Is Obama at War? With the American People?
A great Churchill quote came to mind recently, and with all the “phony scandals” as a backdrop, I was struck by an unsettling notion. Is Obama at War?
The Churchill buffs may know where this is going, but for everyone else, here is the quote. “In wartime, the truth is so precious that she must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
In fact, even without remembering those first two words, it was still clear that the bodyguard of lies was intended to deceive his enemies, not his friends.
Looking at the handling of the unrelenting scandals it is glaringly obvious that POTUS & Co. are not telling the truth. Some of their evasions are even on literal life-or-death issues.
Now think of the public scrutiny his predecessor faced. For all of that, which of the “Bush lied, people died” complaints resulted in torched Embassies, or the arming of murderous drug cartels with Mexican civilian casualties numbering in the hundreds?
Scandals like NSA’s billion-bullet shopping spree, privacy violations, email hacks, phone tracking, or cudgeling political rivals with the IRS are emphatically NOT the S.O.P. of any “free” society in peacetime. So I ask again.
Is Obama at war?
As Churchill knew, there is no moral obligation to speak plainly to an enemy. WWII has amazingly complex stories of the steps Allies took to deceive the Axis powers.
Who is being lied to? Is it a rival nation in a Shooting War — or even a Cold War? It turns out that Obama is sometimes more candid with rival nations than his own. Remember his infamous “hot mic” moment with Russia? “After my election I will have more flexibility.” And this is despite Russia’s routine antagonism to American interests.
There is little doubt what threats animated earlier Presidents. Sometimes it was a traditional war. Others were — rightly or wrongly — committed in (relative) peacetime to domestic threats like “War on Terror” or even “War on Drugs”.
So what rouses the Peace-Prize-President’s animus? In ‘08, Gitmo was an abomination, and must be closed in a year (per Executive Order). The “abomination” lingers on. But Eastern Europe’s Missile Defense is gone!
Did the Commander-In-Chief (does he understand that role?) stand up and denounce the carnage at Fort Hood? The shooter calls himself “mujahideen”, does POTUS call it Domestic Terror? No, it’s “workplace violence” effectively denying the fallen of any honors they’d receive fighting that same ideology on foreign soil.
When the cost of his administration’s botched “Fast & Furious” program raised the Mexican civilian death toll well into three digits, did this alleged “defender” of immigrants and Hispanics do something about it? Yes, absolutely he did. He invoked Executive Privilege in a boilerplate CYA move. Feel free to take a moment and contrast his reaction to the Sandy Hook hand-wringing “if even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act.”