It’s the eve of Christmas Eve. And families all over America are preparing for family get-togethers, doing last minute Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, baking cookies, and hopefully remembering the reason for the season – the birth of Our Lord. I’m involved in all of the above (except for the cookie baking, which my wife takes care of), but I also am tasked with keeping a close watch on government and politics, and each week keeping you, my faithful blog readers, up on what’s happening on the political front. So here’s what’s happened of note over the last week.
President Obama blamed the news media for his dismal failure to defeat ISIS thus far, and for the American people’s (legitimate in my view) concern that radical Islamic terrorism is not just a threat overseas, but now a threat here at home. “If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about, is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you.” Well, Mr. President, that’s because they are, and because you’ve done virtually nothing to stop them. In fact, by downplaying the threat, by warning us to be politically sensitive to them, and by naively limiting the rules of engagement by our bad-guy-fighters overseas, you’ve just made us more vulnerable.
Also over the last week, President Obama’s third of four defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel, broke his silence, and became yet another one of the top guys tasked with defending this nation, to reveal just how bad Obama is at being commander-in-chief. According to Hagel, Obama was unable to make tough decisions, and deferred to Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett (born in Iran by the way) on virtually all international and military decisions. Hagel noted that long, unproductive meetings were the rule at the White House, that the so-called wars in the Middle East were micromanaged by Obama’s political people, that Obama’s infamous drawing of a red line in Syria was a disaster to the U.S. around the world, that there was a slavish and misguided effort by Obama and his liberal advisors to close Guantanamo Bay, and on and on.
Interestingly, Hagel is but the latest of Obama’s former Secretaries of Defense to criticize our feckless President. Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, criticized Obama’s air-only strategy against ISIS. “The reality is, they’re not gonna be able to be successful against ISIS strictly from the air… so there will be boots on the ground if there’s to be any hope of success in the strategy. And I think that by continuing to repeat that, the President, in effect, traps himself.” Obama’s second Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, acknowledged that ISIS rose to power because of Obama’s failure to leave a contingency force of troops in Iraq after we won the war. “I really thought it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq.” And Obama’s fourth (and current) Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, disputed President Obama’s declaration that ISIS was contained. Instead, Secretary Carter said he agreed not with President Obama, but with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, who stated before the House Armed Services Committee that “we have NOT contained ISIS.”
Also over the last week, the Democrats had another boring debate. Hillary and Bernie sparred briefly over a DNC data breach (much ado about nothing – unlike Hillary’s own email foibles, which Hillary and the mainstream press would prefer not to talk about.) The only newsworthy thing to come out of the nothing Democrat debate, was Hillary’s bashing of Donald Trump as allegedly being “ISIS’s best recruiter.” She claimed that there’s a video of Donald Trump making anti-Muslim comments, which is being used by ISIS to sign up future would-be terrorists. Politifact, the supposed gold standard for fact-checking, after doing extensive research, determined that there is no evidence of her allegation, and therefore rated Hillary’s claim as FALSE. You’d think that Hillary might be a bit more careful about making up stories about supposed videos being used to rile up Muslim terrorists to attack Americans, after her whole Benghazi experience (“the best assessment we have today, is that this was not a premeditated attack, but that it was a spontaneous reaction to a video”). But apparently not. Trump of course has demanded an apology, and Hillary’s campaign has said “hell no.” (Enough with the profanity already – it’s Christmas!)
Let’s face it, Hillary and her people already think she’s got this in the bag – both the Democratic nomination, and the presidency itself. If there was ever a group of people already measuring the drapes, the Clinton people are those folks. They want as few debates as possible, and the debates they do do, at times inconvenient for people to watch (the next one is on the same day as two NFL playoff games!) And even though she rarely does interviews with legitimate news outlets (she might be asked pesky tough questions), she is willing to do the occasional interview with softball interviewers like, well, like the self-proclaimed “Queen of YouTube” GloZell Green, who famously bathed on TV in a milk and cereal filled bathtub (I’m not making this stuff up.) Of course I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, because our commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, elevated the political discourse by doing a similar interview earlier this year. (Maybe he’ll name her as our fifth Secretary of Defense.)
Speaking of defense, six U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan when the Taliban detonated a suicide motorcyclist near the Bagram air base north of the capital, Kabul. Every one of those deaths will be a terrible loss to the families here at home, especially during the Christmas season. The loss, in my view, will be even worse, when the families may well question what has really been gained by our country at such great sacrifice. This president’s principal goal has been to get us out, not to prevail, or secure the gains at such high cost. In Iraq, he pulled all U.S. troops out, and we saw the resulting fall of Iraq and rise of ISIS. And in Afghanistan, we saw Obama ramp up troop levels, but at the same time announce that we were pulling out by a date certain in the future. This was a prescription for failure, and I fear that we’re seeing that same failure playing out in Afghanistan right now.
Senator Lindsey Graham pulled out of the presidential race. A lot of people probably don’t know that he was even in. Lindsey was probably the most hawkish candidate on fighting terrorism, but he never got much traction. The height of his attention in the media was when he got in a public spat with Trump and The Donald released Lindsey’s personal phone number to the world. Lindsey was really hurt by never making it to the main attraction at the debates – he was always at the kiddie table. He was probably the most glib and quickest on his feet of any of the candidates, but the broader public never really got to see this, since he never made it to the primetime debate. Well, that’s the way it goes.
And finally, total screw-up at the Miss Universe contest. Host Steve Harvey announced that Miss Colombia was the winner, when in fact it was Miss Philippines. They literally had to take the crown off the poor woman’s head, and put it on the real winner. Steve Harvey called it “human error” and profusely apologized.
This is one thing that can’t be blamed on Barack Obama. Although if Barack Obama hadn’t turned out to be such a lousy President, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t have decided to run for president to repair the damage he’d done, and wouldn’t have made those “anti-immigrant” comments which resulted in Trump having to sell off the Miss Universe franchise. And we can all agree that this total screw-up would never have occurred if Donald Trump was still in charge, because only a LOSER would have let that happen. I’m just saying…
MERRY CHRISTMAS!