Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Friday, May 6, 2011
John Yoo: 'This Administration' Really Doesn't 'Want to Capture al Qaeda Leaders'
A follow up to my essay from Wednesday, "The Editors at the New York Times are Living in Another World." I quoted John Yoo's latest op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, discussed at the clip below with Eliot Spitzer. It gets a little heated toward the end, and that's when Yoo reiterates his thesis: The Obama administration made a political decision to not even attempt a capture of Bin Laden, and this may have deprived the U.S. of valuable intelligence, while also adding more fuel to the hypothesis that reelection considerations were at least as important as national security in White House decision-making on the raid in Abottabad:
I will go you one further, I do not believed they planned to do anything about Osama or most of the terrorists. They were forced to act by a number of things not the least of which was the "Wikileaks" material.
ReplyDeleteThe only time they would have taken any action otherwise would have been just before the next Presidential election if they thought there was a big chance of Obama losing.
One only has to look at the bungling of almost everything the Obama administration has done just in the last week. This is a demonstration of gross incompetence, not leadership.
There is nothing they do that is not a political calculation. Gun running to drug gangs in Mexico by the administration in order to use it as a premise for gun control. Did they really care how many innocent people would/could be killed by their politically motivated actions? Action motivated by political calculations place no value on the ramifications of those actions except whether it gains more power. The Obama administration is incapable of thinking or acting in any other terms.
They have gained one thing and that is it has taken the administration's bungling of almost every other issue out of the news for a week and I suspect they may even be happy about that fact because it was only causing his poll number to go down. That will be short lived because they are incapable of doing the right things for the right reasons.
The best one can describe this is "that even a blind squirrel can find a acorn." It is too bad that this particular squirrel appears not to be able to maintain his grip on the acorn.
The only problem with Yoo's assessment is that the American people would have objected to Bin Laden being housed in a mansion a short distance from the Naval Academy.
ReplyDeleteObama is a walking political calculation.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't plant his ass on the porcelain throne without considering the political implications.
-Dave