Evidence For An Unpalatable Conclusion

     “What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

     I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly – I can’t stand his style, regardless of whether I concur with his positions – but now and again he manages to bring on a guest who says something of significance.

     Yesterday evening, Nice Deb reports, O’Reilly conversed with retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, and elicited the following bombshells:

     “No, [Obama] doesn’t care about defeating [ISIS]. He cares about making it to the end of his term without another major disaster that can be blamed on him. And that is it!”

     “Stop thinking rationally! It does not work with the Obama White House. That inner cabal that knows nothing about history, nothing about military affairs, denies that Islamist extremism has anything to do with Islam, they live in a fantasy world, and in that fantasy world where they don’t take military advice – they just chatter to each other.”

     “Bill, we have a president whose vision of the world has been, remains and will remain divorced from reality....He hates the military. Despises it and doesn’t want to do what it takes to defeat ISIS....The Left keeps saying that the American people are tired of war. They’re not tired of war, they’re tired of losing! They’re tired of seeing their sons and daughters killed and maimed for the vanity of an inept and ineffective and cowardly president.”

     Now, Colonel Peters isn’t an Obama White House “insider,” so the above must be regarded as his deductions from evidence available to any “outsider’s” eyes and ears. Nevertheless, how would you go about trying to falsify it? What evidence available to your eyes testifies to:

• Obama’s determination to defeat ISIS;
• Rationality about foreign and military policies within the Obama Administration;
• Obama’s sincere respect for our military.

     Note that our highest military commanders are becoming massively frustrated with Obamunist foreign and military dithering:

     Key lawmakers from both parties say frustration with the White House among the top military officers is at its highest level in decades, the product of President Obama’s cautious approach to the wars in Syria and Iraq and an indecisive inner circle of White House advisers who, critics say, have iced the Pentagon out of the policymaking process.

     “There’s a level of dissatisfaction among the uniformed military that I’ve never seen in my time here,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain in an interview. “For some of us who are a little older, let’s go back and read the Pentagon Papers — what the administration is doing is the kind of incrementalism that defined much of the Vietnam conflict.”

     But of course, the Democrats are unwilling to allow such an observation to pass without trying to lay the blame on the Republicans:

     [Congressman Adam Smith (D, WA)] said Republican leaders deserve a fair share of the blame for the polarized debate because of what he said was political posturing against nearly every aspect of President Obama’s Middle East policy.

     Some of the attacks are so derisive, he said, that they have effectively crippled the prospects for serious national security discussions on Capitol Hill.

     Suuuuure, Congressman. You go right on quacking that while the head of your party continues to degrade the greatest fighting force in human history.

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     If there’s a more serious subject in the realm of public policy than the appropriate and effective use of America’s armed forces, it escapes me at the moment. Yet the Obamunists have deliberately mishandled our military for seven years, undermining its effectiveness right up to the point of betraying it to America’s enemies:

• Unilaterally reducing our strategic deterrent,
• Announcing pre-established withdrawal dates,
• Subjecting our forces to crippling rules of engagement,
• Trading five vicious, venomous terrorists for a deserter,
• And forbidding our forces in the field to engage the enemy even after that enemy has been positively and unambiguously identified,

     ...in aggregate constitute as clear a betrayal as anyone could imagine short of openly ordering our men at arms to lay down their weapons before the enemy. Add to that the insult-atop-injury of appointing Chuck Hagel, the most rabidly anti-military Republican ever to attain high office, to be Secretary of Defense, and having him conduct a reduction in force on the grounds of economy while the Administration continues to squander on ObamaCare, ObamaPhones, luxuriant welfare programs of every sort, the coddling of illegal aliens, and other obscenities too numerous to tabulate here.

     Given all that, anyone who claims that Colonel Peters is merely a partisan determined to badmouth the Administration should be certified.

     (Say, do we still do that sort of thing? Could we do it to a president? And would the Inability Clause (Section 4) of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment apply? Or is an insane president allowed to continue in office as long as he still looks good on TV? Food for thought.)

     I dislike the “world policeman” role the U.S. has assumed. I’d prefer to see our military used only to defend the country, American lives and American property abroad, American interests guaranteed by solemnly ratified treaties, and the freedom of transit on the high seas and in space. But my likes and dislikes are less important than maintaining a military capable of doing what it’s asked to do, and then supporting it to the hilt when it’s in the field. That, the Obamunists have openly refused to do.

     For which reasons, to which I add the following short chain of reasoning:

• The military is the U.S.’s sole means of defending ourselves and protecting our legitimate extraterritorial interests;
• To weaken our military when it’s already overcommitted is therefore an attack upon the nation as a whole;
• For a president and his administration to do this demonstrates hostility toward the nation: its people, its lands, its property, and its ability to defend those things in time of danger.

     ...I concur with Colonel Peters: Obama and his inner circle hate America's military and are doing everything they can get away with to weaken it.

     What do you think, Gentle Reader?