BZ
Couldn’t pass this up:
Author Archives: BZ
SHOCKING: Obama hates the military, and Biden is stupid
The galleys of former SecDef Robert Michael Gates‘s new book, “Duty: Memories of a Secretary at War,” (not yet released), have flamed the dark and pimpled ass of the Obama Administration.
Gates has, with this book, burned every bridge in the current era; but perhaps he couldn’t care less. Bob Gates is principled and civil, and the lowbrow, uncivil and completely partisan conduct of Obama and his sycophants became the genesis of his book. Gates, I suspect, had had enough.
As my readers would expect, I pre-ordered a copy of his book. I put my cash where my philosophies lie.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and when Obama is stupid and creates same, others rush in.
i.e., Mr Gates. This book by Gates was created by Mr Barack Hussein Obama.
A few extracts from Bob Woodward in the Washington Post:
In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.
As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.
Woodward characterizes Gates as “highly emotional.” Perhaps I would suggest the words “highly patriotic” apply instead.
And you can be sure that many in DC right now are checking the index of the book to see if they are mentioned by name and, if so, how they can pre-prepare Damage Control. “Did I get set on fire?” is the question and “How will that torpedo affect me?”
Asses getting covered.
Gates portrays Obama as two-faced, hypocritical, run by only politics, and Biden as an idiot who has been wrong on most every issue in the past forty years.
This is a Political Vesuvius.
Biden is accused of “poisoning the well” against the military leadership. Thomas Donilon, initially Obama’s deputy national security adviser, and then-Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the White House coordinator for the wars, are described as regularly engaged in “aggressive, suspicious, and sometimes condescending and insulting questioning of our military leaders.”
Truly — think about it — the revelations in the book by Mr Gates aren’t any kind of shock. These are points that were commonly known. The heresy involves the fact that someone had to temerity to put these points to print in a sitting administration. Again, bridges burned. Or perhaps not quite.
Hillary Clinton is primarily motivated by politics. So is Obama. But despite their most base proclivities they occasionally possess sufficient survival modes to back off a bit when polls are proffered. That noted, however, William Jefferson Clinton could run rings around the both of them, politically — and look sterling doing it.
“All too early in the [Obama] administration,” he writes, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials — including the president and vice president — became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.”
Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”
He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
Until now, no one — NO ONE — has said that Bob Gates is a liar, a prevaricator, a double agent, a provocateur, a shill for the Right, a dishonest man, a fornicator, without morals, a sham and an underminer.
Let those terms, now, commence.
And then, the True Tell:
Gates acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”
That said, is it any wonder that:
Life at the top was no picnic, Gates writes. He did little or no socializing. “Every evening I could not wait to get home, get my office homework out of the way, write condolence letters to the families of the fallen, pour a stiff drink, wolf down a frozen dinner or carry out,” since his wife, Becky, often remained at their home in Washington state.
He ends:
Gates writes, “I did not enjoy being secretary of defense,” or as he e-mailed one friend while still serving, “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”
Something tells me there’s much more to come.
BZ
Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For:
You NEED to be guaranteed some basic and fundamental rights. They include:
From RollingStone.com:
Guaranteed jobs, universal basic incomes, public finance and more
Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn’t often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.
That’s odd. When I stepped into the work arena at the age of 14, I didn’t think of my work atmosphere as the “hellhole our parents have handed us.”
I simply thought it would be cool to throw papers from my bicycle early in the morning whilst it was dark. And make up to $50 a month which was, then, unheard-of.
I subsequently made an amazing discovery: I had to have a sturdy bicycle in the first place, and then I had to have a big bag suspended on my handlebars and, if I could support it, bags suspended off the rear tire if I had a rear rack. Which I did. I could carry a lot of papers.
Not only that, but I had to get up at the UnGodly Hour of 4 am in order to receive the papers at the end of my driveway. Unbanded. They got thumped down in a huge vertical stack and I had to fold them into thirds and then rubber band them. Each and every one of those things.
The faster I got my job done, the earlier I could go home. And the closer to the porch and the front door I threw them, the fewer complaints I received. Actually got a few tips.
Then there were “collections.” I would have to knock on the door of the neighborhood alcoholic, the neighborhood recluse, the neighborhood wife, and say “Collecting for The Bee.” Sometimes they paid, sometimes they put me off. It was a continual struggle. But if I wanted to get paid, I had to persevere.
And that’s when I learned about the “Work-to-Success” ratio.
If I applied myself, I could kick out collections in a few days. There were some people who didn’t want to pay and were deadbeats. McClatchy went after them in other ways that I didn’t understand then. I can remember, for whatever reason, the first time I was called “sonny.” As in: “Sonny, I don’t have your cash.” Oddly enough, the more papers I accepted, and the more papers I took on my bike, the more money I made. That became pretty clear. That’s how I learned to work. That’s how I learned to make money. That’s how I learned to have any kind of work ethic whatsoever.
That said, what are your “economic reforms,” Mr Myerson?
1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector. There are millions of people who want to work, and there’s tons of work that needs doing – it’s a no-brainer. And this idea isn’t as radical as it might sound: It’s similar to what the federal Works Progress Administration made possible during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vocally supported a public-sector job guarantee in the 1960s.
The terribly irony of it all
Frankly, makes me larf out loud: a boatload, literally, of Global Warming fuzz-head alarmists — out to prove Global Warming — found themselves hemmed in by the very ice they sought to disprove.
Ain’t life odd?
BZ
The biggest Obamacare whopper of all?
Apparently, according to The American Thinker, it wasn’t this:
Which, by the way, did come in as the biggest LIE of 2013 according to the Washington Post.
But, according to American Thinker, this wasn’t the biggest lie either: the fiction of “saving” $2,500 per family:
Which made me create this graphic:
Nor was it this: ObamaKare will be cheaper than your cell phone bill:
But perhaps something even more heinous than those outright, naked, and bald LIES?
From Thomas Lifson at American Thinker: President Obama told an even bigger lie than his promises about keeping your insurance and doctor, if you like them. And Politifact already has a leading candidate for the biggest lie of 2014. Betsy McCaughey explains in the New York Post why his words, “you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making,” amount to biggest whopper of all.
Which tells me: you are DEFINITELY going to have the government getting in between you and your doctor. Another sentence from the files of Captain Obvious, in my reckoning.
From the ACA itself with commentary:
Section 1311(h)(1)(B) of the health law gives the secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but patients with private plans they pay for themselves. On Dec. 2, 2013, we learned from the Federal Register that the rules are now being written. Starting in 2015, insurance companies will be barred from doing business with doctors who fail to comply. The rules will be offered in the name of ensuring “health-care quality,” which of course could mean anything. “The powers given to the secretary are so broad, he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine,” warns Congressman Phil Gingrey (R. Georgia), himself a physician.
Gingrey is sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 1311(h)(1)(B). Otherwise, he says, the HHS secretary – a Washington bureaucrat with no medical training – could, for example, bar doctors from doing routine mammogram screenings until female patients turn 50. In short, the federal government will be calling the shots on what patients get.