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