Rumsfeld calls out the ever ungracious Obama - and more commentary

In other words ... is Obama lying ? again ? (well, his lips WERE moving)

Rumsfeld on Last Night [NRO Staff]
Washington, D.C. – Responding to President Obama’s address on Afghanistan yesterday, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued the following statement:

“In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that ‘Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.’ Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response.”

“I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, ‘repeated’ or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.”

“In the interest of better understanding the President's announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President’s assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied.”


James Fallows’s Double Standard [Peter Wehner]

James Fallows of The Atlantic, terribly concerned about appropriate public discourse from former high-ranking public officials, writes this:

I am not aware of a case of a former president or vice president behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama's decisions on Afghanistan. . . . Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people now trying to make difficult decisions. He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest.

Let’s see if we can help Mr. Fallows by going way, way, way back in history — to, say, the George W. Bush presidency, when former vice president Al Gore charged that Bush had “brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon,” and that Bush had “betrayed this country” and was a “moral coward.”Funny, but I’m not aware that Fallows had anything critical to say about Gore at the time, even though what Gore said about Bush is far more personal and ad hominem than anything Cheney has said about Obama. You would think that Fallows, if he were concerned about the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people then trying to make difficult decisions, would have spoken up at the time. But shockingly he did not. Perhaps he was putting ideological politics far, far above national interest. But who can tell?


Innocent Abroad [Charlotte Hays]

What jumped out at me last night in the president’s address is that even when sending our young men and women to war, Obama can’t resist a dig at the country he leads. He just had to say that America is “less innocent” than in Franklin Roosevelt’s day. In a way, though, he got that backwards: We are now led by an innocent . . . an innocent abroad.


Obama-Family Graciousness [Jay Nordlinger]
There are many points being made about Obama’s Afghanistan speech, large and small, and one of the smaller points is this: the president’s continued snarkiness toward his predecessor. In fact, if he could refrain from some of his snarkiness, he would show himself a bigger man. Remember how Obama was praised for his temperament, above all? Part of temperament, I would think, is graciousness — or at least non-snarkiness.Not everyone in the president’s family is a snark toward Bush. As I relate in Impromptus today, there was a very interesting piece from the Associated Press about Zeituni Onyango. Remember her? She is Obama’s aunt, and finds herself in an immigration pickle. A native Kenyan living in Boston, she is applying for asylum.Anyway, at the end of the AP report, we get this:

Onyango reserved special words of kindness for former President George W. Bush for a directive he put in place days before the election requiring federal agents get high-level approval to arrest fugitive immigrants, which directly affected Onyango. The directive made clear that U.S. officials worried about possible election implications of arresting Onyango.She said she wants to thank Bush in person for the order, which gave her a measure of peace but was lifted weeks later.

“I loved President Bush,” Onyango said while moving toward a framed photo of Bush and his wife standing with Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House on inauguration day. “He is my No. 1 man in my life because he helped me when I really needed that help.”

“No. 1 man in my life”? If ever the Bush family gets too down on their successors in the White House, they might look to Aunt Zeituni.



The Speech [Andy McCarthy]
If you accept, as I do, the premise that President Obama is an Alinskyite, last night’s speech was totally predictable. From 2003 forward, he and his party cynically raised the Afghanistan mission into a noble calling — not because they thought it really was one, but because it made their political attack on the war in Iraq more effective. Now, Obama is cratering in the polls and his party is in even worse shape. Politically, they can’t afford to abandon the noble calling at this point: Even the legacy media couldn’t protect them from the fallout, which would intensify when the Taliban overran Karzai right as we headed into our midterm elections next year.

So we can’t leave, but we can’t wage war either. The Obama Left can tolerate, barely, the appearance of waging war if that’s what it takes to prevent rank-and-file Democrats from revolting. But they have no interest in defeating anti-American Muslims (who, after all, have a point, right?) or in pursuing American interests for their own sake.

What to do? Well, the Right has given Obama his escape hatch. Conservatives keep talking about “victory” but they never define it. We keep saying, “Give General McChrystal the troops he needs to win,” but because we’re as vague as Obama when it comes to what “winning” means, no one will really care what the additional troops actually do in Afghanistan. Thus, as long as Obama agreed to send a contingent — low-balled, but reasonably close to the 40,000 in McChrystal’s last request — he knew he’d be fine. Now, Obama can continue purporting to define the mission “narrowly . . . as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies,” and conservatives will dutifully tell themselves that we are over there to demolish bin Laden’s network and the Taliban — so let's rally behind our president! In reality, however, we’ll be nation-building: the thankless, impossible dream of turning Kabul into Kansas. Our unwavering resolve for this task will last 18 months — during which we will continue solidifying the new narrative that the war is not ours but Afghanistan’s, and that the hapless Karzai isn’t producing results fast enough. That will get Democrats through the midterms.

By that point, it will be the middle of 2011 — and that’s when the “taking into account conditions on the ground” kicks in. If the Left has succeeded in souring the country on the whole enterprise such that Obama’s reelection chances won’t be impaired by a withdrawal, we’ll pull-out. On the other hand, if the noble calling is still perceived as noble, Obama will satisfy the Right by bravely staying the course and giving General McChrystal the time he needs "to complete the mission successfully," and satisfy the Left by re-promising a phased withdrawal in about 18 months, so that those resources can be invested here at home in rebuilding our economy and putting Americans back to work (since unemployment should be hovering around 12 percent by then).