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Here’s something you don’t see every day: Leftwing/left-leaning MSM journalists actually saying something negative about their (de facto) boss, as assembled in the above video from the Washington Free Beacon.
As Allahpundit paraphrases at Hot Air, Chuck Todd of Obama house organ MSNBC claims, “The White House expected ‘euphoria’ over Bergdahl’s release:”
They probably thought that any desertion claims against Bergdahl would be confined to Fox and a few problematic segments on Jake Tapper’s show, all of which could be ignored and ghettoized as some new right-wing bugaboo (sorry, Jake) that no one else need take seriously. Michael Tomasky was way out in front of that yesterday morning. But then all sorts of big-media outlets dug in — the Times, WaPo, NBC, ABC, and on and on — and that made the “politicization” defense too difficult (although the left, God love ‘em, is still trying). I’m shocked by how eagerly the media went after it, frankly, although not as shocked as the White House. The X factor they didn’t anticipate, I’ll bet, is that soldiers like Cody Full would come forward and risk retaliation for putting his name to the “deserter” theory. It’s one thing to call a Republican a hack, it’s another to call a veteran who was there and who lost friends in the hunt for Bergdahl one. They’ve been left with no counter.
Allah adds, “All of which is to say, this seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding by the White House of military culture.” Which dovetails perfectly with the pull quote from this Time magazine article posted earlier today, which claims, “White House Overrode Internal Objections To Taliban Prisoner Release:”
But officials in the Pentagon and intelligence communities had successfully fought off release of the five men in the past, officials tell Time. “This was out of the norm,” says one official familiar with the debate over the dangers of releasing the five Taliban officials. “There was never the conversation.” Obama’s move was an ultimate victory for those at the White House and the State Department who had previously argued the military should “suck it up and salute,” says the official familiar with the debate.
Which sums up our would-be Commander-in-Chief’s relationship with the military rather nicely, no? Especially when coupled to the other half of the equation — that they’re implementing the will of an administration whose self-described foreign affairs “doctrine” is “Don’t Do Stupid Sh***.”
Roosevelt and Truman weep.
Responding to the Time magazine article, Allah asks:
The media’s assuming that the White House wanted an American POW back so badly that they’d reluctantly agree to release five very dangerous Taliban to make it happen. In reality, maybe the reasoning went the other way. Maybe, in the name of finally closing Gitmo, they were eager to get rid of the five Taliban but realized that they couldn’t free them without paying a heavy political price. If, however, they could get the last American prisoner in Afghanistan back as part of a trade, that might give them enough cover to make it happen. It wasn’t Bergdahl who drove the deal, in other words, it was springing these guys from Gitmo. Bergdahl was just a bit of political sugar for the White House that’s now suddenly turned sour on them.
That scenario is certainly consistent with the sneering tone of Harry Reid’s latest non-sequitur:
Senate Majority leader Reid on Bergdahl prisoner swap/release of Gitmo prisoners: “I’m glad to get rid of these five people.”
— Kara Rowland (@kararowland) June 3, 2014
By the way, “Here’s what happens when Taliban leaders are released:”
If anyone doubts that the five senior Taliban leaders President Obama released this weekend will return to the fight and kill more Americans, they need only look at what happened when the George W. Bush administration released a Taliban leader named Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir (a.k.a. Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul) in 2007.
Unlike the terrorists Obama just set free, Zakir was assessed by our military as only “medium risk” of returning to the fight. At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zakir pretended to be a low-ranking conscript and told officials he simply wanted to “go back home and join my family” and promised “I [have] never been America’s enemy and I never intend to be.”
But when he returned to Afghanistan, he quickly became one of America’s fiercest enemies, directly responsible for the deaths of U.S., coalition and Afghan forces. In 2009, Zakir was appointed as the Taliban’s “surge commander” in charge of countering Obama’s new strategy to deny the Taliban safe haven in southern Afghanistan. According to the Times of London, Zakir instituted a campaign of “increasingly sophisticated [roadside] explosives attacks” that killed British and U.S. forces as well as many Afghan civilians. He waged relentless war on the United States and presided over unspeakable atrocities before stepping down from military command in April. To this day, he remains a top member of the Taliban leadership council.
The five Taliban leaders Obama released will now take up where Zakir left off. According to our own military, they are all “high risk” to return to the fight.
Flashback: Remember when the Washington Post declared last week to be “The Worst Week of the Obama Presidency?”
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