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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • The National Security President

    In this morning’s Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen writes that the president has skipped more than half of his daily national security briefings to date;

    The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

    Theissen continues that National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, told him that it wasn’t necessary for the President to attend every briefing because it’s “not particularly interesting or useful.” I could see a tenth of the meetings not being useful, but nearly 60% of them? The why are they even having the security briefings?

    But, of course, Senator Obama missed most of the votes in the Senate during his term, so why should we expect him to be more concerned about national security? We got the President we voted for.

  • The President on the military

    Like I’ve said repeatedly this election season, I can’t watch political speeches anymore, so Obama’s acceptance speech last night was no exception. Which left me to read the transcript this morning. This is what he said about the military, defense and veterans;

    And tonight, we pay tribute to the Americans who still serve in harm’s way. We are forever in debt to a generation whose sacrifice has made this country safer and more respected. We will never forget you. And so long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known.
    (APPLAUSE)
    When you take off the uniform, we will serve you as well as you’ve served us because no one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they need when they come home.
    (APPLAUSE)
    Around the world, we’ve strengthened old alliances and forged new coalitions to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. We’ve reasserted our power across the Pacific, and stood up to China on behalf of our workers. From Burma to Libya to South Sudan, we have advanced the rights and dignity of all human beings, men and women; Christians and Muslims and Jews.
    (APPLAUSE)
    But for all the progress we’ve made, challenges remain. Terrorist plots must be disrupted. Europe’s crisis must be contained.

    Our commitment to Israel’s security must not waver, and neither must our pursuit of peace.
    (APPLAUSE)
    The Iranian government must face a world that stays united against its nuclear ambitions. The historic change sweeping across the Arab World must be defined not by the iron fist of a dictator or the hate of extremists, but by the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people who are reaching for the same rights that we celebrate here today.
    (APPLAUSE)
    So now we face a choice. My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy, but from all that we’ve seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.

    After all, you don’t call Russia our number one enemy, not Al Qaeda, Russia, unless you’re still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.

    My opponent — my opponent said it was “tragic” to end the war in Iraq, and he won’t tell us how he’ll end the war in Afghanistan. Well I have, and I will. And while my opponent would spend more money on military hardware that our Joint Chiefs don’t even want, I will use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work rebuilding roads and bridges and schools and runways.

    Because after two wars that have cost us thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, it’s time to do some nation- building right here at home.

    Basically, it’s all smoke and mirrors. He honors the troops and veterans with his words, but he’s pricing veterans out of the programs that they earned and broke decades of promises that the government made to veterans. And I’m not sure how he intends to “sustain the strongest military the world has ever known” when he’s planning to slash the living crap out of the defense budget. Not to mention slashing manpower, weapons and R&D.

    Russia is a greater threat now than al Qaeda – because this administration have allowed them to determine what our policy towards are allies will be. That’s not Cold War mentality, that’s the situation this administration created. The “tragedy” of ending the war in Iraq too soon has become apparent this week as Iraq allies itself in Syria with Iran against the Syrian people.

    Obama’s attitude towards veterans illustrates why the economy hasn’t healed in the last four years. Employers need someone that they can believe, and Obama can’t be believed. He told veterans last year that he wouldn’t balance the national budget on the backs of veterans, however, veterans are the only people in the country facing any changes in their benefits. The benefits that they earned.

    Obama has made promises over the last four years that he might have intended to keep, but he hasn’t so how can anyone believe anything he said last night? How do you make decisions that effect your own future, or the future of your business when you’re getting faulty information from the country’s leaders.

    He says he wants to raise taxes on “the rich”, but under Bill Clinton, who promised a tax cut, we learned that even social security recipients are among the people Democrats call “the rich”. We learned last night that Democrats plan to slash defense even more than the $1.2T cuts looming over the Defense Department. I’m sure Russia is just one of the countries rubbing their hands together over the cuts.

  • Panetta, defense cuts, and weekends in CA

    The Washington Post, in a link sent to us by Chief Tango, talks about Leon Panetta, the Defense Secretary, and the dilemma he finds himself in what with $1.2T in defense cuts looming on the horizon. Clearly, Panetta was sent to DoD as a hatchet man who merely salutes and executes, but the Washington Post sympathizes with him;

    By contrast, Panetta sometimes sounds more like a congressman representing the “Pentagon district” than the leader of the world’s largest military. He talks frequently about his parents, who immigrated from Italy. And he regularly rails against the possibility that the Pentagon will have to absorb $500 billion in automatic cuts if Congress cannot agree on how to trim $1.2 trillion in government spending. The cuts, triggered under an arcane process known as sequestration, would come on top of an already mandated $487 billion in reductions.

    “It’s mindless, and it will…do incredible damage to our national defense,” Panetta said last month in a speech in New York.

    Then, without blinking, the Post reports the thing that we’ve been harping on for months here since we found out;

    As he did during his days as a congressman, Panetta spends most weekends in California, commuting home on a military jet at a cost of more than $800,000 as of this spring, the latest figures available.

    Doesn’t anyone find it incongruous that he’s charged with reducing our defense posture while he spends taxpayer dollars to go home every weekend on the other side of the country – a perk that none of the people who work for him are allowed. He has tens of thousands of soldiers deployed to a foreign shit hole far from their families and homes who don’t get to see their families for months at a time, yet he gets to spend a million or so dollars to see his EVERY WEEKEND.

    The Post goes on to explain that our “new” enemy is China and that our focus, in regards to defense, should be on Asia. Last I knew, Iran was still rattling their sabre in the Near East. While I agree that China is a threat, but, it appears to me that Iran is a more immediate threat, what with their terrorist cells spread through out the world and their work on their nuclear program that no one seems to have the fortitude to confront directly.

    The wars we fought in the Middle East are not over until we’ve somehow restrained Iran. Embargoes don’t seem to be having the desired effect. I guess facing Asia will give the administration another “win” when China hasn’t taken over the world four years from now.

  • Romney promises to not hike Tricare fees

    Hondo sent a link to the Army Times article by some guy named Rick Maze who works for the cowardly, backstabbing senior editor, Tobias Naegale, in which they report that when Mitt Romney spoke to the American Legion last week, he promised that, if he’s elected president, he won’t hike Tricare fees for military retirees like the current administration plans;

    The quest to raise beneficiary fees is a longtime Pentagon initiative that has spanned several administrations, but Romney said he won’t ask service members and retirees “to pay more for their health care to pay for Obamacare.”

    There is no direct link between the Tricare fee increases sought by the Defense Department — and mostly rejected by Congress — and funding for the Affordable Care Act that is commonly called Obamacare, but the promise still drew loud cheers from the American Legion crowd.

    Yeah, nice save for the Obama Administration, Rick, except that the guy, David Chu, who wanted to hike personnel fees and lower benefits in the Bush Administration was never as successful as the clowns in this administration. And the Clinton Administration was successful in kicking military retirees over 65 years of age out of Tricare and into Medicare.

    And of course this 500% hike in Tricare fees isn’t part of the Obamacare health bill. This administration promised us that healthcare was going to be cheaper for regular citizens while raising costs for veterans, you know, because veterans haven’t done enough for this country already.

    I probably don’t need to tell this crowd that last year,the president told the American Legion Convention that he wasn’t going to balance the budget on the backs of veterans, but we’re the only ones paying more for the services we earned, then any of the services the government offers to people who haven’t worked a day in their lives.

    Romney also promised to get all veterans who qualified for the Post 9-11 Education Bill in-state tuition rates regardless of their qualification and it should be that way. Veterans served the whole nation, not just their home states. And if illegal aliens qualify for in-state tuition, why shouldn’t veterans?

  • Narcissist in Chief Selfishly Shortens Soldiers’ Holiday

    As noted here Saturday by Rick Moran, the Commander in Chief got a decidedly cool reception from the troops on a whistle stop at Fort Bliss in El Paso Friday. While this president already is not widely popular with our military, the attitude demonstrated by the shanghaied soldiers in that cavernous hangar was demonstrably cooler than at such past events. The conservative media interpreted that indifferent reception to dissatisfaction with Obama’s politics and his repeated failures as CinC, but the event is far more consequential as yet another example of how little the Obama Administration understands the military it commands.

    I’m an old non-com who, as a bachelor lived in the barracks, and as such I’m well aware of the excitement that permeates any military barracks in the days leading up to a four-day, holiday weekend like Labor Day.

    Virtually every soldier has made big plans to escape his military existence for four precious days and spend that time with family or friends. Many will have to use the first and fourth days for travel to and from distant destinations, which means only two, crucial days of holiday pleasure for them, sandwiched between two less pleasant days of travel, especially if they must fly commercially. Take away just one of those days and many of those soldiers’ plans will either have to be scrapped entirely or the time at home or whatever destination, be reduced to a single day. Plans made long in advance have to be rescheduled, a sometimes quite difficult task when it regards holiday weekend travel: flight changes may be impossible and hotels are booked solid; neither may allow changes in reservations without severe financial penalties.

    So, some hotshot in the Obama campaign, feeling badly stung by the sparse turnouts for the president’s visits to other locales, gets a bright idea of how to produce a really big crowd for a photo op: “Hey, let’s schedule one for some military facility where the commander can be ordered to produce a big audience in a sufficiently impressive backdrop.” It was probably some over-eager, politically correct flack in the Pentagon who suggested the massive hangar at the Fort Bliss airfield, but you can bet it was some clueless member of the campaign with no military experience who picked the incredibly dumb date.

    And as with so many other aspects of the disastrous Obama campaign, their scheme to produce a huge crowd ended up giving them another embarrassing black eye. They got their huge crowd all right but it was a silent, sullen crowd that was oozing hostility to the oblivious politician who had ruined their holiday weekend at worst and, at the least, had taken away one-fourth of their free time for his own selfish political gain. That from Democrats, who, knowing that the military is primarily politically conservative, are the first to demand political neutrality from those in uniform.

    The resentment created by this incident isn’t limited to just those troops ordered to be in that hangar; it is shared by their far-flung friends and family members who won’t forget such a narcissistic, selfish, political imposition on their own holiday plans. Nor will it go unnoticed by other members of the military, their families, and the millions of veterans in this country who realize what an arrogant, selfish insult this was. Whoever it was on the campaign staff who scheduled that particular date for a military campaign stop might as well have said,
    “Here, Mr. President, take this pistol and aim carefully for your middle toe…”

  • Navy General McRaven tells SpecOps troops to zip it

    Hey, if the President says he’s a general, he’s a general, by golly. But General McRaven commander of Special Operations Command threatened his troops with legal action if they reveal Special Operations secrets to the public, in the wake of the pending release of the book “No Easy Day” written by Matt Bissonnette under the pseudonym Mark Owen;

    Special operations chief Adm. Bill McRaven warned his troops, current and former, that he would take legal action against anyone found to have exposed sensitive information that could cause fellow forces harm.

    “We will pursue every option available to hold members accountable, including criminal prosecution where appropriate,” the four-star commander wrote, in an open, unclassified letter emailed to the active-duty special operations community Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press.

    While I agree with the good general or admiral or whatever, he ought to put that much emphasis on busting out members of the White House staff who have been talking about the operations, too. That doesn’t make it right for the military to do it, because they shouldn’t be aping those low-life civilians.

    More on the subject from Mr. Hanson.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the links.

  • Their Lives, Their Fortunes and Their Sacred Honor: Spec Ops Warriors Stand Tall

    In yet another instance of what is becoming a steady series of incredibly stupid misfires, the clueless Obama campaign has decided to adopt the tactics of that memorably successful Kerry campaign in dealing with criticism from the nation’s military. Rather than man-up and admit that he perhaps went a bit overboard in taking credit for the Osama raid, and that it’s entirely possible his White House has leaked critical intelligence, Obama is taking the same tack as the thoroughly torpedoed Kerry: attack his military critics by calling them dishonorable liars.

    It didn’t work for Kerry and it’s not going to work for the campaign of a man who, unlike the turn-coat Kerry, has absolutely no military credentials to link him to veterans, even that minority that leans left. It most assuredly is not going to work with that much larger group of veterans who tend to vote conservative but will vote for those candidates, regardless of party, who are supportive of the military.

    But no, the Axelrod/Plouffe bubble factory, correctly believing that a large part of their Democrat Party is inherently anti-military, has chosen the hang-tough Kerry Gambit, deny, discredit and dishonor. For those of you unfamiliar with what I’m referring to, the White House handling of the mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden back in 2011 has created a huge amount of displeasure and dissent within the multi-service special operations community as well as the overall military and veterans’ communities. The President’s quick rush to grab the glory with his I,I,I, me, me, me speech, left a lot of active and former members of the military stone, frosty cold. As any general or admiral could tell you, top commanders, especially commanders-in-chief, do not rush to claim the glory. All credit goes to the warriors who carried out the missions, not the politicians and staff wienies involved in the upper-level planning.

    Such a rush to snatch credit from the jaws of victory is unseemly and undignified to those who serve to protect this nation, especially so when the unseemly, undignified grabber-of-glory happens to be the commander of all our military forces, a position which demands dignity, gravitas and a true understanding of the Warrior Code. Bush, a fighter pilot, had it; Clinton, a draft-dodger did not; the guy there now and his Chicago advisors don’t have the slightest clue.

    But worse, in the eyes of those frontline and behind-the-lines warriors who have now posted their displeasure, is the total disregard by this White House for operational security. The unseemly haste with which the Obama spin machine jumped in to blare to the world that Osama had been killed was a grievous intelligence error. In their eagerness to seize credit, the politicians in the White House deprived our nation and our forces of the intelligence that would normally flow from the capture of a terrorist headquarters: all the information contained there about our enemy’s forces, their structure, their distribution/locations, their communications networks and their finances. With one simple White House press release, all that hard-fought-for intelligence was lost. Forever. In claiming the glory, Obama insured that all that intel was end-of-story.

    Subsequent leaks that raise the concerns of our military community are those that have exposed the Pakistani doctor who enabled our finding of Osama; intel regarding undercover operatives within Al Qaeda in Yemen; the revelation that our C-in-C maintains an enemies list from which he magisterially fingers those to be killed. Then we have the leak, exposed in a positive manner at the New York Times that suggests White House cooperation, that it was the United States and Israel that attacked the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus. Absolutely everything listed in this paragraph was leaked to bolster the image of Barack Obama as a strong and decisive military leader. Everything in this paragraph also constituted incredibly stupid breaches of operational security that while glorifying Obama and supposedly enhancing his re-electability, endangered our country, the citizens of Israel, and all the military forces of the world engaged in the battle against militant Islamism.

    So now that the military community has responded to the outrage of the commander-in-chief being the single largest security threat to military operations with a video which is a must watch, the Obama Administration, which seems hell-bent on following the Kerry trajectory has singled out the special operations community for an honor that up to now has only been bestowed upon the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. As of today, according to Breitbart, the special operators behind that video and all who support them have been placed on the White House Enemies List. I can’t begin to express how that leaves me, and I’m betting millions of military and veteran voters, feeling: honored, energized, empowered? Yeah, all those and more, the most important of which is a determination to throw this worst commander-in-chief ever out on his incompetent butt.

    I salute the Special Operations Community for having the courage to once again be that tip of the spear they famously pride themselves on being. I also salute them for their achieving the special honor of having become designated as an enemy of the White House and the extant Democrat Party. There should be a service ribbon for that accomplishment. May I suggest a scalloped gold frame surrounding a red, white and blue background with a small gold jump boot, signifying each award for the bravery and honor of those who are willing to risk their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to put a steel-toed jump boot up the soulless butts of those political snakes in Washington who would corrupt our military operations for nothing but political gain?

    As an honorary member of the Swift Boat Veterans and I would hope the special operations community, I have only this to say:
    Barack Obama, you totally bogus, phony commander-in-chief, consider this, then bring it on.

  • Complacent America

    Well, we could call it a win, that America doesn’t talk about the war against terror, I suppose, because complacency comes from a sense of security and no one is really worried about terrorist attacks, well, unless you live in DC near the Family Research Council, or go to the movies in Colorado or to Temple in Wisconsin. But the war that is still raging in Afghanistan has fallen off the public’s radar according to this article in the Associated Press;

    Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They’re more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted “Stop the war!” They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.

    By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that’s long enough.

    If there weren’t still Americans dying everyday, I’d say “Good!” But it only shows the disconnect between Americans and the people who keep them safe. The majority of Americans have no skin in the game. While people with kids, husbands, wives in the military are looking at the end of the war in Afghanistan in 2014 means at least one more deployment, the rest of the country sees it as light at the end of the tunnel and they’re relieved. And, like South Vietnam, and now Iraq, the public won’t go back to save even one person in Afghanistan after the withdrawal is complete. The media and this administration has programmed them for it and that’s what they expect.

    Candidate Obama promised to refocus America’s resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.

    And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan’s seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.

    Yeah, but Obama’s generals and the CIA told him that if he didn’t send at least 60,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009, the surge would fail to have an impact on the enemy, and he didn’t listen, so we have the mess there that we have now and because the public is weary of hearing about it, we have to withdraw. The war in Iraq didn’t sap resources and resolve, Afghanistan was Obama’s to lose and he did. While we should have been talking about the war and the surge, instead we were talking about health care and tax hikes.

    Joe Biden’s robot ninja zombie strategy disconnected us even more from the war. Fewer people were engaged with the enemy, and yeah, we got bin Laden – good job – but the Left told us during the Bush years that getting bin Laden wouldn’t end the war, but here they are telling us it’s over. And, surprise! It’s in an election year.