A Five-Sided Kennel of Cowardice
That lukewarm reception Barack Obama received at West Point last week was indicative of the widely held view among the troops that the man is a truly incompetent commander in chief, or as the language-mangling Al Sharpton might say, “the Commander of the Chiefs.” Notice that I said the troops, not their senior leadership. If our Pentagon weren’t currently occupied by the perfumed princes of political correctness, we might be seeing some courageous generals and admirals falling on their swords and exposing this failure of leadership instead of enabling it. Those ambitious cowards should ponder the reality that neither “I was only doing my duty” nor “I was only following orders” is a viable defense.
It is this failure of courage by our military leaders that has allowed this dilettante president and his inexpert staff to make one unwise military decision after another, with a compounding effect of weakening and endangering America’s forces around the world. The latest example is this political stunt of releasing five high-level terrorists in exchange for one American soldier who most likely is a treasonous deserter who should be in Gitmo himself. In doing so, this lawless “Commander of the Chiefs” has ignored another federal law that was passed precisely to prevent this sort of executive overreach.
There is no way that the White House could have pulled off this "wag the dog" stunt without considerable acquiescence from the highest levels of our military leadership. Those perfumed princes, led by their secretary of defense, have made themselves complicit in the crime by carrying out an order that they all knew to be unlawful. Moreover, they had concluded that Bergdahl was a deserter back in 2010, according to media reports that broke yesterday. They had the testimony of PFC Bergdahl’s fellow paratroopers that he was a deserter, supported by the content of e-mails sent to his parents. Does packing his clothes for their return to his parents in the days preceding his desertion not imply premeditation, rather than spontaneous disorientation or capture? And in spite of that knowledge, our vaunted military leaders went along with this administration’s foolish stunt that now will endanger yet more of our warriors by encouraging kidnapping by terrorists.
What is truly disheartening is that not a single one of the perfumed princes had the courage or honor to resign in protest.
Democrat strategists in the administration, watching their president getting hammered by scandal after scandal, were no doubt encouraged by this lack of opposition from the lie-down leadership of our military. It also likely fed the confidence of the Screw the Constitution Cabal in this administration that they could proceed to ignore the law and that Obama could once agin flip a defiant bird to effete Republican leadership in Congress. And that confidence in turn reinforced their belief that this prisoner-swapping stunt could be pulled off, distracting the president’s critics and providing some respite from the building wave of disillusionment in the electorate regarding Democrat leadership.
A single, public resignation by a single honorable four-star could have stopped this executive branch arrogance in its tracks, like a kitchen light breaking up a roach-fest.
Thus, the overconfident political strategerists encouraged their exalted leader to defy a clearly drawn congressional red line, which requires the secretary of defense to provide Congress with thirty days' prior notice of any such prisoner exchange. If our Republican congressional leaders roll over on this act of defiance, then they will have proved their red lines to be as meaningless as Obama’s.
Let us hope there are some braver souls in Congress looking at Obama’s unlawful action as the basis for yet another indictment in a growing body of charges to support articles of impeachment. And yes, I’m fully aware that there is virtually no chance that Obama could be both impeached and convicted, but the reality is, he can be impeached. It would be a significant repudiation and disgrace for both him and his party.
Should this country regain enough political sanity to elect a Republican president in 2016, high on that president’s list of things to do should be a clean sweep of the Pentagon, starting with the service secretaries, then the Joint Chiefs, the service chiefs of staff, their staffs, and then all the generals and admirals advanced to major commands around the world appointed by this corrupt Obama administration. They should then be replaced with warfighters who recognize that their sworn loyalty is to the Constitution, not the tenets of political correctness. Pick leaders who fully comprehend that the primary mission of our military is to defend our nation, not to be an incubator of socialist experimentation. The process should be dubbed Operation Spinal Implant.
At this moment, while writing, I am listening to this traitorous deserter, Bergdahl, being applauded as a hero, which truly sickens me. And even now, as this is happening, not one of our military leaders has the courage to step forward with the truth and prevent the liar in the White House and his Democrat loyalists from foisting another huge fraud on the American people. Thank goodness the troops are speaking out, undeterred by the spinelessness of their leadership.
One has to wonder if there’s mandatory neutering for these former dogs of war upon being assigned to lapdog duty in that five-sided kennel of cowardice.
Postscript:
Senator John McCain, when asked by Greta Van Susteren about Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey’s role in the prisoner exchange:
General Dempsey is irrelevant in any discussion of national security.
The author rests his case…