Focus on the sheer hypocrisy of a liberal president who embraced his party’s anti-war platform now using military might in an oil-rich country, citing a humanitarian rationale. Should not the same questions asked of George W. Bush also be applied to Barack Obama?

In a speech earlier this week, President Obama cited both U.S. interests and preventing a massacre at the hands of Libya’s Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Well, welcome to the president’s seat, Mr. Obama. It’s a lot tougher to actually do something to stop dictators than rattling off feel-good buzz words like “engagement” or “dialogue” that are so frequently repeated in a campaign. (Speaking of meaningless prattle, even Dove in Chief John Kerry stated the importance of regime change in Libya, without actually calling it that, mind you, “The justification is clear and compelling,” Kerry says, due to, “the promise that the pro-democracy movement holds for transforming the Arab world.” Wow, that guy knows no shame.)

But what of the massacres in Syria this past week, or in Bahrain in February, or those frequently occuring in Iran? Are they not also massacres worthy of our involvement? If Libya, why not them? And if we can act in Libya for hundreds of innocent deaths, why were we wrong to intervene in Iraq, which under Saddam Hussein had caused tens of thousands of innocent deaths?

And why is it that when George W. Bush invaded Iraq he was “creating terrorists,” or when Ronald Reagan assisted Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union he was unwittingly “creating terrorists,” but when Barack Obama aides Libyan rebels who have admitted to fighting the United States in Iraq, he’s not also, you know, “creating terrorists!”

Now there’s debate on Capital Hill on if we should arm the Libyan rebels — stinger missiles anyone?

Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

Presidents Bush (43) and Reagan were regularly lambasted by the media after 9-11 for supposedly not understanding with whom they were getting into a political bed. Yet, only now after the bombing has started do we discover that the Obama administration has just begun to do research on the rebel groups.

[Washington Post] The Obama administration has sent teams of CIA operatives into Libya in a rush to gather intelligence on the identities and capabilities of rebel forces opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, according to U.S. officials.

Where’s that “rush to war” talk now?

There’s no good outcome in Libya right now, but all things being equal with Gaddafi gone there’s at least a chance for improvement (albeit a chance for Islamic radicals to take over too). And despite all the justifiable criticism above (the Democrat’s hypocrisy) the biggest criticism of all is their waffling.

If we’re going to really intervene then we should really intervene. If we’re going to promote regime change then we should have both the gonads and the strategy to do just that. If we want to prevent massacre we can’t only do it from the air — it didn’t work in 1990s Iraq, it didn’t solely work in Kosovo despite the revisionist history, and it isn’t working in Libya right now. Not alone it won’t. You need boots on the ground. That can be symmetrical, as it was in Iraq, or asymmetrical, as it was in Afghanistan or Poland.

To his credit Barack Obama still has the opportunity to stay the course and get what he wants — assuming he stops the waffling. But in the end my skeptical nature tells me that the hand-wringers will prevail, and he’ll serve us all something that looks like “regime change lite.”

Next up: Watch the Democrats remove Gaddafi from power but leave a vacuum in it’s place. History does repeat itself — first as tragedy, then as hypocrisy.

Do you ever use your debit card for gas purchases, groceries, shopping or maybe a night at dinner where the purchase is more than $50? Think how easy it is, especially in the summer, to spend more than $50 on a gasoline fill up. Well, in the future any debit purchase of more than $50 might be automatically declined by your issuing bank, thanks to Congressional Democrats — particularly Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd — and 12 weak Republicans.

Already in the wake of this 2,000-page Congressional monstrosity, JPMorgan Chase bank is considering either a $100 or even $50 cap on all debit purchases. Hey you don’t mind separately ringing up two to four carts at the grocery store, right!

That’s because the Frank-Dodd financial “reform” act includes a provision to have the Federal Reserve set prices on what merchants can charge for debit-card transactions. This act will cap prices, according to the WSJ, “at 12 cents per transaction, reducing the charges by some $12 billion to $14 billion and in effect transferring the cost of debit cards from the merchants who pay the fees to the consumers who use them.”

The repercussions of Frank-Dodd don’t end there: JPChase Morgan is also ending a variety of reward programs, especially, but not limited to, you guessed it, debit card rewards. This affects the small businesses the most because small business more than any other entity relies on these reward perks to maximize spending and insulate costs. So much for “protecting the little guy,” eh Congress?

Rival Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf wrote in a letter to shareholders that limits of debit card merchants’ fees “make no sense.” He added, “What’s next? Will the government require car dealers to sell a new vehicle for $5,000 or grocers a gallon of milk for 50 cents?”

Bank of America is also contemplating what to do about the proposed caps and has joined the fight against the measure. The banks argue that they could lose $12 billion annually on the fees alone.

But the real loser, as it often is, is the entrepreneur—the very backbone of the nation’s economic recovery. The small business sector, which represents 99.7 percent of all employer firms, and is responsible for having generated 64 percent of new jobs in the past 15 years according to the Small Business Administration, will no doubt see yet another obstacle in its way to economic growth when these rewards programs come to an end.

And as the nation struggles to find creative ways of finding funds for innovative, high-growth companies, taking away a key way for those startups to close their cash gaps is only going to make the cost of doing business seem that much more impossible.

The day the bill passed, last December in the “Lame Duck” Congress, Visa and MasterCard stock tanked by 10%. How do you think these card associations are going to respond? Think they’re just going to sit back and lose money? “But what do Visa or MasterCard have to do with my debit purchases?” you may ask. Take a look at your card again — it most likely has a Visa or MasterCard logo on it, even though it came from an issuing bank. Yeah, Visa and MasterCard don’t charge banks nothin’ to use that logo.

Well, Sens. Frank and Dodd might not understand this but the card-issuing Banks (Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, etc.) and major card associations of Visa and MasterCard aren’t going to be left holding the bag. These banks understand that people like using their debit cards, and if prices are fixed by Congress and nothing changes, then these banks are going to lose money (billions).

But what these Congressional buffoons don’t get is that banks don’t lose money, they make money. That’s all they do, make money. And how much money they make is in part determined by consumers and market forces — we’re the check and balance, not Congress. If consumers think it’s costing them too much to use their debit cards then they stop using them and banks will lower the fees.

Even worse, thanks to Congressional Democrats and their clumsy meddling in our financial market the push away from debit cards will in turn force people to use credit cards — which means those who are poor or who already have bad credit will be driven to far worse options and decisions.

Amazing home-made video of the tsunami in Japan.

“Their struggle is your struggle. If anyone thinks you can somehow thank them for their service, and not support the cause for which they fight – our country – these people are lying to themselves. . . . More important, they are slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to this nation.”

That’s from Lt. Gen. John Kelly, who lost his son, a 2nd Lt., to a land mine in Afghanistan in late 2010. Read the whole heartbreaking story here.