This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Together for eternity

    Hack Stone sends us a link to the story of James Sizemore and Howard Andre who were friends in college and died together as the crew of a Douglas A-26 Invader in Laos in 1969. Last year a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command task force reached the crash site and recovered the two friends. They will be buried side-by-side at Arlington tomorrow;

    “It’s very meaningful. They flew together, they died together and they ought to be buried together,” James Sizemore’s brother Gene Sizemore said.

    But, ya know what sucks? The family had to pay for the traditional aircraft fly-over at the funeral;

    Sequestration forced the men’s families to pay for the traditional flyover — a final [tribute] to the fallen airmen.

    “In our economy, I think there needs to be a fund for funerals just like this,” James Sizemore’s son told News4. “I think that whatever the government is going to do to balance the budget, they should make it a necessary requirement to honor those families.”

    It’s too bad that the government couldn’t find a couple of bucks in their budget for some fuel so that the Air Force could honorably pay their own tribute to the former pilots, but instead had to stick the family with the bill, like your chintzy old uncle. Especially since the last Secretary of Defense used to stick taxpayers with a bill every weekend when he flew home. One trip home might have paid for a year of overflights for our honored dead.

    If this pisses you off enough to do something about it, Warrior Aviation will accept your donation to help the family pay for a flyover of military aircraft by private civilian pilots.

    The folks from Warrior Aviation wrote to clarify;

    The family is NOT being forced to pay for the fly over by The Warrior Flight Team. All the aircraft owners and aircrews ( USAF,USN & USMC vets themselves) are donating there airplanes and time to fly this most honorable mission. Not sure how the media screwed that up so bad but the only thing the family has asked for is donations to the fuel fund for the 10 aircraft involved which is enormous. We are honored and humbled that the family contacted us and all the team jumped at the opportunity to fly this.

  • Obama & military leaders part ways on policy

    The Washington Post has noticed that military leaders and the President aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the use of the military as a means to a political end. That’s probably because the military sees itself as a tool of policy that must be unfettered in order to accomplish the country’s stated goals abroad, while the White House thinks that the use of the military is a means to make domestic points with voters and it’s political base.

    About the Afghanistan surge, the Post writes;

    Obama’s relationship with the military was indelibly shaped early in his presidency by the 2009 debate over whether a troop surge in Afghanistan that his generals were pressing for stood a good chance of turning around the worsening conflict.

    “From his perspective, he trusted the military and they betrayed him,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a blunt assessment that is shared by many in defense and policymaking circles. The president felt boxed into a political corner by leaks about the troop numbers the generals wanted. After that, “I think this White House made it pretty clear that they intended to run all foreign policy from the Executive Office Building.”

    And form the military’s perspective, Obama betrayed the troops by seeking a political compromise on a military solution in Afghanistan. According to campaign-Obama, Afghanistan was the only war worth fighting, but he only gave the commanders half of the troops they told him that they needed to win. The result has been exactly the outcome that those commanders and the CIA predicted – that the troops are currently withdrawing under fire.

    Obama’s recent threat to use force in Syria to make political points without actualy accomplishing in the region has met with criticism from two of his Defense Secretaries, William gates and Leon Panetta;

    Obama’s two former defense secretaries weighed in on the controversy Tuesday night, saying they disagreed with the president’s decision to seek congressional authorization for a strike. While Leon E. Panetta said a cruise missile attack would have been worthwhile, Robert M. Gates said the plan was akin to “throwing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East.”

    “To blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple of days to underscore or validate a point or principle is not a strategy,” Gates said at a forum in Dallas in which the two appeared

    The Post neglects to mention the harsh criticism Panetta heaped on President Obama, the New York Times didn’t;

    Mr. Panetta, also speaking at the forum, said the president should have kept his word after he had pledged action if Syria used chemical weapons.

    “When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word,” Mr. Panetta said.

    “Once the president came to that conclusion, then he should have directed limited action, going after Assad, to make very clear to the world that when we draw a line and we give our word,” then “we back it up,” Mr. Panetta said.

    The Obama/Biden campaign in 2012 leaned heavily on the military’s accomplishments during their first term, and all the while, the administration was planning to balance the federal debt on the backs of the military and on the veterans who gave them their campaign slogans. Loss of money for training and equipment are plunging the military into a hollow force. Steep personnel cuts are causing the military to lose faith in the commitment to them by the government.

    Their inability to negotiate a successful Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the government of Iraq has allowed that country to fall back into a morass of blood of thousands, turning the clock back to the 2006 Sunni/Shiite civil war. The situation there is causing the administration to examine ways they can get US troops back into Iraq.

    From the Post;

    “The U.S. military feels it has been burnt with half-measures,” said Peter J. Munson, a retired Marine officer who most recently served as a senior adviser to a Marine Corps commander. “There is going to be on the part of our senior military leaders an aversion to using force when you don’t have clear ends and escalation can take on a life of its own.”

    Mostly because military solutions shouldn’t be restrained by public opinion polls and shouldn’t be dressed up to look pretty and clean for public consumption.

  • Bear Drops Ditz in the Woods

    In one of those eerie coincidences that leaves one looking around suspiciously while the music track from The Twilight Zone echoes in the brain at 2:00 am, I early this morning finished W.E.B. Griffin’s novel, Covert Warriors. What is so eerie is the premise of the storyline that Vladimir Putin is ingeniously attempting to destabilize America’s place in the world order through infiltrating the American president’s intimate inner circle and influencing his behavior as to make him look inept and possibly unbalanced. Published in 2011 and apparently set a few years earlier, the book has a rather abrupt, unresolved, unsatisfactory ending, leading one to believe that there must be a Volume II in the works.

    The machinations of the fictional Vlad couldn’t more closely parallel current world political events.

    While I’ll stay away from the comparison of mental imbalance, although advanced narcissism is considered a psychiatric disorder, the events of the past few days show solid evidence that Putin has displayed almost Machiavellian skill in manipulating America’s chief community organizer, Little Bo Sheep, into increasingly embarrassing diplomatic and geopolitical missteps that are indeed diminishing this once all-powerful nation in the eyes of the leaders and the peoples of the world. The guy who once famously boasted of bringing a gun to a knife fight seems to have entered this mano-a-mano struggle armed with a flashy political putter while Bad Vlad brought a bear-sized battleaxe. Guess who got cut down to size.

    And if you happen to be one of those blindly loyal Obama worshipers who says, “So what?,” you need to take a look at the real geopolitical consequences of a weak and incompetent American president served by equally weak and incompetent secretaries of state. If you think even more daring and challenging moves of this sort aren’t on that big chessboard the Russians view as the world, you’re eminently qualified for low-information voter status. And you can bet the farm that where the Russians boldly tread, the Chinese will inscrutably follow.

    Admit it: as a nation, we’re embarrassed. We allowed this incompetent, unqualified pretender to greatness to usurp the seat of power because of a misplaced, loopy sense of hope, racial guilt, and racial healing, and now we are paying the easily predicted price. The chilling truth is that we are locked into three more years of such losses before we can even begin to fight back and try to regain our previous preeminence. As the expression goes, we have shown the world our a**, and they’re not buying him.

    Ronald Reagan battled the Soviet bear back through the forests of Eastern Europe and forced it into grumbling, resentful hibernation in its eastern lair. With his ill-advised Russian reset, Obama has freed the bear, and the 21st-century incarnation of that fearsome predator is the Ursus Putinus, who took our clueless ditz of a leader and left him lost in the woods of world power play.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Syria according to Obama

    OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t watch the President last night, but my novelas come on at that hour on Telemundo, so… But I did read the transcript this morning at Fox News. I was hoping that the president would answer some of my questions about his planned assault on the Syrian regime. Unfortunately, he did not. I’d like to know how this attack will make us safer, what the national security interest is in a limited attack on the Assad regime. This is what he said;

    I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike. The purpose of this strike would be to deter Assad from using chemical weapons, to degrade his regime’s ability to use them, and to make clear to the world that we will not tolerate their use.

    But why is it in our “interests” to do all of that? “Because f* you, that’s why” is not a reason. It’s a little arbitrary to say that it’s not OK this time, but was OK all of those other times they’ve used chemical weapons in the last year when they crossed that “red line”. We invaded Iraq and deposed Hussein because we won’t tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction – so if Assad hadn’t got the message yet, he has a comprehension problem. Do I need to remind you that Assad’s father was in the coalition against Hussein in 1991 and Syrian troops accompanied ours into Kuwait?

    Obama goes on to remind us that the troops are out of Iraq and rushing for the exits in Afghanistan on his orders. I’m guessing that’s one of the reasons that he feels a need to use force against Syria because the whole world knows that he doesn’t have the cojones to see a mission through. There are more people dying in Iraq by the month than died while we were still there because we didn’t finish the job when we were there than. The job isn’t done in Afghanistan, mostly because Obama couldn’t properly staff the “surge” in 2009 against the advice of the generals and the CIA. The threat of US military action has no “umph”, largely thanks to the Democrats who fought a political war at home while our troops were fighting a real war overseas giving the enemy aid and comfort from the very beginning.

    The President continues;

    I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo.

    It sounds like we’ll be able to keep our own doctors and healthcare costs won’t go up, and no taxes on the middle class promises, doesn’t it? The problem is that all military actions have a way of changing despite what politicians want to do.

    Other questions involve the dangers of retaliation. We don’t dismiss any threats, but the Assad regime does not have the ability to seriously threaten our military.

    Then, why are we even doing this, if Assad doesn’t have the means to threaten us? It’s as if he’s arguing with himself.

    And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to America’s military might with the failure to act when a cause is so plainly just.

    To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.

    Indeed, I’d ask every member of Congress and those of you watching at home tonight to view those videos of the attack, and then ask, what kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?

    So, basically, we’re making a military strike in Syria costing billions of dollars and putting countless lives at risk as well as risking another world war “for the children?” Why didn’t he just say that in the beginning? I’m convinced.

  • Because Obama

    Yeah, it’s just like that;

  • Syria accepts Russian proposal

    While John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are making their case for military action against Syria, Syria has accepted the Russian proposal that they turn over control of their chemical weapons to the international community, says Fox News;

    Syria’s foreign minister said Tuesday that President Bashar Assad has accepted a Russian proposal to turn over control of Syria’s chemical weapons, potentially opening the door to defusing a stand-off with the United States as President Obama indicates he’s willing to give the “diplomatic track” a try.

    According to the Associated Press, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said Tuesday after meeting with the Russian Parliament speaker that his government’s officials quickly agreed to the Russian initiative to “derail the U.S. aggression.”

    But according to broadcast news, the President intends to continue to make his case for military action to the country tonight. I watched a little of John Kerry’s statement to Congress this morning and he told us that the US has a “huge” national interest in attacking Syria, that being the containment of chemical weapons. It looks like that has already been accomplish since the only chemical weapons that have been used are entirely with the borders of Syria.

    Chuck Hagel told Congress that we have to use military force to insure the credibility of US military force – says the same guy who called the ‘surge” in Iraq a failure before it began. The same guy who said that our war against terrorism was our “greatest military blunder”.

  • Obama knew that al Qaeda wasn’t so “decimated”

    The Washington Times reports that while the president was campaigning last year and touting the “decimation” of al Qaeda as one of his accomplishments, he knew differently from classified briefings;

    The gulf between the classified briefings and Mr. Obama’s pronouncements on the campaign trail touched off a closed-door debate inside the intelligence community about whether the terrorist group’s demise was being overstated for political reasons, officials told The Washington Times.

    Many Americans believed when they voted in November that the president was justifiably touting a major national security success of his first term. After all, U.S. special operations forces succeeded in May 2011 in capturing and killing the al Qaeda founder and original leader, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan.

    Of course, we knew he was lying to our collective face and voters should have seen through the thin veil that this administration cast over their snappy campaign phrases. We had friends in Africa facing al Qaeda. It was al Qaeda’s black banners that went over the walls of our embassies in Egypt and Libya. Al Qaeda has made a resurgence in Iraq and thrives in the maelstrom of the Syrian Civil War. The French are currently chasing al Qaeda around central Africa.

    We were told last year that there were about a dozen al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, yet they’re credited with market suicide bombings in that country at least once every week. Using the Obama Administration’s math, they should have blown themselves up by now.

  • ABC/Washington Post poll; America opposed to Syria “punishment”

    I won’t let this become the “Syria” blog and try to keep the number of posts on the subject to a minimum, but the folks at ABC News sent us their latest polling of Americans on whether we should take this undefined, unnecessary military action and it appears that we’re generally opposed to it;

    As things stand now, 64 percent oppose air strikes, up by 5 percentage points from a week ago; just 30 percent are in favor, down by 6 points. If Congress rejects action, support drops to 17 percent, with 76 percent opposed.

    It’s a much closer call if Congress were to support air strikes, but even in this case the public divides essentially evenly on the issue, with 44 percent of Americans saying they’d favor air strikes, vs. 48 percent opposed.

    This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds increased partisanship as the administration has sought to make its case. On the basic measure, regardless of congressional action, 71 percent of Republicans oppose military strikes, up from 55 percent last week. Opposition likewise has increased among conservatives, from 59 percent last week to 74 percent now.

    Regardless, air strikes remain opposed by majorities across the political and ideological spectrum. Even among liberal Democrats, a core support group for Obama, just 44 percent support military action, with 50 percent opposed. Across the political spectrum, support from conservative Republicans dives to 22 percent, with 73 percent opposed.

    Yeah, so I expect one of two things to happen as a result of this polling, either public opinion will suddenly swing back in the President’s direction after his talk with us, or the Administration will take the deal with Syria and account for all of their chemical weapons and declare a victory.