Obama's One Fine Mess of Potage

Clarice Feldman

In the Bible, Esau sold his birthright for a mess of potage -- some red lentil soup, to be exact. Looking at the week's events, it seems that this country has sold its glorious birthright of constitutional government by honest men and women for a mess of potage -- a false promise of hope and change delivered by a glib huckster and his shady friends. The deceit and lawlessness of Obama and those around him and the consequences have never been clearer than they were this week.

Nothing shows better the unprincipled nature of the administration and the acquiescence of the media than the stories of Bowe Bergdahl, who this week was charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and Hillary Clinton's destruction of her email server's records. Both Obama and Clinton operate on the not unreasonable assumption that voters have memories no longer than a nanosecond and the complaisant press will be all too ready to help bury history.

It is clear that Bergdahl was, as the army has now charged, a deserter. Three days before his disappearance, he emailed his loopy parents: 

The future is too good to waste on lies," he wrote. "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American."

He left the base, was predictably captured by the enemy and spent several years in captivity instead of being hailed by them as a hero as I suppose he imagined he'd be.

Six men died searching for him (PFC Matthew Martinek, SSG Kurt Curtiss, PFC Morris Walker, SSG Clayton Bowen, 2LT Darryn Andrews, SSG Michael Murphy) and one was seriously permanently disabled. 

The military investigation into his disappearance surely made the circumstances of his disappearance into enemy territory and hands known. Still, undoubtedly in an effort to clear out Gitmo, an Obama campaign promise never fulfilled, the president traded five high-ranking Taliban commanders for Bergdahl, placing them under the uncertain short-term supervision of Qatar. Disgustingly, he cloaked his motives in pieties about never leaving a single troop behind.

In making this trade he reneged on his promise to consult with Congress before making any terrorist trades and then he compounded the outrage with a bizarre Rose Garden appearance accompanied by scruffily bearded, long-haired Bergdahl dad who recited an Arabic prayer, Pashto murmurings, and a Koranic blessing, and a huggy Bergdahl mom.

Jonah Goldberg in National Reviewcolorfully recalled:

"The fact remains they knew Bergdahl had been AWOL and yet still thought this would be a clear-cut "huge win," particularly in the context of winding down the War in Afghanistan.[snip] Every political pro I know who watched that announcement responded pretty much the same way you or I would if we saw a polar bear pooping a live hamster on a bus made of graham crackers; "What the Hell am I looking at?"

Susan Rice, apparently tasked with straight-facedly spouting its really big lies, contended that Bergdahl had served the United States "with honor and distinction". His fellow soldiers who knew better had been ordered not to discuss that he had actually deserted for fear of endangering him, but upon his release made clear the circumstances of his disappearance. A number of pressies nevertheless lapped up the hokey drama, including the New Republic's Brian Beutler.

As Tom Bevan put it so well:

Qatar's "strict monitoring" of the Taliban 5 -- if it ever really existed -- is set to expire this spring, effectively allowing them to roam free. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year that there is "very little" his agency can do to prevent them from returning to the battlefield and trying to kill American soldiers.

So, far from the fairy tale of a hero's homecoming that President Obama tried to spin for the American people that Saturday morning 10 months ago, this story doesn't have a happy ending for America. In his effort to empty the Gitmo detainee facility, the president traded five hard-core terrorists for a man who now stands officially accused of abandoning his fellow soldiers. He very may well be court-martialed and spend a good deal of his life behind bars. It's the Taliban 5 who, beginning in just a few short weeks, get to live happily ever after. 

With the announcement of the charges against Bowe, his platoon members at last feel vindicated, though they find it odd that real heroes are ignored by the White House and that a man charged -- they believe rightly -- with desertion got Hollywood star treatment:

"If they would have brought him back, and we had an American soldier back and they had released a statement or a memo saying, 'Hey we got him back, there's some circumstances that are surrounding him, we're going to investigate them,' that would have been great. We got him back and we're going to seek justice, but instead they parade his parents out in a Rose Garden ceremony and you have cabinet members come out and say he served with honor and distinction, basically calling him a hero, when they knew that wasn't true. The facts have been the same for five years, but yet you have solders that are missing limbs or paid the ultimate price over there and they don't get a Rose Garden ceremony. They served honorably," Army Specialist Cody Full, who also served in Bergdahl's platoon, added. 

Just in case you forgot all this, the press is now peddling Bergdahl's lawyers' sob story and trying to justify Obama's actions in the swap in an effort to interfere with military justice so long delayed or to pave the way for some intercession by Obama. They are painting a picture of a man who was mentally ill or victimized by bad military management.

In the fluffer hit parade, we have the New York Times editorialists who seem to concede that he was guilty but want to spare him -- or more obviously spare Obama the political cost of pardoning Bergdahl. There's CNN swallowing wholethe unlikely tale of "senior Defense officials" that Bergdahl just left his base in the middle of enemy territory to go elsewhere to report "leadership issues" on his base. {Would you imagine these are other than political appointees probably in the communications division? In any event they spoke only on condition of anonymity which CNN granted them.) 

For mouthing Bergdahl's defense as opinion, perhaps USA Today is the winner: after announcing that the attorneys say the case is weak, that Bergdahl just meant to briefly step away -- AWOL, not desertion -- and no one died or was injured in the repeated searches for him, they add the weak nutter defense:

"Bergdahl's attorneys say the report "makes it clear" that he is truthful but also "naive and at times unrealistic." That fits with news accounts depicting him as fragile and somewhat troubled before he joined the Army and after.

According to the Washington Post, Bergdahl initially joined the Coast Guard, but got himself discharged after just 26 days by supposedly faking a psychological condition. It's unclear how he was able to join the Army after that, but at the time, the military had lowered standards to meet recruiting targets. There's at least the suggestion that he should never have been allowed to join up in the first place." It's someone else's fault, they say -- no wonder Obama feels a kinship with him.

And apart from this explosive fiasco and the unraveling of the Middle East where even with a program you can't tell the shifting alliances -- especially the make-believe nuclear negotiations with Iran, we have Hillary -- showing once again what a totally unprincipled liar and scoundrel Obama's longtime Secretary of State is.

To recap briefly: this week Hillary announced just before the deadline to turn over her server -- on which all her personal and government emails were kept in violation of regulations -- that it had been wiped clean of all emails. 

The emails were sought to establish her role in the Benghazi tragedy, but could as well shed light on the improper garnering of support for her family's foundation from foreign governments as well as other wrongdoing.

What we do know from the emails hacked and made public by Guccifer is that she was running a private intelligence gathering operation coordinated by Sidney Blumenthal -- popularly known as Sid "Vicious" for his odious ways.

Who paid for this network? What was their task? Who else received their reports? Why did the Secretary of State believe an independent, private intel service was needed to supplement the official ones?

In any event, there's a well-known legal doctrine called "spoliation of evidence" -- a person under a duty to retain records who purposely destroys or tampers with them is considered to have done so because the evidence in those records was unfavorable to her. That's how I read what she did. The records had to be far more damning to her than the reasonably anticipated fallout from this breathtaking act of arrogance and entitlement. CBS is already reporting her favorability rating has sunk to 26%. After this bit of chutzpah, if the Democrats aren't searching for another nominee, they're as nuts and unfit for service as Bergdahl's lawyers claim he was.

After announcing she'd destroyed the records, she had a private tête-à-tête in the White House with Obama. I could be wrong, but think it unlikely they were planning to celebrate the wiping clean of her server with a Rose Garden ceremony.