Saffron wrote:philip964 wrote:I guess what I am most puzzled about is, why?
What was the motivation to get this guy released now and not maybe a year before Obama leaves office?
Maybe the timing is about one of the trades, not about Bergdahl.
The timing has EVERYTHING to do with getting the press off of his neck over the VA scandal. The logic is simple, and inescapable:
- Bowe Bergdahl's release could have waited.
- The release of the 5 (and now, officially White House approved) terrorists could have waited.
- Even the Taliban take the long term view of things, and they could have waited.
- There is absolutely ZERO military or diplomatic reason that the trade had to happen NOW. That leaves only one possible explanation, and that is POLITICAL.
- When you accept that the only possible explanation must be political, you then have to accept that nobody would make a political decision like that unless there were some benefit to themselves in doing so. After all, Obama ordered this. Congress didn't order this. They weren't even consulted as the law requires. The courts didn't order this. They weren't even in the notification loop.
- So then you have to ask yourself "what possible benefit to Obama would there be to releasing Bergdahl now?" The only possible explanation is to get the story into the news cycles. Why, you might ask?
- Because getting it into the news cycles will divert the public's attention from other items currently in the news cycles which are damaging to Obama.
- There is currently only one major news story at the top of the cycle which is damaging to Obama: The VA Scandal.
- The media don't care about Benghazi.
- The media don't care about the IRS targeting of conservative organizations.
- The media don't care about Fast & Furious.
- The media really don't care about anything else that makes Obama look bad, but they DO care about what happens to people in the VA system, because they are everyone's grandfathers, uncles, aunts, parents, brothers and sisters, and children, not to mention our most recent generation of wounded warriors.
- The press is—for once—tearing Obama a new one over the VA scandal.
- Prominent democrats are tearing Obama a new one over the VA scandal.
- There is only one way to get the VA scandal off the headlines, and that is to replace it with another story which (hopefully) reflects more positively on the administration.
- An opportunistic president, possibly the most tone-deaf president in history, thought that "rescuing" a captive soldier would be that story. BUT...... as is so often the case, going back to his college days (which is why we're not allowed to see his transcripts) Obama did not do his homework. He never bothered looking into the details of Bergdahl's disappearance. There is a secondary reason for this.
- The initial Army report listed Bergdahl has "having been captured during a firefight".
- When members of his unit protested the report because they knew it to be false, they were told to shut up about it.
- Even so, the Army quietly began an investigation into the possibility of desertion shortly afterward.
- All of this information AND MORE would have been available if Obama had been possessed of the intellectual curiosity of a gnat.
Obama is NOT intellectually curious. He does not want to
learn because he always thinks he already
knows. Therefore, he is unteachable, either by those who know more than he does in the details of thing, or by the crucible of life. Not one single mistake that Obama has made in office has led to his becoming more circumspect, more likely to consult people who know, or more likely to become familiar with background facts before committing himself to an action. He NEVER tailors his response to anything based upon undeniable facts. He ALWAYS has a conclusion, and then tries to bend the facts to support it. When the facts don't support it, he either ignores them, or he and his machine try to destroy the person who has them (think "IRS scandal").
So this buffoon we have for a president, this intellectual fraud, this cold and aloof executive who "leads" by threats and intimidation and who surrounds himself with vile sycophants who renounce all accountability, is so ignorant and tone deaf that he is genuinely surprised by the reaction of nearly his entire party as well as the
rest of this country, not to mention a large part of the democrat party's official mouthpiece—the press.
Even Time.com (
http://time.com/2826534/bowe-bergdahl-taliban-captors/) says:
Asked whether the Taliban would be inspired by the exchange to kidnap others, he laughed. “Definitely,” he says. “It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people. It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”
When even a hard-left organization like Time publishes the truth, which ANY idiot with the IQ of a 10 year old child could have answered, your presidential goose is surely cooked.
So far, Obama has been made of teflon to the bulk of the nation's news media; but I sense that attitude has passed, and going forward, they are going to be far less likely to hand him a pass.
The only upside to all of this is that elected democrat politicians whose actions while in office helped to secure Obama's sense that nothing could touch him will have much to answer to, and people seeking to unseat them will have a LOT of ammo for the elections:
- Fast & Furious.
- Eric Holder hides behind executive privilege and fails to answer Congress during the F&F investigations
- Benghazi
- The absolutely pathetic and crasse attempts to first control the message, instead of just being simply truthful, and then the absolutely pathetic and crasse attempts to distance the administration from the truth after it came out.
- The IRS scandal.
- The painfully overt attempts to cover up the administration's involvement in the IRS scandal.
- The VA scandal.
- The attempt to hide the administration's undeniable fecklessness in the VA problem, when they had been warned by the outgoing Bush administration that there was a big problem that needed to be addressed.
So now we can add to the list of political ammunition: Obama trades deserter, whose desertion cost the lives of at least 6 known Americans, for 5 of the most vile terrorists at Gitmo.
REREAD THAT TALIBAN COMMANDER'S WORDS:
Asked whether the Taliban would be inspired by the exchange to kidnap others, he laughed. “Definitely,” he says. “It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people. It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”
Get that? Any enlisted man/woman in uniform in Afghanistan is "an important bird" whom the Taliban will work hard to capture, now that they know it will yield results. This was SO predictable, and it is SO stupid. Obama's actions have placed all U.S. citizens overseas into harm's way. Does
anybody with half a brain in his body think that this is restricted to Afghanistan only? What about Al Qaeda in Yemen? What about the Muslim Brotherhood in
other countries? Does anyone seriously think that they will not learn from the Taliban's victory here? And it isn't just restricted to Americans in uniform. I have a personal friend, a young woman who is serving as a missionary in an Arabian Gulf country I cannot name because her missionary status is illegal in that country. At least she was marginally safe because her cover story (which is also true) is that she is there as an English teacher. Is she safer or in more danger because of Obama's obtuseness?
Obama is a traitor. He is a loose cannon. He endangers all of us. He is the worst kind of example of the true dictum that elections have consequences. That is true, even when it comes from HIS lips, or the lips of his minions.
I find it amazing that people lose sight of this, but election outcomes are the results of people voting. BigGuy laments voting for this fool TWICE. I had my own epiphany and abandoned the democrat party between the 1994 and 1996 election cycles after a lifetime of voting democrat. I regret every single vote I ever cast as a democrat......not just the last two presidential votes I cast for Dukakis and Clinton. I regret ALL of those votes. I WAS A DECEIVED FOOL.
BigGuy, you have seen the error of your ways in voting for Obama twice, will you turn that into a complete refutation of the democrat party? Like I did? If not, then you will continue to be part of the problem. Why? Because national politicians start locally. Obama's career did not start with the U.S. Senate. He started in community activism, at the local level. If you keep voting for democrats locally and statewide, then you are simply helping to set those people onto the path toward national office.....because that is where their ambitions naturally lie....and you perpetuate the problem.
The democrat party has to be destroyed, root and vine. When the citizens are done with that, it will be time to turn their attentions to the republican party. After all, democrats would not have had a (now heavily unionized) Department of Homeland Security to turn into their own private SS if it weren't for republicans handing them a newly created cabinet level department.
But first things first... of the two, the democrat party is far worse. It badly needs a bracing antiseptic bath with a stiff brush. It needs to be completely reorganized. Tip O'Neal and Jack Kennedy would have NEVER tolerated the commie bastards that run that party now..........and Obama is one of THEM.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
I also trust the Taliban more than obama.
