Naughty or Nice: Administration Hands Iran a Christmas Gift [Dan from NY]

Dan from NY:

After reading this story, and watching the embedded video, you’ll be asked to participate in a brief survey and asked a few simple questions. 1) Do you smell something fishy? 2) Based on President Obama’s decision in this case, do you still think there’s a chance in Hell he’d ever attack Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons?

December 08, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Official Confirms Authenticity of Iranian TV Images Showing Lost U.S. Drone

A senior U.S. official has confirmed to Fox News that images aired by Iranian state television do in fact show the secret U.S. drone that went down last week in eastern Iran.

"Yep, that's it," the official told Fox News. "And it's intact."

U.S. officials had been expecting the video to appear. The footage, which shows the aircraft intact, confirms the Iranians have custody of the drone but appears to refute Iranian claims that it shot down the RQ-170 drone.

With early knowledge that the aircraft had likely remained intact, the senior U.S. official also told Fox News that President Obama was presented with three separate options for retrieving or destroying the drone. The president ultimately decided not to proceed with any of the plans because it could have been seen as an act of war, the official told Fox News.

Among the options the U.S. considered were sending in a special-ops team to retrieve the drone; sending in a team to blow up the aircraft; and launching an airstrike to destroy it.

NATO initially said the drone may have been one that was flying a mission over western Afghanistan before operators "lost control" of it. Officials have since acknowledged that the drone was part of a joint CIA-military reconnaissance mission.

One official told Fox News on Thursday that the incident is a huge loss and makes the top-secret helicopter tail lost during the Usama bin Laden raid in Pakistan "look like a pittance." The official said there are real fears the Iranians will share this technology with the Russians and the Chinese, in addition to using it themselves.

There's a good reason that the Democrat Party has, since the days of James Earl Carter, been known as The Party of Weakness™.

It's official: we're in the midst of Jimmy Carter's second term

Welcome back, Carter! Does this scene look familiar?

Regarding Iran, remember when then-presidential candidate Obama's website read as follows: "Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions"?

That kind of tough talk really showed the Mullahs, eh?

In related news, I believe I've come up with an excellent proxy for the level of economic distress felt around the world thanks to our feckless Democrat leaders. I call it O-FAIL, which stands for the Obama Financial Anxiety Index Level™.

O-FAIL takes all of the world's instability, hysteria, deficit spending, money printing, fears of energy disruption, terrorism and war -- and encapsulates them into a single, easy-to-understand number.

The higher O-FAIL gets, the worse things are around the world. Check out the O-FAIL index. You can see that over the past couple of years, immediately after the election of Barack Obama, it began going parabolic.

O-FAIL is also known as the price of gold.

The last time it was this high, in inflation-adjusted terms, one James Earl Carter was President.

Carter's second term -- confirmed.


Update: SCOAMF's Gallup Job Approval Falls Below Carter's!

Welcome to the New Middle East, or What I Like to Call "The Obama Caliphate"

Perhaps some Democrat foreign policy expert -- if there is such a thing -- can explain "The Obama Doctrine" to me. Let's review, shall we?

• Tunisia - democratic elections in this once-peaceful Mediterranean state have installed an Islamist party. Curiously, the aptly named State Department blog ("DipNote") congratulated the country's new extremist overlords.

• Libya - a NATO-supported rebel force helped defeat the terrorist dictator Muammar Gaddafi, but also left the country in control of one Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, who has declared his government's "fealty to Shariah, Islam's brutally repressive, totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine."

• Egypt - once the peaceful ally of both Israel and the United States, the overthrow of President Mubarak was quickly and publicly supported by President Obama. In Mubarak's place, a hard-core Islamist leadership has arisen under the direction of the feared Muslim Brotherhood. The country's downtrodden Coptic Christian community is also being systematically eliminated, the hallmark of religous governments in majority Islamic countries.

• Syria - a similar anti-government rebellion in Syria was curiously ignored by the administration, leading to the slaughter of at least 3,000 civilians by Iran's puppet dictator Bashar al-Assad.

• Iran - Likewise, a liberal, democratic revolt in Iran against the country's extremist leaders -- the so-called "Green Revolution" -- was brutally repressed with nary a word from President Obama. The country's thinly veiled pursuit of nuclear warheads therefore continues apace.

• Iraq - is slated for abandonment by the end of the year to the tender mercies of Iran's Mullahs (coincidentally, just in time for the 2012 campaign)

• Israel - our most steadfast ally in the entire world was told in no uncertain terms by President Obama to unilaterally withdraw to its 1967 borders, otherwise known as the "Holocaust lines".

We are witnessing something historic. But not-in-a-good-way historic. The die has been cast for a new and even more hyper-violent Middle East.