Freedom Line Blog

What is it with Barack Obama and his habitual slurs against police, anyway?

Speaking about Arizona’s new immigration law during one of his “perpetual campaign” rallies in Iowa, Obama employed his usual caricature of Gestapo-like American police officers:

You can imagine if you’re a Hispanic American in Arizona, your great-great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state.  But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.  That’s something that could potentially happen.”

“You’re going to be harassed?”

Well, if you’re living in Community Organizer-in-Chief Obama’s world, anyway.  Recall that he descended into the same anti-police slander when he accused Cambridge, Massachusetts police of acting “stupidly” during the Officer Crowley-Professor Gates incident.  It turned out, of course, that Officer Crowley behaved professionally, just as almost all of our nation’s officers do on a daily basis.

Well, at least we know now that Obama was paying attention during Reverend Jeremiah “G-d Damn America” Wright’s sermons.

As President Obama mulls over General McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan — and former Vice President Cheney hits the current administration hard for what he calls “dithering” — the White House has hit back with some heavy accusations.

Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has claimed that the Bush Administration ignored the strategic planning process for the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs alleges that the Bush White House let a request for more troops in Afghanistan fall stillborn for nearly a year.

You can debate the merits of various approaches and the trade-offs that are always necessary in national security policy. But as someone who was in the Bush White House during the time in question, I can testify to the fact that Afghan planning was very high on the agenda in the waning days of the administration. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has done the legwork to bear this out and his new piece pushes back against the Obama Administration’s claims with great clarity. Among the best passages:

One Bush veteran asks, “If it’s true that the Bush administration sat on these troop requests for eight months, is the White House suggesting that the Pentagon was incompetent or negligent or both? That would be a good question to put to the defense secretary–and President Obama is in a position to make him talk.”

I couldn’t reach Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but I did talk to a senior defense official who serves with him. This person stressed that Gates has gone to great lengths to avoid being dragged into political fights between administrations. Nonetheless, he offered a strong rebuke to the present White House political team.

“There was no request on anyone’s desk for eight months,” said the defense official. “There was not a request that went to the White House because we didn’t have forces to commit. So on the facts, they’re wrong.”

In reality, the Bush Administration stayed quiet on the options going forward into Afghanistan so that Obama wouldn’t have his choices muddied by having them labeled as recycled goods from the previous president.  That they are now using that fact as a cudgel speaks very poorly of the current denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Read Hayes’ entire piece here.