“Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” the Obama campaign says.
Obama treated the anniversary of ObamaCare like it was the leper waiting to appear before the death panel (which is of course what ObamaCare truly is and how it ought to be treated). But the killing of bin Laden is different: Obama has been doing victory lap after victory lap after victory lap on that one.
It’s supposed to be besides the fact that Obama once attacked then-presidential rival Hillary Clinton for “invoking bin Laden to score political points”:
In a new web video titled “One Chance,” the Obama team features former President Bill Clinton praising Obama for deciding to launch the strike last year. “Why path would Mitt Romney have taken?” the clip asks.
But four years ago this April, the Obama campaign criticized Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using Osama bin Laden in a political ad.
On the eve of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Clinton’s campaign released a television commercial featuring an image of bin Laden and invoking President Harry S. Truman’s quote: “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.”
The ad never mentioned Obama by name, but it was part of the Clinton campaign’s effort to brand the Illinois Senator as inexperienced, especially in the foreign policy arena.
“Who do you think has what it takes?” the ad’s narrator says as an image of Clinton flashes on the screen. (The ad showed a brief clip of bin Laden as well as images of Pearl Harbor, the 1920′s stock market crash, Fidel Castro, the fall of the Berlin Wall). “You need to be ready for anything, especially now.”
The Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, accused the Clinton team of playing “the politics of fear” just like George W. Bush.
Burton, now the head of the Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, said at the time: “When Senator Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision that diverted our military from the terrorists who attacked us, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network. It’s ironic that she would borrow the President’s tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points. We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don’t need another.”
And yet we have another in the person of the very slimeball hypocrite who is so quick to demonize everybody else for stuff you ought to KNOW he himself will soon be doing himself.
Here we are, a few years later, and Barack Hussein Hypocrite is doing the EXACT same thing he demonized George Bush for doing and attacked Hillary Clinton for doing. Because his DNA is pure weasel.
But let’s step aside from the “Obama, one blatant hypocrite sack of fecal matter” point and move on.
Let’s first point out that the ONLY reason that General Motors is still alive is because George Bush provided the bailout that allowed incoming president Obama to do ANYTHING. Because if George Bush hadn’t taken that step, General Motors would have filed bankruptcy before Obama even took office. That is simply a documented historical fact; and for Obama to try to use General Motors as a political bludgeon against Republicans is, well, just another in an incredibly long series of “weasel-in-chief” garbage rhetoric.
There were a LOT of ways to rescue General Motors without all the failed idiotic crap, boondoggle pork politics and frankly illegal partisan politicking that accompanied Obama’s bailout of GM.
The bottom line is that Obama is a president who cynically politicizes and demagogues absolutely everything under the sun.
So, just with those two above facts alone, Obama is sitting on a stool that aint got any legs with his skinny butt planted firmly in midair. But let’s continue.
Our weasel-in-chief has tried to depict the decision to nail bin Laden as an incredibly “gutsy call.” It wasn’t. First, consider what would have happened when Obama’s opponents learned – and in this era of Wikileaks they most assuredly would have learned – that Barack Obama had a clear shot at Osama bin Laden and refused to take it. So, yeah, something could have gone wrong and Obama would have probably been blamed for it. But if he hadn’t done anything THERE IS NO QUESTION HE WOULD HAVE BEEN BLAMED FOR THAT. So just how “gutsy” was it, really?
I mean, Obama faced a “possibly damned if you do, VERY DEFINITELY damned if you don’t” decision. How “gutsy” of a call was it to avoid the “VERY DEFINITELY damned if you don’t” decision???
But it turns out that that isn’t the half of it. Because remember how I said Obama has weasel DNA? Ask yourself how a true weasel would have handled the above dilemma in which he potentially stood a chance to be blamed for deciding to go get bin Laden or to refuse to go get bin Laden. It turns out that Obama took “the most weaselly option” possible:
What ‘Gutsy Call’?: CIA Memo Reveals Admiral Controlled bin Laden Mission
by Ben Shapiro 4/26/2012
Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:
Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.
The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.
This, of course, was the famed “gutsy call.” Here’s what Tom Hanks narrated in Obama’s campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled”:
HANKS: Intelligence reports locating Osama Bin Laden were promising, but inconclusive, and there was internal debate as to what the President should do.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We sat down in the Situation Room, the entire national security apparatus was in that room, and the President turns to every principal in the room, every secretary, “What do you recommend I do?” And they say, “Well, forty-nine percent chance he’s there, fifty-one … it’s a close call, Mr. President.” As he walked out the room, it dawned on me, he’s all alone. This is his decision. If he was wrong, his Presidency was done. Over.
Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.
The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.
The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.
Finally, the memo is unclear on just what the mission is. Was it to capture Bin Laden or to kill him? The White House itself was unable to decide what the mission was in the hours after the Bin Laden kill, and actually switched its language. The memo shows why: McRaven was instructed to “get” Bin Laden, whatever that meant.
President Obama made the right call to give the green light to the mission. But he did it in a way that he could shift the blame if things went wrong. Typical Obama. And typical of him to claim full credit for it, when he didn’t do anything but give a vague nod, while putting his top military officials at risk of taking the hit in case of a bad turn.
This was NOT a “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” moment for Obama. It was not a “I have not yet begun to fight!” moment. It wasn’t even a “You may fire when ready, Gridley” moment. It was the tepid decision by a career bureaucrat to choose the least risky political decision while having a sacrificial lamb tied to the stake to take the blame if the least risky political decision went wrong. Period.
With that, let’s further consider that without George Bush, without the complete overhaul of the intelligence system that George Bush created, without Gitmo and without waterboarding, Obama never would have had a shot at finding out that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Abbotabad, Pakistan. Nor would our intelligence have known that Osama bin Laden was relying on couriers to remain in contact with his organization.
Here’s the proof of that in the form of another memo:
Having this information – which resulted from WATERBOARDING - was absolutely critical to identifying the location of Osama bin Laden. Without the information that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad (a small dot on a very large globe), and without the information that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could be followed to an even smaller dot on that globe, we had butkus.
Obama’s own handpicked guy – Leon Panetta – confirmed that FACT:
Asked by NBC-TV’s Brian Williams about the information obtained from detainees that led to the bin Laden takedown, Panetta replied: ‘We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. … Clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.”
When Williams asked whether “waterboarding” was one of those techniques, Panetta replied: “That’s correct.”
And all the other principal players in the CIA confirmed that waterboarding was a sine qua non – a “that without which” – in the nailing of Osama bin Laden. Without that information about bin Laden’s courier and the city he was hiding in, he could have been literally in any one of a few billion caves for all we knew. In order to find Osama bin Laden, we needed somewhere to start looking and something specific – like the courier – to start looking into.
So Obama is taking all the credit for getting bin Laden when he not only opposed but even tried to criminalize the personnel and the tactic that directly led to getting the most vital information involved in getting bin Laden.
And while I myself believe that going into Pakistan to get bin Laden was the right thing to do, let’s not forget that there have been rather awful repercussions from that act – particularly the surrender of BILLIONS of dollars in stealth technology that will surely go into the hands of every single one of our worst enemies and the even more worrisome now-glaciated relations between the United States and vital ally Pakistan. There were huge costs to what we did – which is yet more reason that a “victory lap” is a very inappropriate thing for Obama to do.
So let me refer now to the title of this article and explain what I mean.
If I asked 100 Americans who were old enough to have lived through the time “Which president deserves credit for the moon landing” the answer would be “John F. Kennedy.” And I mean he would get the credit 100 percent of the time. After all, it was John F. Kennedy who said:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
But here’s the thing: we didn’t actually land on the moon until 1969. And just who was president in 1969?
Richard M. Nixon. The guy who gets no credit for anything partly because of Watergate but mostly simply because he was a Republican. JFK had been in his grave for six years when his dream of putting a man on the moon became a reality – TWICE the time it took for George Bush’s goal to get bin Laden.
George W. Bush was every bit as instrumental in the eventual nailing of Osama bin Laden was as John F. Kennedy was in the eventual putting a man on the moon:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
And:
“Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”
RICHARD CLARKE, White House Terrorism Advisor, 1998-01: President Bush said to us in the basement of the White House on the night of 9/11, “You have everything you need.” And that was true because as soon as we went to the Congress, they said, “Just tell us what you need.” Blank check.
NARRATOR: The president was determined to spend whatever was necessary and do whatever was necessary to conduct a new kind of war.
JOHN ASHCROFT, Atty. General, 2001-05: The president turned to me and said ─ in my direction anyhow ─ he said, “Never let this happen again.”
FRAN TOWNSEND, White House Terrorism Advisor, 2004-07: I understood that to mean there was no end of the earth we weren’t willing to go to, there was nothing we weren’t willing to ask for, there was nobody we wouldn’t work with. [...]
J. COFER BLACK: This is a very highly classified area. All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves come off.
Bush put all the infrastructure in place to get bin Laden. He transformed the American intelligence community. And yes, he waterboarded the terrorists who yielded the vital information we needed. It simply took time. Osama bin Laden could have been literally in any of a few billion different caves spread over half the planet. And it wasn’t like Barack Obama got out his mail-order investigator kit and found out where bin Laden was hiding by himself, was it?
Finally, Obama demagogues Mitt Romney by insinuating that Romney wouldn’t make the tough decision to get Osama binLaden had he been president. And Obama’s “evidence” for that demonization is this quote from Romney in 2007:
LIZ SIDOTI: “Why haven’t we caught bin Laden in your opinion?”
GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY: “I think, I wouldn’t want to over-concentrate on Bin Laden. He’s one of many, many people who are involved in this global Jihadist effort. He’s by no means the only leader. It’s a very diverse group – Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and of course different names throughout the world. It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person. It is worth fashioning and executing an effective strategy to defeat global, violent Jihad and I have a plan for doing that.”
That clearly doesn’t mean that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have made the decision to go in and nail bin Laden in the event that GEORGE BUSH’S WATERBOARDING had led to his location. He was merely pointing out that we undermined ourselves if we made getting bin Laden the end-all given the fact that there are MANY TERRORISTS and even MANY TERRORIST LEADERS and getting bin Laden wouldn’t magically win the war that these terrorists started.
As an überliberal website documents, HILLARY CLINTON - now serving as Obama’s own Secretary of State – COMPLETELY AGREED WITH MITT ROMNEY. And completely DISAGREED with Barack Obama. As did the man who would have been THE most experienced “foreign-policy” president America had ever had since Dwight Eisenhower, Sen. John McCain.
The only reason – THE ONLY REASON – Barack Obama has been allowed to make the incredibly cynical credit-grabbing statements about getting bin Laden is because the mainstream media are incredibly biased and dishonest propagandists.
