-39-arc-instability-221800485.html ] that involves a 60 percent increase in terrorist attacks had to do with North Africa, and the increase wasn’t overall for the years 2009-2014, it was from 2013 when there was a 60 percent increase over 2012. If we look at the overall post-9/11 trend for that region, the biggest increase took place between 2001 and 2009 under a different president. Furthermore, other than in 2013, terrorist attacks declined in North Africa from 2009 to 2012. This can’t really be attributed to Obama, but if we’re talking about blaming Obama for the spike in 2013, then he deserves credit for the decline as well, right?
There’s another study by RAND which was recently cited by the always trustworthy Dick Cheney which showed a 60 percent increase in terrorist groups — not terrorism. The study also indicated that this increase was due to weakened governments in the nations where the terrorist groups are forming.
5) And now… balls.
“And you keep letting these guys out! Like the Bergdahl trade and the five terrorists, you didn’t have the balls to try in GITMO or federal court. You were simply clueless. A paper tiger who only knows how to cut and run.”
If Obama is a “clueless” eunuch for authorizing the Bergdahl prisoner swap in exchange for five detainees, what the hell was Bush for releasing nearly 600 detainees from Guantanamo? We’ve covered this before [ http://thedailybanter.com/2014/06/gop-bergdahl-deal-obamas-willie-horton-moment-even-though-bush-released-detainees/ ] but it bears repeating: the recidivism rate for detainees released by Bush was 30.5 percent. The recidivism rate for Obama was 7.5 percent. Oh, also, the five detainees turned over to Qatar were Taliban prisoners of war. We don’t put prisoners of war on trial. But why should we expect a judge to know that?
6) Chris Stevens: Al-Qaeda’s Gun Smuggler. Then Pirro pivoted from lying to her audience to dealing in wacky conspiracy theories:
“Here’s the kicker. There have been reports that ISIS was trained by U.S. instructors at a secret base in Jordan to prepare them to fight President Assad as rebels. Since the Benghazi massacre, reports have been that the [Benghazi] annex was a front for a CIA operation shipping arms to the anti-Assad forces through Turkey.”
Where did this hooey come from? World Net Daily [ http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/officials-u-s-trained-isis-at-secret-base-in-jordan/ ], a well-known far-right conspiracy site that no one, other than Pirro, thinks is a serious news source. Also, the thing about Benghazi is a conspiracy theory in which the late Ambassador Chris Stevens is accused of running the guns from Libya to al-Qaeda backed rebels in Syria, namely ISIS. So either Stevens was an American hero killed by terrorists and his death adds significant weight to this particular attack, or he was a criminal gun-runner sending American weapons to al-Qaeda affiliates. You can’t have it both ways.
7) “That despicable video theory.” Pirro moved on to another conspiracy theory about how the president apparently waited for two year before U.S. special forces finally grabbed Abu Khattala, the mastermind of the Benghazi attacks. If you watch the video, Pirro amplifies her insufferable snark with the addition of air quotes and a contemptuous smirk — you know, in a serious rant about how the terrorists are coming for you.
“Why did you wait? Could it be, Mr. President, that if you arrested him sooner he could’ve debunked that [air quotes] despicable video theory. You know the one you all lied about? Can you imagine, you indict Khattala for killing Ambassador Chris Stevens [who was running guns to al-Qaeda, according to Pirro's source, WND] and he comes in and he says, ‘You dumb schmucks! What video?!’”
“You release terrorists, you cut deals with Iran, you dance around with your political correctness while they sharpen their knives.”
On the far-left, Obama is considered to be a bloodthirsty, drone-addicted war criminal who indiscriminately launches Hellfire missiles at children. On the far-right, he’s a flitting dilettante who pals around with terrorists instead of killing them by the bushel. The truth is that in spite of Pirro’s boardwalk caricature of Obama, no president has killed more terrorists than this one — more than 2,000 [ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/01/23/more-than-2400-dead-as-obamas-drone-campaign-marks-five-years/ ] as of 2013, and that’s just the ones killed in drone strikes — eight times as many as the previous administration. Again, if this is weakness, I have no idea what her standard for strength against terrorists could possibly be, because since the beginning of the global war on terror, Obama is the clear leader in killing the evildoers.
As always, Fox News makes it really easy for people like us here at The Daily Banter. Just about every day, a host at the network says something that makes for almost unfairly easy ridicule. But Pirro has set a new bar for fire-eating, not to mention the most easily-debunkable nonsense per sentence of any Fox News host, past or present.
Copyright 2014 The Daily Banter (emphasis in original)
He barely remembers his old friend Ahmed Chalabi and imagines nuclear terror scenarios in detail. Has he lost it?
Joan Walsh Wednesday, Jun 25, 2014 09:05 AM CDT
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is a man who apparently sits around imagining nuclear terror attacks. Something is coming that will be worse than 9/11, and soon, he told radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday night [ http://www.hughhewitt.com/vice-president-collapse-obama-foreign-policy/ (complete audio at http://www.hughhewitt.com/wp-content/uploads/06-24hhs-cheney.mp3 ; with full transcript)]. “You can just imagine what would happen, somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container, and drive it down the Beltway outside of Washington, D.C.”
Hewitt egged him on with what sounded like martial law porn, a fantasy of the whole government collapsing: “Do you see the government reconstituting?” he asked Cheney breathlessly. “Because it would have to be military rule for a period of time at least.”
Oooh, baby, “military rule.” Bring it on!
Cheney shares with Hewitt his experience with “the continuity of government program” during the Cold War. “It involved having a government waiting, if you will, ready to go in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States, so that we could always maintain the constitutional base of governmental authority. I was part of that program for several years, and a lot of it, I’m sure, is probably still classified. But it was very, very important.”
I’m sure it was, because Dick Cheney is a very, very important man. Who may nonetheless have lost a step. In a long, rambling conversation with Hewitt, he often talked in weirdly high-gloss, low-detail terms, like “I’m big on the Kurds,” though “I’m not sure you want to be in a position of advocating [greater Kurdistan].” He starts to warn about a scary terrorist President Obama has fecklessly emboldened in Iraq, and then he stops. “I’m trying to think of his name now, is it al-Baghdadi?”
“Yeah, al-Baghdadi,” Hewitt assures him.
But the most outrageous part of the Cheney interview was the way he distanced himself from the man he once wanted to run Iraq, serial fabricator Ahmed Chalabi. When Hewitt asked if Chalabi should be in the running to replace Malaki, the garrulous Cheney clammed up.
Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve met him a few times. I don’t know him that well. A lot of people look on him as a bit of an opportunist, always, you know, around, eager to insert himself into a situation. He was fairly active in the opposition to Saddam before we went in, one of the expatriates. I don’t know him well enough to be able to determine whether or not he’d be a positive force. A lot of people are very critical of the way he’d operated in the past.
Of course in the early days of the war Cheney was a huge booster of Chalabi, and the bogus intelligence he shared to gin up the case for war. Former CIA director George Tenet wrote in his 2007 memoir: “You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.”
David Frum had a similar take in his own book.
I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.
Now Cheney says, “I don’t know him that well. I’ve only met him a few times.” We shouldn’t be surprised that Cheney lies, but this lie is too easily challenged (although of course Hewitt didn’t try).
Of course, as in any Cheney sit-down, there was lots of trashing the current Democratic president. “When Obama came in, Iraq was in relatively good shape,” he claims, and he says the president’s commitment to keeping only a small force in Iraq is what led the Maliki government to reject a status of forces agreement – as though 20,000 troops would have been more palatable to the Iraqis than 5,000. Never mind that Americans, not just Iraqis, opposed lingering involvement there. That’s Obama’s fault, too.
“The key is to get the American people to support difficult things,” he instructs Hewitt. “And military action and wars are always very difficult. And you need strong leadership, somebody who will stand up and say this is what we’re going to do, and this is why we’re going to do it.” Hewitt neglected to point out that as Bush and Cheney left office in December 2008, an ABC News/Washington Post Poll found 64 percent of those surveyed said the Iraq War was not worth fighting, while 34 percent said it was worth it, and 2 percent undecided.
Getting a third of the country to “support difficult things” like the Iraq War? Mission accomplished, Vice President!
The conversation closed with the reason Cheney’s currently on his media tour: the PAC he’s established with his daughter Liz, fresh off a failed attempt to carpetbag a Wyoming Senate seat. Their Alliance for a Strong America will search out candidates who share their grim neocon worldview. While Cheney wouldn’t say whom he might support for president in 2016, he made clear there’s one man he won’t: Sen. Rand Paul. Once again calling Paul “an isolationist,” he assures Hewitt: “Somebody with an isolationist view, that is to say that we can hide behind our oceans and everything will be OK, doesn’t fit that test.”
Obviously I’m no Rand Paul backer, but credit where it’s due: On NBC’s “Meet the Press” he put the blame for the current Iraq mess on those who led us into war under false pretenses.
They didn’t really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out. And what’s going on now, I don’t blame on President Obama. Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution.
That was brave of him, and he’ll pay for it politically. If Paul runs, you’ll likely see that very sentence – “What’s going on now, I don’t blame on President Obama” – in ads sponsored by Cheney’s PAC, to rile up a base that doesn’t like neocon interventionism. Cheney may no longer have the name of every bad guy on the tip of his tongue, but he knows the name of the one that counts, Barack Hussein Obama, and he’ll be reviling it as long as he’s breathing.
I’ve given up hoping the media would tire of promoting the rantings of Mr. Five Deferments, the man who never saw a war he didn’t like, but also never found one he’d like to fight in. Maybe Paul can gain some traction with a Republican base that’s weary of war but thinks if Obama’s against something, they have to be for it. It’s up to Paul now to consign Cheney to history.
We know that American security, peace, and freedom depend upon reversing the dangerous policies of the Obama Administration. We also know that America's armed forces are the greatest fighting force and the greatest force for good the world has ever known. The Alliance for a Strong America will advocate for the policies necessary to protect the nation, and ensure that these issues are part of our national discussion in the coming years and beyond.
Rachel Maddow reviews the recent history of failed Liz Cheney political endeavors and marvels at Dick Cheney's apparently lack of awareness of his lack of credibility in offering foreign policy advice, particularly on dealing with matters in Iraq.
Barton Gellman, author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” talks with Rachel Maddow about whether Dick Cheney has an audience in the Republican Party and how he continues to try to influence foreign policy despite his disastrous record.
Jay Carney Had The Perfect Response To Dick Cheney On Iraq
White House press secretary Jay Carney (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
By Igor Bobic Posted: 06/18/2014 2:28 pm EDT Updated: 06/18/2014 4:59 pm EDT
Asked Wednesday if he had any response to criticism by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz that no president had done worse in office than Barack Obama, White House press secretary Jay Carney delivered the perfect reply.
"Which president was he talking about?" he deadpanned at his final White House briefing.
"It's always good to hear from former Vice President Cheney," he added.
"He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America," they added.
Departing from Carney's stone-faced approach, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the Senate floor [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/18/harry-reid-dick-cheney_n_5507113.html ] to lambaste the former vice president for doling out advice about a costly conflict that many believe was a misguided effort engineered by the Bush administration.
"If there's one thing this country does not need, is that we should be taking advice from Dick Cheney on wars," Reid said. "Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history. To the architects of the Iraq War who are now so eager to offer their expert analysis, I say, Mr. President, thanks, but no thanks. Unfortunately, we have already tried it your way and it was the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country."
Cheney Talks About His New Heart: ‘Everyday Is A Day I Never Expected To See’
by Alex Pappas 10:28 PM 06/24/2014
McLEAN, Va. — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had a heart transplant after leaving the White House, says he is grateful to be alive, as “everyday is a day I never expected to see.”
“I was in a near death condition in the summer of 2010 — 17 months after I left the White House,” Cheney said in a wide-ranging video interview with The Daily Caller this week at his home in Virginia. “I got a new heart. And everyday I wake up with a smile on my face, grateful for a donor, and medical technology, that made it possible for me to have an extension on life.”
Cheney, who called the heart transplant a “whole new lease on life,” said his “health is excellent” now.
“I am very very grateful,” he added.
Cheney, who splits his time between Wyoming and Washington D.C., is doing interviews to promote the Alliance for a Strong America, the new group he and his daughter, Liz, are forming to “advocate for a restoration of American strength and power.”
As portions of Iraq are overtaken by the terrorists with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Cheney has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration for withdrawing all of America’s troops from the country and not leaving any remaining forces.
Asked if he has spoken to President George W. Bush about the recent developments in Iraq, Cheney wouldn’t divulge how the former president, who doesn’t typically speak out on current events, feels.
“He’s got feelings about it, obviously,” Cheney said. “But those are private conversations. And he generally has pursued a policy of not criticizing his successor. That’s his choice.”
“I face no such limits,” Cheney continued. “So I’m perfectly prepared to speak out. And the organization Liz and I have set up and will be very active in is specifically designed to be able to get those issues front and center before the American people, and to help organize efforts to guarantee that the policy weaknesses of the Obama administration don’t continue.”
Cheney said he and his wife had dinner with Bush about a month ago.
Rachel Maddow criticizes right-wing media for searching for bad news in an arrest in the Benghazi attacks, and American media broadly for re-engaging so-called experts on Iraq with terrible track records, and Congress for not taking its role seriously.