RECKONING THE RAINBOW PRESIDENT

Ever get that sinking feeling that some people would rather spend their entire life chasing rainbows than accept the reality that a rainbow is merely an arc of colored light in the sky caused by refraction of the sun's rays by rain. There is no distinction to the rainbow whether this is caused by clean rain or polluted rain caused by a myriad of human and geological events.

This immense, curved spectrum of light appears only when both the elements of sunshine and rainfall present. As the sunlight enters the falling raindrops, it breaks up into its true colors of red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet. These colors are always arranged according to their wavelengths, with red being at one end of the spectrum, and violet at the other. Once inside the droplet, the particles of colored light bounce from side to side, reflect off of the far side of the droplet, exit the droplet, and reassemble, according to their wavelengths, to form a rainbow.

Simply because one happens to be standing in the right place at the right time, when both elements necessary to form a rainbow are present, does not mean that one will actually see a rainbow dazzle. For the human eye to see these multi-colored bands, ranging from red to violet, her body must be strategically positioned between the sun and the rain, with his back to the sun.

If the sun, the eye, and the center of the rainbow's arc are not in a straight line, the show is over, before it began. This explains why we only see rainbows in the early morning or late afternoon...

it is physically impossible for us to align our eyes with the sun at other times of day, as it is high above our heads! Logically, a morning rainbow appears when the sun shines in the east, and the rain falls in the west, and an afternoon rainbow appears when the sun shines in the west, and the rain falls in the east. Interesting stuff.

From Dr. Daniel Pipes:

POTUS BARACK OBAMA'S assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John O. Brennan, conveniently outlined the administration's present and future policy mistakes in a speech on August 6, "A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans."

To start with, his address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, has an unusual tenor. "Sycophantic" is the word that springs to mind, as Brennan ninety times in five thousand words invokes either "President Obama," "he," "his," or "the president." Disturbingly, Brennan ascribes virtually every thought or policy in his speech to the wisdom of the One. This cringe-inducing lecture reminds one of a North Korean functionary paying homage to the Dear Leader.

Specifics are no better. Most fundamentally, Brennan calls for appeasing terrorists: "Even as we condemn and oppose the illegitimate tactics used by terrorists, we need to acknowledge and address the legitimate needs and grievances of ordinary people those terrorists claim to represent." Which legitimate needs and grievances, one wonders, does he think Al-Qaeda represents?

Brennan carefully delineates a two-fold threat, one being "Al-Qaida and its allies" and the other "violent extremism." But the former, self-evidently, is a subset of the latter. This elementary mistake undermines his entire analysis.

He also rejects any connection between "violent extremism" and Islam: "Using the legitimate term jihad, which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself."

This passage regurgitates a theory of radical Islam that, according to Lt. Colonel Joseph C. Myers of the U.S. Air Command and Staff College, "is part of a strategic disinformation and denial and deception campaign" developed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Discredited in 2007 by Robert Spencer, the theory distinguishes between good jihad and bad jihad and denies any connection between Islam and terrorism.

It's a deeply deceptive interpretation intended to confuse non-Muslims and win time for Islamists. The George W. Bush administration, for all its mistakes, did not succumb to this ruse. But Brennan informs us that his boss now bases U.S. policy on it.

As has been pointed out many a time in many a place, the problem is "The One." Right at the top, Barack Obama, that is. As a candidate, in discussing foreign affairs, he used endless platitutes. On Iran, for example, he could not get beyond "carrots and sticks," which he repeated again and again. He made extraordinary comments about Hezbollah and Lebanon that even caught the attention of David Brooks of the New York Times. He sounds a all times like a moderately adept debater who thrives on the fruits of platitude, chasing rainbows in the false churlish world of his own imagination.

Read the remainder of the report from Dr. Daniel Pipes.

We at the Bellicose Augur agree that Obama and Brennan are up to no good with their soporific notions of appeasing the enemy, or worse, in conducting pure acts of treason to gum up the works for future service, but we strongly disagree that the Bush administration stayed free of such conflated and confused thinking themselves. Did the Bush White House stop or place a moratorium on Islamic immigration onto our shores? No, it did not. Instead, it flung open the doors to Islamic immigration from around the globe, cocksure that once on American soil, followers of Allah would morph into Joe and Flo Crossbearer, and play peacefully with its infidel neighbors. Oops, didn't happen.

Did the Bush White draw distinctions between our system and the system of Islamic nations in terms of human and natural rights, as diminished as these rights are becoming even here with the encroachment of government from both ends of the sledge hammer? No, it most certainly did not. A martial code of silence was in full effect. Echoes of Bush's "Islam is a Religion of Peace" non-sense still bounce like bricks with a painful thud inside my head. Lies. More lies. And those damned lies.

Bush was obviously in bed with the Saudis who are spearheading massive spending ventures, funding Wahhabi schools from kindergarten upwards, erecting virilent and robust mosques in a neighborhood near you, and in a slick move politician types of every stripe master with a wink and a nod, these Saudi princes pour concrete and glass into new Islamic Studies wings at universities in every state of this formerly great nation of ours while the Bush administration did nothing but fire whistleblowers who dared contradict its standing (and sitting) policy of soft appeasement of this very real enemy. All in the name of oil and business as usual. To now hold Scotland accountable for its release of the Lockerbie bomber is a joke.