The Robots of the Right

Quick: What’s the difference between a robot and a sentient being?

Answer: if you know a robot’s programming, you can  predict with certainty their action in the face of any given stimuli. Case in point [emphasis added]:

Book bombshell: Obama canceled Bin Laden ‘kill’ raid three times at Jarrett’s urging

Published: 9:10 PM 07/29/2012
By David Martosko
Executive Editor

At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL mission, according to an explosive new book scheduled for release August 21. The Daily Caller has seen a portion of the chapter in which the stunning revelation appears.

In ”Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,“ Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the “kill” mission in January 2011, again in February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.

Miniter, a two-time New York Times best-selling author, cites an unnamed source with Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.

Uh, Paris Hilton and Snooki are both “New York Times best-selling authors.” I wouldn’t believe them if they came up with such allegations, but let’s see who “Richard Miniter” is, shall we?

New York Times best-selling author

Wikipedia:

In 1989, he was a summer fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies. He later worked as an environmental policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. From 1992 to 1994, Miniter was an associate producer of the PBS talk show TechnoPolitics. In 1996, he produced a radio series profiling female entrepreneurs, Enterprising Women, that was distributed to more than a hundred radio stations in the United States.  He has also been fellow and senior editor of the Hudson Institute.

Institute for Humane Studies is Charles Koch’s pet and first “foundation.” You know, like Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, both of which came from their original Koch parent “Citizens for a Sound Economy.”  Eric O’Keefe — currently heading the Sam Adams Alliance, and formerly President of Americans for Limited Government — sits on its board of directors.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute comes of the same ideological parentage. Here was their “journalism fellowship” awardee (cash) for 1995-1996: Michelle Malkin. CEI gives out a big award every year. In 2006  the winner was John Stossel (formerly of ABC now of Fox) and in 2001, it was Stephen Moore, then of the Cato Institute (Koch controlled) and founder of the “Club for Growth.” Now a Wall Street Journal editorial board member.

Stephen Moore

Speaking of which: [ibid]

Hired by Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley in 2000, Miniter was sent to Brussels as an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal Europe and editor of its weekly “Business Europe” column. He also wrote a weekly column, “The Visible Hand”, for The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com

Or, take board member Thomas Gale Moore (relation? no relation?) of whom SourceWatch says:

Moore is listed as Adjunct Scholar for Cato Institute,  and currently is on the board of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is also associated with The Independent Institute, and Hoover Institution. The tobacco links to Cato and C.E.I. are well documented, and do not need repetition — just click the links provided. The Independent Institute is another Koch-funded organ using tabacco-techniques of the white lab coats to dissemble about global warming, of which Moore is an identified flack. Remember, Koch is an OIL company, even if they loan troops for tobacco battles. The evidence of this report is that Moore is corrupt, and was so on the day his name was listed on this report. Funders to Moore’s various institutes include the “usual suspects” Olin-Bradley-Koch-Scaife, et al.

Bobby Bork

Hudson Institute? Wikipedia lists some current and former board members which I’ve edited down a bit for clarity:

Notable past and present trustees, fellows and advisors
Politicians who have been affiliated with Hudson include former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle and Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels who served as Hudson’s President and CEO from 1987 to 1990.
* Robert Bork
* Pierre S. du Pont, IV (emeritus)
* Alexander Haig (emeritus)
* Donald Kagan (emeritus)
* I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (resigned from his position as a senior advisor after his convictions in United States v. Libby)
* Betsy McCaughey
* Richard Perle
* Former “Drug Czar” John Walters, Executive Vice President

Interesting pedigree our “best selling” author has, isn’t it? Here’s his first two books, the latter being his first “best seller”:  (Wikipedia, ibid.):

The Myth of Market Share

Miniter’s first book, The Myth of Market Share, was published in 2002 by Crown Publishing, an imprint of Random House. The book asserts that business emphasis on achieving a particular level of market share is wrong-headed and distracts from profit-seeking.  According to a Washington Post review, the book “although at times repetitious… makes it clear why there is zero correlation between profitability and market share.”

Losing bin Laden

In 2003, Miniter’s Losing bin Laden was published. The book is the result of eighteen months of reporting from Khartoum, Cairo, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.. It offers an account of United States policy relating to Al Qaeda and bin Laden during the Clinton administration. According to George Will,

Miniter suggests that the appointment of [Richard] Clarke on May 22, 1998, as the government’s first coordinator of the counterterrorism efforts that were dispersed to 40 agencies, “could have been the beginning of the end of al Qaeda. But the lack of presidential leadership, government inertia and bureaucratic squabbling often got in the way.”

Awww. Losing bin Laden was all Clinton’s fault! Oh, and a properly capitalist piece on making as much money as one possibly can. Gee. Wikipedia continues:

Shadow War: The Untold Story of How America is Winning the War on Terror became his second New York Times bestseller, debuting at number seven on the November 7, 2004 edition of the newspaper’s non-fiction bestseller list…

In other words, his Wikipedia entry was probably written by himself or his publicist. Real encyclopedeists don’t write like that.

Notice any pattern here? How about “Bin Laden was CLINTON’s FAULT!” followed by “We’re WINNING the war on terror!”

Now somehow Obama’s GETTING bin Laden is a bad thing, an accidental thing, a questionable thing.

Ham-handed swiftboating from an author of questionable objectivity with a long Koch employment and an ideological axe to grind.

And, of course, the professional character assassins at the Daily Caller (funded by Foster Friess) cite the pre-publication copy they’ve mysteriously acquired as a “BOMBSHELL REVELATION!”

Election coming up. Obama’s signature achievement in the “War on Terror” must be disparaged and destroyed. Book comes up with perfect timing from a “New York Times best-selling author.” You know, like Paris Hilton or Snooki or the Kardassian sisters.

Like Michelle Malkin, Miniter also published with Regnery Press (the hyper-partisan publishers of the Right, like Malkin, Coulter and others who got their start at Regnery/Eagle publishing.) Miniter was one of the authors who sued Eagle (Tom Phillips) for allegedly cheating them out of royalties:

In 2007 Miniter and five other conservative authors sued Regnery Press and its parent company Eagle Publishing, claiming that the publisher had sold their books at a steep discount to book club subsidiaries owned by the same parent company, thus depriving the authors of royalties. According to Miniter, “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books…. It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.”

So, the obligatory swiftboating and the suspicious timing of He Who Is Named for That Which He Demonstrably Does Not Possess Cheney snarking this morning –

Cheney: Obama worse than Carter, ‘one of our weakest presidents’
The Hill

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in his first interview since a heart transplant operation in March, blasted President Obama calling him “one of our weakest presidents.”  —  “Obviously, I’m not a big fan of President Obama …

– don’t add up to the mindless programming of a swiftboating operation? There is sentience here? Or, are we dealing with robots, because this was as predictable as the morning dew.

And about as ephemeral.

It’s sort of like the bombshell dropping yesterday that a Koch-funded scientist has now bit the bullet and said, yes, global warming is real and caused by humans. Watts Up With That conveniently publishes another “it’s all FRAUDULENT data and they’re LYING to you about global warming” bombshell in the wee hours this morning. Kind of like the so-called “Climategate” hacking showed up on the eve of the global Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

James Delingpole of the Telegraph (UK) 
who should be publishing his “climate” 
debunking as timely as his banging on 
the so-called “climategate” story of 2009.
UPDATE 7:39 AM PDT: Prediction comes TRUE

I guess it’s a clever manipulation of public opini0n and all — denying that anything’s happening and even if it was we didn’t cause it, and we can’t do anything about it, anyway — but it’s as transparent as cellophane, and just as cheap. And it’s utterly predictable.

Five minutes’ research was all it took to see that Miniter is not a source who should be taken with anything OTHER than a truckload of salt and may well be a professional liar for hire, along the lines of (allegedly) Jerome Corsi, the original swiftboating author, and author of Joe Farah’s WorldNutDaily book “Where’s The Birth Certificate?”

Paid for by WorldNutDaily readers

And, of course, the usual cattle-call of catcallers have jumped on the story, to drive it to the top of the Memeorandum page, so that the political talk shows can bloviate all day about it, without a single one taking either the Daily Caller or Miniter as needing to prove their credibility on their swiftboating attack.

But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

They’re not evil robots.

Just completely predictable. They even manufacture the facts they need for the story timing they require.

But hey, he’s a New York Times best-selling author. Like Kim Kardassian.

Life ain’t that neat. As Leonard says in “North By Northwest”:

Call it my woman’s intuition, if you will. But I’ve never trusted neatness. Neatness is always the result of deliberate planning. 

North By Northwest

But I’m sure there’s a convenient and facile explanation as to why I’m obviously wrong.

That’s predictable too.

Courage.

====================

UPDATE 2:29 PM PDT:  I neglected to mention how “cozy” this all is.

Neil Patel, Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, is the “silent partner” in The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson being the public face. Patel is neighbors with Cheney in Jackson Hole, Wyoming’s “Millionaire Acres,” and HIS Jackson neighbor, Foster Friess, is the cash behind the Daily Caller — to the tune of six figures, and edging towards seven figures.

And we know that Cheney is back in the Hole, because he held a private fundraiser for Mitt Romney at his home just a couple weeks ago, not much covered by the press.

So, it sure is cozy how Cheney’s first interview after his new “heart” exactly coincides with the Daily Caller’s attack on Obama, both suggesting that Obama is such a “weak” president (evidently because he only killed Osama bin Laden once).  As all good deer hunters know, it’s less important to stalk your prey until you have a clean shot than to blunder loudly through the forest, shooting at everything you see or hear. And, slaughterer of seventy hand-raised “hunting preserve” pheasants in a morning and countless equally “cunning” quail in an afternoon, Dick Cheney knows all about hunting. As does the Daily Caller know all about “journalism” — and not, as some might claim, about a concerted campaign and primary mission of character assassination of targeted “opposition” leaders as a tactic to win elections.

About these ads