October 5, 2009

These Are A Couple Of Items…

…from today’s Washington Times Online. I’m somewhat pressed for time this morning, I have some people to meet, but figured I’d share them.

Here we have a fine example of the term, “haste makes waste” in action, in this case mongers of political agendas in such a hurry to blow our hard earned tax money that they misinformed the public, largely through failure to do their homework and largely to get their itinerary pushed through in a hurry, in an un-thought-out, unconstitutional, just plain stupid act, part of the idiotic and ill advised TARP program.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other “healthy” financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.

The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year’s Wall Street losses.

Right. Now the American taxpayer gets to pay the price for the blatant miscalculations due to political agendas and faulty thinking of a number of general purpose assholes.

Moving right along, we have the messiah Barack Hussein, whose military expertise evidently outshines that of his generals, coming up with excuses as to why he’d rather allow U.S. servicemen and woman to die than to commit more troops where General McChrystal says they are needed. What does McChrystal know, anyway, right? He’s just a general, whereas Obama, the guy who once, for campaign reasons, said the war in Afghanistan is justified in order to compare it to Iraq (according to his excellency, unjustified) is so much more knowledgeable about warfare that, well,

One day after an attack in Afghanistan killed eight American soldiers, President Obama’s national security adviser downplayed both the importance of U.S. troop levels and the possibility of a Taliban return to power.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested that Gen. McChrystal’s call for more troops must be tempered by diplomatic considerations as the president weighs how to deal with the 8-year-old war.

“Well, I think the end is much more complex than just about adding ‘X’ number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that’s quite large and that swallows up a lot of people,” the retired Marine general said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right, let’s here more, Jones. What else did Obama instruct you to say, and being an ex-military man yourself, how does it feel to be a party to it?

The rest of the story can be found here.

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12 Responses to “These Are A Couple Of Items…”

  1. BB-Idaho Says:

    McChrystal/Jones: even military experts can disagree.
    The Soviet Union crumbled after messing in the Kush, as did Britain prior. Bush2 had enough sense not to get involved in escalation there. Warfare is a fun hobby for those tribal folk and I, for one, would like to see exactly what our goals there are. McChrystal is a Petreaus admirer and nothing wrong with that, but COINOPs may not work with that bunch…

  2. Seth Says:

    BB –

    Hmmm, lemme see…

    How ’bout that if Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the next one to fall will be Pakistan, which has nukes in its arsenal.

    BOOM!

  3. BB-Idaho Says:

    The old domino theory?

  4. Seth Says:

    BB –

    Not exactly, LOL.

    Look back in the history of, say, India and Pakistan. The two were divided up by the Brits to forestall bloody disagreements brought on by religious differences.

    Pakistan= “Land of the religiously pure”.

    The two countries still went toe to toe over Kashmir, and, I suspect, because Pakistan, being Islamic, is not a country to forgive and forget such things as having real estate it believed belonged to it being denied it (once Islamic, always Islamic, whether it was actually theirs or not), hence incessant hostility.

    A fundamentalist Muslim government bearing such ill tidings and with the Islamic penchant for justifying mindless violence at the drop of a hat, in possession, no less, of nukes, would have no compunction re going back to war with India, another country that has nukes.

    What do you bet that we (these here U-nited States of ‘Murica) and other western nations wouldn’t be drawn, in the interests of heading off a major Armaggedon type event in southwest Asia — which could spread (who knows, maybe Ahmadmanjihad taking the opportunity to deal himself in if his own nukes are ve-hiculized), into the fray.

    If you believe our present involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan are a mess, imagine what things would be like if we were forced to leap into the middle of that kind of conflict!

    Although denizens of the left side of the aisle are generally in the dark when the concept of preemptive action arises in the average discourse, believing that a) if we just ignore something it will go away, or b) everybody but the Republicans have America’s best interests at heart, and after all, everybody but the ugly American is nice folks and would never do anything dastardly, the reality is that evil things do occur, more often than not these days at the hands of the Mohammedans, and sometimes “a stitch in time does, indeed, save nine.”

  5. BB-Idaho Says:

    Denizens? heh
    Upon encountering the Aryan mountain tribes of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great wrote to his Mom,
    “I am involved in the land of a ‘Leonine’ (lion-like) and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel, confronting my soldiers.” Tough place, tough bunch. While I agree that the Pakistani
    nuclear weapons present a challenge, my opinion is that we have had ‘boots on the ground’ for eight years.
    Some wag pointed out that in that period of time we fought both world wars. So why the sudden rush? We need think this through: will we need 200,000 combat troops? 400,000? How long? Need we ‘nation build’?
    I saw General Petreaus a couple days back taking questions: his reply to adding troops was that they
    did not necessarily have to be US…implying that
    a successful COIN would involve the recruitment and training of indigenous types, as in Iraq. I submit this is a complex operation, we have diddled for a long time…lets not rush in where angels fear to…
    but do some serious thinking. Ya know..deep thinking,
    like the ‘denizens of the deep’?

  6. Seth Says:

    BB –

    So why the sudden rush? We need think this through

    Until when? The longer an enemy is allowed to operate without sufficient opposition, the more deeply he becomes entrenched and the more effort and lives it takes to defeat him.

    this is a complex operation, we have diddled for a long time…lets not rush in where angels fear to…
    but do some serious thinking.

    Need we diddle longer? We both know that sometimes Murphy’s Law gets itself into the mix, in this case our fearless leaders may have found that previous strategies were sadly lacking in results, that there were more or smarter bad guys than anticipated, whatever… perhaps there’s not a whole lot of time to diddle around with a long, bureaucrat-like period of “serious thinking” sans some in-the-meantime action. Perhaps we need some increase in our military presence at the same time we are dappling in extended diddling.

    A whole lot of Marines died unnecessarily at Fallujah as a result of professional second guessers diddling for six months while the Marines awaited permission to go in and do what needed doing immediately, not post-serious thinking. Ya know..deep thinking while the enemy entrenched themselves, in siege condition.

  7. BB-Idaho Says:

    Bomb them into the stone age? They started there.
    Drop more ordnance than ALL of WWII, bring home 50,000 KIA? Been there, did that..VN. Yeah, I know..light at end of tunnel..been there, too. Throwing USMC at places is John Wayne movie stuff, Seth: Tarawa, Peleliu were tactical mistakes, uneccessarily costly.
    Re-read Petreaus’ FM3-24. Kicking
    butt is great sport..but it doubles the number of enemy for every kill, Consider, (sort of a stretch for a conservative) if foreign troops came down your street looking for some desperado; RPG’d your house
    and ‘collateralled’ your family. You would not thank
    your deliverers. The Ft. Leavenworth think tank finally figured this out, hence we attempt to avoid such tactics. It ain’t easy and no doubt you disagree sending our best generals for PhDs…

  8. Seth Says:

    BB –

    Bomb them into the stone age?

    Drop more ordnance than ALL of WWII

    Bah! Yes, Bah! There are mediums, one does not have to advocate extremity. If you need more people to get a job done and that job is as vital as is winning in Afghanistan, you bring them in.

    McChrystol was hired to do exactly what he’s done, evaluate and recommend, based upon his expertise, yet because his evaluation doesn’t meet the liberals’ political agendas, they have begun attacking him, soon, no doubt, to the same level as the “Betray Us” rhetoric.

    Islamofascists tend to surround themselves with innocents, for the sole purpose of attracting collateral damage. GIs have died specifically because they have gone the extra mile to avoid killing innocents.

    …if foreign troops came down your street looking for some desperado; RPG’d your house
    and ‘collateralled’ your family. You would not thank your deliverers.

    I think I’ve mentioned before that terrorists as often as not come from family units, certainly that when a terrorist lives in the neighborhood over there, everyone knows fully well who he is and what he does.

    If none of the fine folks in the ‘hood has the humanity to come forward and identify these monsters so they can be taken out or arrested in a more planned, quiet manner, they shouldn’t complain when people come looking with big weapons.

  9. BB-Idaho Says:

    Not a simple issue. I have heard a number of folk on both left and right say let’s just pull out, we didn’t get Osama, as well as the hard-line build-up and stay till they are all dead. I don’t buy either, which are basically black/white thinking applied to a situation involving military as well as geo-political issues. Is there some problem with defining goals and doing a cost/benefit study on achieving them? Got a vested interest, BTW..son-in-law, 45 yr old USN reserve Commander got called up and is deployed in Baghdad for
    the coming year..not that we shouldn’t be concerned with every single US soldier in harm’s way. Naive liberal, yep; but goals vs lives strike me as complexities deserving of serious thinking.

  10. Seth Says:

    BB –

    The problem is that our esteemed politicians (mostly on the left) have developed the nasty habit of politicizing every single thing, homeland security, war, the economy, you name it, that comes along.

    Rather than look for a solution to a problem that embraces reality or makes sense, they prefer to make a political issue of it and push that issue to partisan extremes.

    Hence, we have what we have,

    If they don’t start acting like leaders and adopt a professional attitude, we will be in the proverbial feces in no time a’tall. :-(

  11. BB-Idaho Says:

    I understand the neocn position. But the folks who have to do the work understand the problem. Gates is no neocon and you will not hear
    ‘ya gotta go to war wit what ya got’ from him. That would be another dumb mistake….

  12. Seth Says:

    BB –

    I tend to go with the attitude of John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

    Listen, say a few things that are vitally necessary are also tough to do, or require some measure of hardship on the part of a number of people involved. Does that mean we simply scrap what we know to be necessary and the hell with it?

    No, if the Americans who made this country the great nation it is had simply adopted that line of thinking and walked off into the sunset, we might today be another France, or perhaps even have been invaded and now be under the iron rule of Trinidad and Tobago.

    Ahem…Sometimes the impossible is just a little bit harder.