It’s Thursday, June 5th, 2014…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, on the subject that has us calling for the heads, quite literally, (but only after, for the benefit of the NSA and Secret Service, due process and a deserved conviction for treason!) of The Obamao and everyone else in his sorry-ass Administration with a role in selling out our national security, James Taranto sums up the story behind Trading Private Bergdahl:
‘Suck It Up and Salute’
Bergdahl, Kerry and the left’s view of the military.
“If I’ve lost Neuman, I’ve lost Middle America.” That’s how we imagine President Obama reacting to being scathed by MAD magazine. The Usual Gang of Idiots tweeted a parody poster yesterday for “Barack Obama’s Unfortunate New Movie,” titled “Trading Private Bergdahl.” The tag line: “They got five Taliban leaders. We got one deserting weasel. The mission is a disaster.” Obama is depicted as the lead actor, with the Taliban quintet in supporting roles. The picture is rated “NC” for “No Congressional Approval.”
How in the world did an administration known for political competence, if for no other kind, manage to pull off such a public-relations disaster? The answer is that the left has a very large blind spot when it comes to military culture. (Not to mention a very large blind spot when it comes to the majority of American culture.)
There’s been speculation that the White House intended the Bergdahl release as a distraction from the Veterans Administration scandal. Certainly it has served as such a diversion, not to mention a reminder to be careful what you wish for.
But that theory would explain only the timing of the announcement, and perhaps its high-profile manner–that is, Obama’s appearance in the Rose Garden with Bergdahl’s eccentric parents the day after VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation.
The Bergdahl deal was a long time in the making. It was a strategic priority for the administration, so that it cannot be explained by the sudden need for a tactical diversion. “To pull off the prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House overrode an existing interagency process charged with debating the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners,” Time reports, citing “sources familiar with the debate.”
“Consensus on the plan was reached by the top officials of Obama’s national security team, including representatives from the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence community and Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Time reports. “But officials in the Pentagon and intelligence communities had successfully fought off release of the five men in the past” on the ground that they were too dangerous.
The president himself does not disagree: “Is there the possibility of some of them trying to return to activities that are detrimental to us?” he asked yesterday at a press conference in Warsaw. “Absolutely,” he answered. “That’s been true of all the prisoners that were released from Guantanamo.”
Obama was eager to free the quintet despite (let’s be kind) the threat they pose to America. In order to accomplish that end, he managed to overcome considerable resistance within the federal bureaucracy–precisely what he was unable to do or uninterested in doing when it came to assuring the veterans have access to health care, or for that matter, that the ObamaCare exchanges would function.
The Bergdahl deal, then, was a rare example of competent execution by this administration–albeit of a policy that was the product of atrocious judgment.
But the administration seems to have been taken completely by surprise by the hostile reaction to the deal’s purported upside, Bergdahl’s release. That Time report contains a clue as to why: “Obama’s move was an ultimate victory for those at the White House and the State Department who had previously argued the military should ‘suck it up and salute,’ says the official familiar with the debate.”
That would be John Kerry’s state department. (Or perhaps more accurately, Hillary Clinton’s State Department!) There are some intriguing similarities between young Bergdahl and the young Kerry, as well as between the administration’s current adversity and that which faced Kerry when he ran for president in 2004.
Before he left his base in 2009, Bergdahl sent an email to his parents, which Michael Hastings quoted at length in his 2012 opus for Rolling Stone:
“I am sorry for everything here,” Bowe told his parents. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.” He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP [mine-resistant ambush protection vehicle]. “We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks. . . . We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.”
Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read as a suicide note. “I am sorry for everything,” he wrote. “The horror that is america is disgusting.” (Like Kerry, Bergdahl appears utterly ignorant of the habits of the opposition.)
Here is 27-year-old John Kerry testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, describing the so-called winter soldier investigation, a media event staged a few months earlier by Kerry’s outfit, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War:
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
The young Kerry possessed considerably more social capital than it appears Bergdahl does. He was able to parlay his prominence as an antiwar activist into a political career. After an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1972, he completed law school, got a job as a prosecutor, and was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982. Two years later, he successfully sought an open U.S. Senate seat. Re-elected four times, he served until 2013, when Obama appointed him secretary of state.
During his fourth Senate term, he successfully sought the 2004 Democratic nomination for president. He ran as a war hero; he was in fact a multiply decorated naval veteran of Vietnam. But he was caught flat-footed by the emergence of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of fellow vets who remembered his slanders from 1971, for which he had never offered an apology or a renunciation.
As one of those veterans, Capt. George Elliott, put it in the bestselling book “Unfit for Command”: “In 1971-72, for almost 18 months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains–there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it.”
Kerry reacted with surprise and indignation to his fellow veterans’ dissent from his campaign narrative. It seemed he expected them to suck it up and salute–never mind that back in the 1970s, he himself had done anything but that.
This morning, Twitchy.com notes, NBC’s Chuck Todd reported that a White House source had told him: “We didn’t know they [Bergdahl’s platoon] was going to Swift Boat him.” It’s déjà vu, if you’ll pardon our French.
The dubious circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance from base were no mystery; Hastings had detailed them in his 2012 piece and noted that “there are those in both Congress and the Pentagon who view Bowe as a deserter, and perhaps even a traitor.” Bergdahl has not been charged with any crime, but it seems fair to observe that he did not suck it up and salute.
The administration seems to have taken for granted that the public would see Bergdahl as a stereotypical soldier, one who “served the United States with honor and distinction,” as National Security Adviser Susan Rice put it on ABC Sunday.
Rice also said: “We have a sacred obligation that we have upheld since the founding of our republic to do our utmost to bring back our men and women who are taken in battle, and we did that in this instance.” Obama sounded the same theme in Warsaw yesterday: “The United States has always had a pretty sacred rule, and that is we don’t leave our men or women in uniform behind. . . . Regardless of the circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop. We don’t condition that.” (Unless they’re under fire in…sayyyy…Benghazi!)
There is a telling contrast between the absolutism of “we don’t condition that” and the equivocation of Obama’s phrase “a pretty sacred rule.” And while it’s true that Bergdahl’s conduct did not nullify the U.S. government’s responsibility for his safety, there is evidence that the military does not see that responsibility in the unconditional way the president describes. From the Washington Times:
The Pentagon on several occasions had ground-level intelligence on where Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was being held captive at various times–down to how many gunmen were guarding him–but special operations commanders repeatedly shelved rescue missions because they didn’t want to risk casualties for a man they believed to be a “deserter,” sources familiar with the mission plans said.
Commanders on the ground debated whether to pull the trigger on a rescue several times in recent years, according to one of the sources, a former high-level intelligence official in Afghanistan, who said the conclusion each time was that the prospect of losing highly trained troops was too high a price to pay for rescuing a soldier who walked away from his unit before being captured by the enemy.
Further, the Pentagon has been pushing back against claims, noted here yesterday, that the Army did take casualties as a result of the early search for Bergdahl. From yesterday’s New York Times:
The furious search for Sergeant Bergdahl, his critics say, led to the deaths of at least two soldiers and possibly six others in the area. Pentagon officials say those charges are unsubstantiated and are not supported by a review of a database of casualties in the Afghan war. . . .
Some soldiers have also contended that the Taliban, knowing the units were out searching extensively for Sergeant Bergdahl, chose July 4, 2009, to attack another combat outpost, which was nearly overrun and several soldiers were killed. But American military officers said they saw no evidence that the Taliban started the attack on the outpost because they thought everyone would be out searching for Sergeant Bergdahl.
Today’s Times features an even more detailed debunking, under the headline “Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky.” Murky they may be, but the Pentagon’s defensiveness on this point belies the administration’s suggestion that the military is heedless of costs when it seeks to rescue captured servicemen. (Not to mention we wouldn’t trust the Pentagon Brass if they told us the sky was blue.)
To the administration, the release of the Taliban quintet is at least as much a benefit as a cost. In Warsaw yesterday, after acknowledging the continued danger they pose, the president explained: “But this is what happens at the end of wars. That was true for George Washington; that was true for Abraham Lincoln; that was true for FDR; that’s been true of every combat situation–that at some point, you make sure that you try to get your folks back.”
The predecessors Obama cited all commanded wars that ended with a clear victory. (He should have mentioned Truman along with FDR, who died a few weeks before the Germans surrendered.) Obama, by contrast, is trying to wind down an unpopular war via a negotiated settlement.
Kerry’s activism back in 1971 was in the service of a similar end. When he ran for president in 2004, he expected both his war record and his antiwar activism to work in his favor. After all, most Americans had wanted out of Vietnam, and the Nixon administration achieved that aim a couple of years later. But while Kerry’s end might have been justifiable, it did not justify the means of slandering his fellow Vietnam veterans.
The left’s blinkered view of military culture is perhaps best summarized by Elias Isquith, a young writer for Salon.com, who yesterday explained the backlash against the Bergdahl deal as follows: “When a member of the military fails to adhere to the far right’s rigid formula of what a soldier should be (nationalistic, religious, obedient; conservative) right-wingers . . . come down on them [sic] like a ton of bricks.” He cited one example in addition to Bergdahl: John Kerry.
Isquith seems to imply that servicemen are fungible, each entitled to equal respect regardless of conduct. But the bitter criticism of Kerry in 2004 and Bergdahl today would carry no force if it came from mere “right-wingers.” It comes, instead, from servicemen and veterans who see the two men as having behaved dishonorably. Once again the left is being undone by its failure to comprehend the centrality of honor to military culture.
As we stated above, Obama couldn’t ignore centuries of precedents to leave one traitor who was in no danger whatsoever with the enemies of the United States he’d chosen to join, but had no compunction at all about ignoring the plight of four dedicated Americans…
…he could have saved! Hells bells; he couldn’t even be bothered to stay in the Situation Room while they were dying!
Writing at NRO, retired Army officer (and former enlisted man) Ralph Peters suggests…
“Congratulations, Mr. President! And identical congrats to your sorcerer’s apprentice, National Security Adviser Susan Rice. By trying to sell him as an American hero, you’ve turned a deserter already despised by soldiers in the know into quite possibly the most-hated individual soldier in the history of our military.
I have never witnessed such outrage from our troops…”
And as George Will notes in the WaPo, this is what happens…
“…Obama did not comply with the law requiring presidents to notify Congress 30 days before such exchanges of prisoners at Guantanamo. Politico can be cited about this not because among the media it is exceptionally, well, understanding of Obama’s exuberant notion of executive latitude but because it is not. Politico headlined a story on his noncompliance with the law “Obama May Finally Be Going Rogue on Gitmo.” It said Obama’s “assertive” act “defied Congress” — Congress, not the rule of law — in order “to get that process [of closing the prison at Guantanamo] moving.” It sent “a clear message” that “Obama is now willing to wield his executive powers to get the job done.” Or, as used to be said in extenuation of strong leaders, “to make the trains run on time.”
The 44th president, channeling — not for the first time — the 37th (in his post-impeachment conversation with David Frost), may say: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Already the administration says events dictated a speed that precluded complying with the law.
This explanation should be accorded open-minded, but not empty-minded, consideration. It should be considered in light of the fact that as the Veterans Affairs debacle continued, Obama went to Afghanistan to hug some troops, then completed the terrorists-for-Bergdahl transaction. And in light of the fact that Obama waged a seven-month military intervention in Libya’s civil war without complying with the law (the War Powers Resolution) that requires presidents to terminate within 60 to 90 days a military action not authorized or subsequently approved by Congress…”
First they came for the Conservatives, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Conservative. Then they came for the Moderates, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Moderate. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Meanwhile, back at the Bergdahl ranch in Idaho…
Gee…
…imagine that!
Here’s the juice; Bowe Bergdahl is the quintessential soldier of the Left’s vision for America’s Military. And the MSM and Pentagon Brass are aiding and abetting the conversion.
Case in point:
After all, when you’re going the speed of heat in an F-18 12″ from your buddy’s wingtip, ensuring he’s enjoying a politically-correct, non-threatening environment on the ground is tops on your priority list. The ChiComs, Russians, NoKos, Islamists and every other enemy of the Unites States must be laughing their asses off.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s The Dear Misleader’s version of pumping iron:
Wow; he’s right up there with TLJ!
Finally, we wrap up the day on a sad note:
Rick, a graduate of Hobart College, was one of the greatest goalies ever to man a lacrosse net, and one helluva great guy; it was both an honor and privilege to have played with him.
Magoo
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