U.S. Army PFC. Stephen Martin cleans his weapon inside a small shelter at an observation post near Combat Outpost Munoz in Paktika province, Afghanistan, Nov. 15, 2009. Martin is assigned to Company B, 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith
Community organizers, government health care, perpetual welfare, victimization, and rewarding failure will never improve America.
Only unselfish, hard-working, devoted, self-sufficient Americans can improve America.
But as president, Mr. Obama has neglected the court. He has played only seven known games of basketball since taking office, compared with 25 rounds of golf, a sport he picked up about a decade ago when he was an Illinois state senator. That’s more golf than former President George W. Bush played in two terms, according to CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who tracks presidential trivia.
And Nero fiddled while his empire burned and his people suffered and died…
So, leaking characterizations is bad? Someone call the New York Times, The One does not approve of leaks. I am sure they don’t have anything in the works but it would be wise to warn the allies in the MSM.
Can anyone show me where Obama was ever concerned about the leaks during the Bush administration that actually put people in danger and compromised national security? I can wait.
Obama, speaking to CBS in Beijing, says he’s “furious” about the stream of leaks characterizing the Afghanistan deliberations.
THE PRESIDENT: “I think I am angrier than Bob Gates about it, partly because we have these deliberations in the Situation Room for a reason – because we are making decisions that are life-and-death, that affect how our troops will be able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be releasing information during the course of deliberation — where we haven’t made final decisions yet — I think is not appropriate.”
CHIP REID: “Firing offense??”
THE PRESIDENT: “Absolutely”
What’s odd about this is that many of the leaks (though certainly not all) have seemed deliberate, in tandem with Flickr photo releases from the meetings and in line with a message that Obama is considering deeply. And indeed, leaking has been a signature of the transition from the Plouffe/campaign era to a governing era run by Rahm Emanuel, who talks frequently to the press and whose hiring was one of the first major Obama leaks. Leaks from more senior officials make lower-level staffers, in turn, feel that it’s not actually a firing offense.
‘This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision,” President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general’s announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.
No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war…
Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.
Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.
This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.
In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.
Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be…
KSM’s lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.
Then again, that may be exactly what the President and his Attorney General wish to happen.
It’s not as if the President has been truthful or consistent during his occupancy of the White House on these serious matters. Just look at his previous comments on trying terrorists:
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. – Dwight David Eisenhower
President Obama and his merry band of Statists idiots have failed. They have failed – again and again, and it will continue.
At some point you chowder-heads who voted for this amateur are going to see the damage he is doing to the country. He’s created more debt than EVERY PRESIDENT WHO CAME BEFORE HIM COMBINED.
I don’t expect you O-bots to understand the damage he is doing to our military, maybe because you don’t care. I don’t know.
I know the president doesn’t really care about our service men and women and their mission. He doesn’t care the same way other presidents cared about our men and women in uniform at home or abroad. He showed it before the campaign. He pretended to be something else during the campaign. He has faked and postured his way from Dover to Arlington to Fort Hood attempting to convince the nation that he has their best interests in mind and supports their mission.
And now as ‘His Ditherness’ struggles to find the lint in his bellybutton, our finest, our bravest, our most patriotic sit, wait, bleed, and die while the “smart power” you voted in as your new ‘American Idol’ makes a f’ing decision about the “necessary war”, the central front on the War on Terror, that he chided President Bush and John McCain over. You know the war that Candidate Obama thought was sooo important:
“His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.”
I am sure the ripples of HOPE® and CHANGE® are reaching our troops here and across the ocean in the dusty military posts, forts, and bases knowing that Barack Hussein Obama – mmm, mmm, mmm – is on his way to save the day with his own plan.
Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday…
Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to craft a new war strategy and planned troop buildup.
Obama “struggles” because he has no f’ing backbone and no clue about fighting for anything more than a community center or the Olympic Games.
He struggles because he doesn’t trust his military leaders. The people in our country who have led lives of substance, sacrifice, and purpose for decades already.
Obama’s never done anything of substance beyond be a lawyer and politician – two of the lowest professions possible falling in right next to prostitutes and thieves, but wait, I repeat myself.
It takes more to be a member of today’s military and face the uncertainties of war than it does to demagogue to the likes of SEIU, ACORN, Organizing for America, Egyptians, Germans, and guilty white Americans, when you yourself have stated you have not done anything of measure.
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So, it comes as no surprise our Commander-in-Chief is already looking to run away instead of fighting against evil ruthless radical religious zealots who torture and terrorize innocents in the name of Allah:
President Barack Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan will include a plan for “how we’re going to get folks out” after a secure environment can be passed to the Afghan government, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
“We have been there for eight years. And we’re not going to be there forever,” Gibbs said. “It’s important to fully examine not just how we’re going to get folks in but how we’re going to get folks out.”
Gibbs spoke en route to Alaska, where the president stopped at an Air Force base in Anchorage before traveling on to Tokyo for his maiden trip to Asia, which will take him to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
The president “has asked for, and will want, benchmarks to evaluate our progress,” Gibbs said. “That’s part of his desire to get a sense of where we are rather than committing to an open-ended conflict.”
But whatever the reason, this man is making a mockery of our country and our military. He is destroying our economy. He is destroying our way of life. He is rewarding failure and taking away our liberty. He is destroying 230+ years of real human progress. And he intended to do it ever since he fell in with the pathetic refuse that surrounds him.
Osama bin Laden was right when he called the America a “Paper Tiger” in his declaration of war against our nation, he knew more about the majority of us than we would like to believe.
The impressionable useful idiots in our nation who believe HOPE® and CHANGE® are actually something more than novelty.
As long as the Democrats, Statists, Liberals, Progressives, and sheep of this nation lead us, a paper tiger is all we will be and we will continue our decline because of them.
Democrats have never been good at going after the important threat:
November 7, 2009
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DROP THE BALL: “While DHS was busy putting tea parties and anyone who dares fly the official military Gadsen flag on the domestic terrorist watch list, a real terrorist was spouting off online, glorifying suicide bombings and our mission in Iraq. I mean, I’m sure if I drink enough I might be able to understand the perception that a bunch of middle-class people peacefully dissenting with certain Washington policies are way more dangerous than a dude who talked about terrorist stuff on social sites and had gotten authorities’ attention six months ago.”
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “Ah, but those middle class protesters are a threat to politicians’ power. Terrorists are just a threat to their constituents’ lives. See the difference?” Such a cynic.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Washington Post: Officials may not have heeded warning signs. “Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.” Too busy worrying about Glenn Beck viewers, military veterans, and Tea Party organizers, I guess.
The plan would fall well short of the 80,000 troops that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, suggested as a “low-risk option” that would offer the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan.
It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a “high-risk” one that called for 20,000 additional troops and a “medium-risk” one that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.
British soldiers at war are an incredible group. Courageous, competent, and committed in very difficult conditions. An email came today from London, from a BBC correspondent who has been to Afghanistan saying that Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid had been killed.
Staff Sgt Schmid, born in Cornwall, lived in Winchester with his five-year-old stepson and wife.
Christina Schmid said: “Oz was a phenomenal husband and loving father who was cruelly murdered on his last day of a relentless five-month tour.
“The pain of losing him is overwhelming. I take comfort knowing he saved countless lives with his hard work.”
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thomson, commanding officer of 2 Rifles Battle Group, said: “Staff Sgt Oz Schmid was simply the bravest and most courageous man I have ever met.
“No matter how difficult or lethal the task which lay in front of us, he was the man who only saw solutions.
“He saved lives in 2 Rifles time after time and for that he will retain a very special place in every heart of every rifleman in our extraordinary battle group.”
Lt Col Gareth Bex, commanding officer of the counter IED (improvised explosive devices) task force, said Staff Sgt Schmid had been a “legend”.
He added: “Staff Sgt Oz Schmid was a brilliant operator and a superb soldier. We loved him like a brother. He was a much adored member of our close knit family.
“With his tousled hair and boyish grin his effervescent presence was always good for morale and he had an infectious enthusiasm.
“His courage was not displayed in a fleeting moment of time – he stared death in the face on a daily basis.
“Many soldiers and ordinary Afghans owe their lives to Staff Sgt Schmid’s gallant actions and his sacrifice will never be forgotten.”
Since late this summer General Stanley McChrystal has been asking for more troops for Afghanistan lest we lose the war. Early last month those sentiments were expressed in a formal request for 40,000 additional troops. General Patraeus and Secretary of Defense Gates have publicly endorsed Gen. McChrystal’s request.
Since that time you have been considering whether or not to provide those troops and whether or not the use of those troops in a counter-insurgency strategy — similar to that employed in Iraq — is wise or not. If press reports are to be believed, then top members of your administration have serious doubts as to whether or not the strategy as outlined by Gen. McChrystal and endorsed by Gen. Patraeus and Sec. Gates will work.
Your inaction on this request speaks volumes and one can only draw one logical inference from it: you do not trust the judgment of Gen. Patraeus, Sec. Gates, or Gen. McChrystal.
If you trusted their expertise, then you would have immediately begun to implement their strategy.
Since it is glaringly obvious that you do not trust the judgment of your top commanders in the field or of your own Sec. of Defense, then why don’t you fire them?
If they are so wrong, then they should be fired.
Personally, I don’t think Obama has the stones in his shorts to fire anyone (his wife on the other hand…).
Obama has never had to do anything truly important that included personal responsibility and risk, that is why he is unable to make decisions.
It’s ‘Petraeus’ just in case your internal spellcheck rang.
As a military brat, a Marine, and a civilian I have always distrusted the Democrat Party and their values.
Once again, they prove just how f’d up their priorities are:
Twice as many Democrats say health care reform should be President Obama’s top priority as say the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be his top concern, according to a new Gallup poll.
Gallup asked people this question: “Which of the following should be Barack Obama’s top priority as president — the economy, health care, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy, the federal budget deficit, or something else…?”
The numbers help explain Obama’s slowness in reaching a decision on what to do in Afghanistan. There simply aren’t very many people in the president’s party who believe the war should be his top priority — just half as many as those who say health care should be his top concern. When it comes to pressure for a decision coming from his own party, there just isn’t much.
When I see numbers like that I don’t see an explanation of Obama’s slowness. I see their attitude towards our military, their sacrifices and the what they really believe when it comes to helping others.
President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.
CBS’ Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, “Today – Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24.
Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”
This news comes on the heels of today’s news that Obama played golf with a woman — chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes — for the first time since taking office.
The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.
The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.
One of the reasons why President Obama may be hesitating to commit fully to a renewed Afghan front is that he is worried that political opportunists might seek to gain advantage by loud rhetoric that unfairly simplifies the bad and worse choices, that he, like all other presidents in time of war, are confronted with.
In other words, he fears someone very much like an on-the-rise Barack Obama himself—who in 2007 in loud fashion demanded that all combat brigades leave Iraq by March 2008 and then flat-out declared to the nation that “the surge is not working” a mantra for months posted on his website until Trotskyized in summer 2008. Ditto all that with Guantanamo, elements of homeland security, and Iran—and one can see that Obama knows first-hand the opportunities for demagogic and unprincipled political ankle-biting that a decisive wartime President invites. After all, what President, after making a tough decision to surge into Afghanistan, wants a young charismatic rival barnstorming the nation, without evidence assuring the public that “the surge is not working!”
NAWA, Afghanistan — Before a battalion of U.S. Marines swooped into this dusty farming community along the Helmand River in early July, almost every stall in the bazaar had been padlocked, as had the school and the health clinic. Thousands of residents had fled. Government officials and municipal services were nonexistent. Taliban fighters swaggered about with impunity, setting up checkpoints and seeding the roads with bombs.
In the three months since the Marines arrived, the school has reopened, the district governor is on the job and the market is bustling. The insurgents have demonstrated far less resistance than U.S. commanders expected. Many of the residents who left are returning home, their possessions piled onto rickety trailers, and the Marines deem the central part of the town so secure that they routinely walk around without body armor and helmets.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is prepared to run a sharply negative campaign if that’s what it takes to win reelection next year, with a top adviser predicting that the Nevada Democrat will “vaporize” his Republican challengers with attack ads.
Trailing in the polls and under constant attack from the GOP, Reid’s campaign has just launched a warm-and-fuzzy million-dollar ad campaign to reintroduce the veteran senator to his constituents. But Reid’s team also wants to be the one that introduces lesser-known opponents to the electorate — and will be ready, when the time comes, to unleash a torrent of ads branding challengers as untested and unprepared for the job.
Now in the campaign’s sites: Sue Lowden, a wealthy gaming executive, former state senator and former chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party, and Danny Tarkanian, a Las Vegas businessman and the son of legendary basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian.
“I expect him to vaporize Lowden or Tarkanian or whoever is the opponent,” said a Reid adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss campaign strategy.
The Reid adviser said the campaign’s oppo files on Lowden and Tarkanian are “growing by the day” — and that the only question for the campaign is when to start using them: Wait until the GOP has a nominee, or start tearing the candidates down in advance of the Republican primary.
He has to do this because he cannot defend his record, his votes, his statements, nor his ignorance of what the people of Nevada want.
Reid, his advisers say, has learned his lesson from Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who lost his seat in 2004 after failing to push back hard enough against intense GOP criticism.
While our Narcissus-in-Chief is frozen gazing at his perfect image in his private pool, choices have to be made in Afghanistan. Consider the following…
Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.
Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, “in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.
Why does the White House want the military to keep quiet about Iranian connections to the Taliban? They want to keep enough political support in the US for direct talks with the mullahs. That support will evaporate if the military starts drawing clear connections between Tehran and the Taliban, especially with al-Qaeda as its ally in Pakistan.
Iran was at war with the US in Iraq. They are at war with us in Afghanistan. Iran does nothing but preach our demise and continues to flaunt their “peaceful” nuclear program in the face of the world.
American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban.
Granted this is a common feeling about being deployed in combat, however, we have the most pathetic excuse for a leader as our C-in-C we’ve ever had (yes, even Jimmah. Carter at least served his country and not just his community before taking the reigns).
Let’s take a short step back in time, when Obama tried to convince people he had a pair when it came to being a military leader.
His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.
I love it when Nancy Pelosi and the other nancys in the Democrat party make themselves look a bunch of uninformed tools:
Democrats have found someone worth fighting in Afghanistan. His name is Stan McChrystal.The other night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went after the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, “with all due respect,” for supposedly disrespecting the chain of command. Around the Congressional Democratic Caucus, we’re told Members refer to General McChrystal as “General MacArthur,” after the commander in Korea sacked by Harry Truman.
White House aides have fanned these flames with recent leaks to the media that “officials are challenging” his assessment asking for more troops. In the last two days, the White House National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense have both suggested that the general should keep his mouth shut. President Obama called him in Friday for a talking-to on the tarmac at Copenhagen airport.
Though a decorated Army four-star officer, the General’s introduction to Beltway warfare is proving to be brutal. To be fair, Gen. McChrystal couldn’t know that his Commander in Chief would go wobbly so soon on his commitment to him as well as to his own Afghan strategy when he was tapped for the job in AprilWe’re told by people who know him that Gen. McChrystal “feels terrible” and “had no intention whatsoever of trying to lobby and influence” the Administration. His sense of bewilderment makes perfect sense anywhere but in the political battlefield of Washington. He was, after all, following orders…
The White House told the Pentagon to hold off asking for troops and Gen. McChrystal not to testify to Congress. Remarkably, President Obama mused on the Sunday talks shows, “Are we doing the right thing?”
Then Gen. McChrystal gave a speech last Thursday before the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. It was scheduled and approved by the Pentagon weeks before the Afghan political jitters seized official Washington. The General was hardly incendiary.
The President’s very public waver is already doing strategic harm. The Taliban are getting a morale boost and claiming victory, while our allies in Europe have one more reason to rethink their own deployments. Such a victory, as the head of the British army Sir David Richards warned on Sunday, would have an “intoxicating effect” on extremist Islam around the world.
Commanders in Chief can change their minds. George W. Bush waited too long to embrace the “surge.” He had private doubts when the casualties also surged in 2007, but he gave the new approach a chance to succeed. Mr. Obama is blinking even before all the additional troops he ordered to Afghanistan have had time to deploy to the theater…
Gen. McChrystal’s liberal critics also have very short memories. In 2003, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki clashed with his superiors by saying many more troops were needed to pacify Iraq. He became a Democratic hero and is now Mr. Obama’s Veterans Secretary. In this case, Gen. McChrystal has become a political target merely for taking at face value Mr. Obama’s order to fight the war properly. His superiors, the Central Commander David Petraeus and Adm. Fallon, back him, but can hardly be said to question civil control of the military.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." - The 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution
In Helmand, a model for success?
