A small LinkSwarm for a busy Friday:
Hillary Clinton wanted to attend this evening's baseball game but she couldn't get out of her second shift at McDonalds. Money's tight.
— SunnyRight (@sunnyright) June 26, 2014
Apparently, the leading cause of hard drive failures is subpoenas.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 25, 2014
I hope to have a longer post of the kangaroo court trying Michael Quinn Sullivan next week…
“A new report released Tuesday by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., claims more than a thousand veterans may have died between 2001 and 2011 as the result of misconduct and a ‘culture of mismanagement’ at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
Obama didn’t make this mess, which was a long time in coming. But he promised to fix it and hasn’t, and in fcat it’s gotten considerably worse on his watch.
Here’s the actual report, which I haven’t had a chance to read all of yet.
There’s so much news going on in the world that it’s hard to sit down and focus on one story to get a single blog post out of it when there’s another huge story coming down the pike. Iraq, Ukraine, the VA Scandal, the dog eating Lois Lerner’s emails (“Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses”); too damn much going on to focus on one thing. So here’s a LinkSwarm instead:
Polling keeps finding a majority in favor of vague “immigration reform” because of the way the questions are asked.
Hint: Any question that asks “Do you support comprehensive immigration reform including enforcement…” is already a lie, since we know that the Obama Administration has no intention of enforcing existing immigration laws.
Things immigration polls don’t ask:
These are the things liberal MSM pollsters refrain from asking because they know they won’t like the public’s answers, and it won’t help their push to scare Republicans into passing illegal alien amnesty.
Indeed, 72% of those polled last year “said they support reducing the illegal immigrant population by requiring employers to check workers’ legal status, fortifying the border, and getting the cooperation of local police.”
But as an “enforcement first” approach appears to be off the table until Obama leaves office, the only responsible thing for Republicans to do is refrain from passing any immigration “reform” until such time as the White House is occupied by someone willing to actually obey the law.
(Note: This headline is only slightly factitious.)
The problem with George W. Bush’s Middle East policy is that there’s no political gain there, no matter how great the price or resounding the achievement, that Obama can’t throw away through his manifestly gross incompetence. Al Qaeda in Iraq’s successor organization, the Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “consolidated and extended their control over northern Iraq on Wednesday, seizing Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, threatening the strategic oil refining town of Baiji and pushing south toward Baghdad, their ultimate target.”
That’s the same ISIS that captured Mosul, where they seized $429 million worth of Iraqi dinars from the local bank, making them the richest terrorist army in the world.
Remember when Obama declared that “al Qaeda is on the run”?
Obama was right. Al Queada IS on the run…straight into Baghdad.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 12, 2014
And remember when Obama pulled out of Iraq and walked away without a status of forces agreement there?
Now two battalions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds forces have deployed to Iraq, ostensibly to support Maliki’s Shiite government. So now, in theory, we’re allied with the Mullahs in Iran in Iraq against the Isalmists we’re supporting in Syria against the Iran-aligned government of Bashar Assad.
About the only good news out of the region is that the Kurds are holding their own. An independent Kurdistan would be far from the worst development in the region, and would probably freak out both Iran and Turkey enough to distract them from further mischief elsewhere.
The current situation highlights the age-old truth that the Middle East is filled with people whose deepest desire appears to be to kill and gain power over members of rival clans/tribes/factions/confessions/etc. This has been true for pretty much all of recorded history save when a strong power (Ottoman, British, Baathist) is able to keep those tendencies in check through heavy policing, military occupation, or a brutal security state apparatus. The presence of our troops there gives the natives a distraction and a target, allowing them to temporarily stop killing each other in preference to killing us. The exceptions to this rule, such as multicultural Lebanon circa 1946-1974, have proven frustratingly ephemeral.
Israel provided a temporary target of unifying hatred, but the Jewish state’s defensive measures have made it increasingly difficult to get close enough to any Jews to kill them, hence back to the old internecine pursuits.
Bush43’s foreign policy in the Middle East and the decision to invade Iraq stems, in large measure, from Bush41’s decision not to let Schwartzkopf take Baghdad in The Gulf War. Whether doing so would have brought all on all our Iraqi troubles two decades earlier is debatable. There is much to say for toppling a totalitarian thug like Saddam, not least of which was liberating the children’s prison, where children as young as 5 were tortured to make their mothers talk. Perhaps the ideal strategy would have been to depose and execute Saddam and his top regime supporters in 1991, then immediately leave and let Iraqi factions kill each other rather than our troops. But I doubt anyone put forward that idea as a serious suggestion at the time.
Bush43 ultimately succeeded in largely pacifying Iraq, but the cost was high and, as recent events proved, the gains were temporary. The problem with interventionist policy in the Middle East is that there is no gain safe from the feckless impulses of surrender and appeasement that dominate the Democratic Party’s thinking today. The Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party is dead, and Obama and Kerry perfectly embody the combination of naivete, hubris, multilateralist, and hostility to the military that dominates today. They love signing treaties and “the peace process,” even though it’s all process and no peace.
It turns out that Ron Paul may be right for the wrong reasons. Because no foreign policy gain in the Middle East is safe from Democratic incompetence, Republicans should not pursue any interventionist foreign policy there, especially in the name of impossible “stability”. No interventionist accomplishment there can endure long past the end of a Republican President’s term, because there is no gain safe from the likes of Kerry and Obama. And since there is no indication the nature of the Democratic Party will be changing any time soon, a military interventionist foreign policy there, no matter how well-intentioned, well-planned, and well-executed, must be doomed to ultimate failure.
In hindsight, the liberation of Iraq turns out to be a tragic mistake, because Bush underestimated how decisively his hard-won gains could be undone by the incompetence of his successor.
Here’s a LinkSwarm to kick your week off with:
I was queuing up a LinkSwarm for Monday when it occurred to me that I have more than enough links on the fallout from the Bergdahl swap to put up a separate post, so here it is:
If you want to see how quickly consensus wisdom can change as the facts come to light, take a look at the 180º turn in opinion on the five Taliban leaders for Bowe Bergdahl exchange.
First “President Obama hailed Bergdahl’s recovery as a triumph of years of high-wire diplomatic efforts” in a Rose Garden ceremony with Bergdahl’s parents.
UN Ambassador Susan Rice also hailed the exchange, saying that Bergdahl’s poor health was a factor in making the swap and that he had “served the United States with honor and distinction.”
All in all, it seemed like the perfect media event to distract public attention from the VA scandal. Republicans were criticized for complaining that swapping five high value Taliban commanders for one soldier was a mistake.
Then it came to light that Bergdahl was not universally loved among his comrades in arms, to put in mildly. “Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.”
The revelation of Bergdahl’s desertion seemed to blindside the Obama Administration. It shouldn’t have. Never mind that it should have been able to find that out before the swap from its own internal military reports. (If not, then there’s a “thermocline of truth” in the chain of command even more serious than previously suspected.) For an Administration that claims it first learns of its own scandals from the media, it should have learned about Bergdahl’s desertion no later than June 7, 2012, when Rolling Stone published an extensive profile on Bergdahl and his status as a prisoner of war:
Bowe Bergdahl had a different response. He decided to walk away.
In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?
Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.
Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.
Even those notorious right-swing shills at The New York Times report that Bergdahl “slipped away from his outpost.”
Soldiers say that after Bergdahl was captured, “over the next couple of months, all the attacks were far more directed.”
Now stories have come to light that soldier’s in Bergdahl’s unit were instructed to lie about how he came into the Taliban’s hands.
No wonder there was such an outrage among our troops over the exchange.
Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)
As for Rice, Ralph Peters noted “At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.”
Then footage emerged of the Taliban handing over Bergdahl, which did not seem to indicate he was in particularly frail physical health. (Mentally? Well, Blinky McDeserter obviously has some issues…)
Even Obama’s usual defenders in the media are questioning the exchange:
Now Obama’s State Department (and liberal Administration defenders) are saying that “there are a ton of conflicting reports”. This is such a general purpose cop-out I’m surprised we don’t hear it from the Obama Administration more often. “Did the IRS target conservative groups?” “There are a ton of conflicting reports…”
The fact that liberal opinion has swung from “This was a triumph for Obama and Republicans look petty for raining on his parade” to “we don’t have enough information to judge yet” tells you all you need to know about the optics…
Also: Oh, nice job Mad:
The scandal of veterans dying while waiting for care, and the wait lists being manipulated, continues to grow.
Here’s Charles Krauthammer on the scandal and what it tells us about government-run healthcare and Obama’s competence:
If the gov't can't even properly care for VETERANS, who risk everything for us, what makes you think it can take care of everyone else?
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) May 21, 2014