Their Lives, Their Fortunes, and Their Sacred Honor: Spec Ops Warriors Stand Tall by Russ Vaughn over at American Thinker
In yet another instance of what is becoming a steady series of incredibly stupid misfires, the clueless Obama campaign has decided to adopt the tactics of that memorably successful Kerry campaign in dealing with criticism from the nation's military. Rather than man up and admit that he perhaps went a bit overboard in taking credit for the Osama raid, and that it's entirely possible that his White House has leaked critical intelligence, Obama is taking the same tack as the thoroughly torpedoed Kerry: attack his military critics by calling them dishonorable liars.
It didn't work for Kerry, and it's not going to work for the campaign of a man who, unlike the turncoat Kerry, has absolutely no military credentials to link him to veterans -- not even to that minority that leans left. It most assuredly is not going to work with that much larger group of veterans who tend to vote conservative but will vote for those candidates, regardless of party, who are supportive of the military.
But no, the Axelrod/Plouffe bubble factory, correctly believing that a large part of their Democrat Party is inherently anti-military, has chosen the hang-tough Kerry Gambit: deny, discredit, and dishonor. For those of you unfamiliar with what I'm referring to, the White House handling of the mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden back in 2011 has created a huge amount of displeasure and dissent within the multi-service special operations community, as well as within the overall military and veterans' communities. The president's quick rush to grab the glory with his I,I,I, me, me, me speech left a lot of active and former members of the military stone, frosty cold. As any general or admiral could tell you, top commanders, especially commanders-in-chief, do not rush to claim the glory. All credit goes to the warriors who carried out the missions, not the politicians and staff weenies involved in the upper-level planning.
Such a rush to snatch credit from the jaws of victory is unseemly and undignified to those who serve to protect this nation -- and especially so when the unseemly, undignified grabber of glory happens to be the commander of all our military forces, a position which demands dignity, gravitas, and a true understanding of the Warrior Code. Bush, a fighter pilot, had it; Clinton, a draft-dodger, did not; the guy there now and his Chicago advisers don't have the slightest clue.
But worse, in the eyes of those frontline and behind-the-lines warriors who have now posted their displeasure is the total disregard by this White House for operational security. The unseemly haste with which the Obama spin machine jumped in to blare to the world that Osama had been killed was a grievous intelligence error. In their eagerness to seize credit, the politicians in the White House deprived our nation and our forces of the intelligence that would normally flow from the capture of a terrorist headquarters: all the information contained there about our enemy's forces, their structure, their distribution/locations, their communications networks, and their finances. With one simple White House press release, all that hard-fought-for intelligence was lost. Forever. In claiming the glory, Obama insured that all that intel was end-of-story.
