June 23, 2010
Dear Preachers:
Obama continues to look for "scapegoats" rather than Victory, with his shabby treatment of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and the upcoming Friday Publication in Rolling Stone. [http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/538160/201006221911/Unfriendly-Fire.aspx]
The piece contains unflattering criticism of administration officials and policy in a war that candidate Obama said had to be won in a place we should be fighting.
We've become accustomed to rhetorical flourishes by the president that end up meaning not much.
That apparently was one of them, along with the part about McChrystal being hand-picked.
In the piece, their first meeting was described as more of a blind date than a strategy talk between commander in chief and commander in the field. It quotes an adviser to McChrystal dismissing the early meeting with Obama as a "10-minute photo op."
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. The boss was pretty disappointed," the adviser told the magazine. This blind date appears to be ending badly.
McChrystal clearly still smarts over Obama's Hamlet-like hand-wringing over the general's request for more troops, particularly when Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. "I found that time painful," McChrystal said in the article.
The commitment for fewer troops than McChrystal asked for came with a large string attached. The White House's troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to start bringing them home in July 2011. McChrystal would be forced to play "beat the clock" while the Taliban pressed the snooze alarm.
McChrystal said he felt betrayed and blindsided by his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.
If Eikenberry had any doubts about the troop buildup, McChrystal said he never expressed them until a leaked internal document threw a wild card into the debate over whether to add more troops last November.
In the document, Eikenberry said Afghan President Hamid Karzai was not a reliable partner for the counterinsurgency strategy McChrystal was hired to execute. McChrystal also felt he was being set up.
"Here's one that covers his flank for the history books," McChrystal told the magazine. "Now, if we fail, they [Eikenberry and Obama] can say 'I told you so.' "
Our Afghan policy is clearly in chaos, and the only thing the administration appears committed to is heading for the exits with a good cover story.
Despite reassurances to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday: "The July (2011) date, as stated by the president, that's not moving, that's not changing. Everybody agreed on that date."
Well, maybe not everybody.
From this ole preacher-warrior’s viewpoint in Oklahoma, there are issues with McChrystal’s politically correct rules of engagement, which, have, in my opinion, led to higher-than-necessary casualties.
What's clearly needed is a "president and a general" who are both fully committed to unconditional victory with no arbitrary troop levels or timetables. Our "Muslim-Marxist" is still the president, our new General is General Petraeus, who, by and large was greatly responsible, again, in my opinion, for the "surge" tactics in Iraq, so we may not have "downsized" in changing Generals.
Otherwise, if all this doesn’t work, for all you folks whose memories go all the way back to 1975, all we may need to do is wait for the helicopters on the roof of our embassy in Kabul.
President Obama, sure, was in his rights to fire McChrystal for insubordination.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with our commander in chief until long after the Afghan war may be lost. [end of article]
On a less serious, but, still serious side, a federal judge overturned President Obama's six-month moratorium on new deep-water drilling projects. [http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/538164/201006221911/Gulf-Drilling-Season-Reopens.aspx]
It's a good decision, one that puts reason and the law before populist politics.
In rejecting the moratorium, New Orleans federal judge Martin Feldman said "the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium" and suggested it intentionally misled the public.
The administration's case, from the beginning, lacked either a moral or a legal basis, and the judge saw right through it. The moratorium was political pandering, pure and simple.
Not tough to see why. The president's popularity is in a nose dive that has accelerated since the Gulf oil blowout.
A CBS-New York Times poll taken last week found that only 32% believe the president has a plan to deal with the disaster, vs. 59% who believe he doesn't.
Some 61% fault the White House for reacting too slowly to the Gulf spill, which has gushed 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day since April 20.
It's been an epic PR disaster for a White House already hurt by growing charges of incompetence and inexperience.
Given the steady drip-drip of bad news for the White House — even many of Obama's most ardent liberal supporters in the media, like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, have abandoned him on this issue — the logical impulse was to do what has always seemed to work in the past: politicize the blame.
That's why the president announced the moratorium on May 26, affecting some 33 exploratory drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Early on, he vowed to kick BP's backside, a nice bit of populist theater he followed up by compelling the oil company to fund a possibly illegal $20 billion "trust," to be administered by the White House.
He knew the extortion from BP and the even-broader industry moratorium would be popular with many voters, who are in no mood to be nice to Big Oil after BP's blowout.
We can't blame people for being mad. But the simple fact is, the moratorium was a disaster that would have made things worse.
Not only did it punish oil companies that had done nothing wrong for BP's mistakes, but if carried out, it would have wreaked devastation on the Gulf region's economy — and on U.S. energy security.
The Gulf produces nearly a third of our nation's oil. And we will rely on crude oil for 85% of our energy needs at least through the middle part of this century, according to the Energy Department.
To halt exploration in an oil-rich area because of one very bad mess-up — and without evidence that the drilling process is inherently dangerous — would be foolish.
That was why Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took the federal government to court.
He knew that each of those idled rigs employs an average 230 people.
According to oil industry data, the moratorium would cost about $330 million a month in lost wages alone.
The knock-on effects would have been worse. Some 40,000 jobs total would have been at risk in the Gulf, according to a report in Popular Mechanics — billions of dollars a month in lost income, during one of the worst recessions in our nation's postwar history.
By the way, many of those rigs, which rent out for as much as $1 million a day, would have gone elsewhere, leaving the U.S. high and dry when it finally came back to its senses months from now.
Where would they have gone, you ask?
How about Brazil, which has embarked on a massive offshore drilling program in recent years, and desperately needs U.S. equipment and know-how.
Ironically, the Obama administration has pledged at least $2 billion to help Brazil drill.
And this White House seems willing to let China drill not too far off our coast. Apparently, it's only off-limits to us.
The response during this crisis by the White House has been pathetic. For petty political reasons, it initially refused to let Louisiana's Jindal build barrier islands to protect his state from the oil.
And it still hasn't suspended the Jones Act, which protects union workers by requiring use of U.S.-flagged ships in our waters.
That has kept countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Norway, all with lots of deep-water oil experience, from helping clean up.
Congress, too, is playing politics — trying to use the crisis as a way to pass cap-and-trade and a ruinous new oil tax.
On Page 138 of the recent "tax extenders" bill, Senate Democrats even tried to sneak in a 612% hike in the per-barrel oil tax. You'll pay if they succeed.
Nothing the White House or Congress has done will stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. But in the case of the ill-considered moratorium, at least, common sense and the law have prevailed. [end of article]
Preachers, your economy, my economy, your country, my country, your future, my future, your kids' future, my kids' future, all — appear to be soon put on the trash heap by the "Muslim-Marxist Commander-in-Chief!"
Some of you become upset that I call our "Commander-in-Chief" a "Marxist." Let me tell you about about Karl Heinrich Marx, as he was renamed on August 26, 1824, and his son - Karl Marx.
Marx’s grandfather was rabbi in Trier until he death in 1789; his uncle in 1824 was still the rabbi.
Marx’s mother came from a long line of famous rabbis and scholars, going back to Meir Katzenellenbogen, a sixteenth century rector of the Talmudic college in Padua.
But, Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a "child of the enlightenment," becoming a follower of both Voltaire and Rousseau, before becoming an Ambitious Lawyer.
Trier, then, was in Prussia, where Jews had been emancipated since the edict of March 11, 1812. In theory it was still in force, despite Napoleon’s defeat. In reality it was evaded. Thus Jews like Heinrich Marx could train for law, but not practice it.
Supposed conversion to Catholicism [called Christianity] was the avenue Heinrich took to then become a lawyer, and later, the dean of the Trier bar. Karl Marx, then, "mentor" of our Muslim-Marxist President, instead of attending a Jewish yeshiva, went to Trier High School, and his being baptized into "Catholicism-called-Christianity" proved to be even more significant to the world than had that of the 1817 baptism of a twelve-year-old precocious boy, Benjamin Disraeli, who later was British Prime Minister.
Today, through Saul Alinsky’s methods, you and I have a President who is bound and determined to bring this country "to ruin." God help us to get the "help we need" from God Himself to avert such nonsense.
JIM VINEYARD
YEDIDIM OF ISRAEL
www.yedidimofisrael.com
http://www.jav-yedidimofisrael.blogspot.com/
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