Tuesday, January 19, 2010
We need another kind of change
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Chuck White
White, of Roanoke, is a general contractor and lifelong outdoorsman.
Do I understand correctly that the same intelligence agencies that President Obama kneecapped this summer by holding them responsible in courts of law and threatening them with jail time for actions taken during wartime are now to blame for the lapse of security that allowed a Muslim extremist suicide bomber to almost bring down a plane on Christmas Day?
You thump your chest and threaten intelligence professionals with prosecution for intelligence gathering, and then you really expect them to go full bore gathering intelligence? Well, what a surprise. A moron could have seen this attack coming a mile away. And brace yourselves, there are more to come, a lot more. Is this what was meant by change?
The president made it implicitly clear that only 100 percent verifiable intelligence would be accepted, and only then if gathered by means acceptable in U.S. courts of law. Why? Because the administration does not believe that terrorists, oops, I mean persons that the president has the authority to detain, are bent on terrorist acts, oops, I mean man-made disasters. We are not, after all, involved in a war, oops, I mean overseas contingency operation, for our very right to exist, are we? The spin is mind-boggling. Is this what was meant by change?
We move prisoners of war from a neutral off-shore site to the most populated city in the land. We afford them the same constitutional rights as American citizens in courts of law. We charge prisoners of war under U.S. criminal codes instead of military law.
We allow foreigners, enemy combatants, men who want to kill your family and mine, to lawyer up and invoke the Fifth Amendment under the protection of our constitution. We allow the enemy a courtroom bully pulpit to spew their hate during public trials. We gut-punch our own intelligence agencies. We negate these agencies' ability to get information from captured enemies because the combatants have been Mirandized and now have the right to remain silent.
We broadcast our intentions to our enemies. We set a deadline for the date we will begin to leave the battlefield. We refuse to call it a war. We refuse to call them the enemy. We refuse to broadcast the images of death and destruction from Sept. 11 because someone might be upset or offended. Is this what was meant by change?
What the hell happened to this country? Have we become so worried about offending our enemies that we have become paralyzed, feeble and weak? In any war before this, at any time in our history, these actions would have been considered unconscionable at best and treason at worst. Aid and comfort to the enemy has never been smiled upon, until now. Is this what was meant by change?
Where does it end? Do we give our enemies teddy bears while incarcerated, maybe their favorite meal on Tuesdays? If we just cuddle them every day, will they decide that they don't hate us anymore? We need a commander-in-chief, not a Harvard law professor or a community organizer. Is this what was meant by change?
Unsustainable debt, comfort for the enemy, partisanship, gridlock, bailouts, buying Senate votes, government ownership of private business, government demanding for the first time in the history of the country that every private citizen buy a product (health care) from a private company. Less liberty, less security, more government interference in every aspect of our lives. Is this what was meant by change?
2010 is here. 2012 is coming. We can only hope that we can vote in someone, of any political stripe, who gives a damn about us. That would be a change.
