The New York Daily News’ editorial on the Bergdahl swap is one of those must-reads, for its content as well as who it’s coming from. This is not the New York Post. It’s the Post’s liberal counterweight. And the editorial is scathing.
As the facts have emerged — and more surely will — it has become ever clearer that he lost his presidential compass in the Taliban swap.
In retrospect, his Rose Garden announcement that he was bringing home an American POW appears to have been a cynical act of theater.
Basking in the good feelings generated by the release after five years in apparent captivity of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, Obama characterized the Taliban release as a safe and considered transfer.
“The Qatari government has given us assurances that it will put in place measures to protect our national security,” Obama assured, while aides insisted that the U.S. would be able to monitor the five confirmed jihadists and dedicated killers.
Subsequently, the President elaborated: “I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought it would be contrary to American national security.”
But a Gulf official flatly contradicted the idea the U.S. could monitor the killers, telling Reuters that the Taliban leaders “can move around freely within the country” for the next year, and then “can go back to Afghanistan if they want to.”
That line of Obama’s is particularly snort-worthy. This is a president who pushed an American ally out of power in Egypt, in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a president who involved the United States in ousting a tamed dictator in Libya, a non-war kinetic campaign that has empowered the jihad. This is a president who scuttled missile defense for Poland, blamed Bush for all problems with Putin, and has generally acted against America’s national security interests in every conceivable way that he possibly could. He has drawn down the military, he has lied repeatedly about the condition and intentions of the enemy, he has just not acted consistently in America’s security interests. He even went out of his way to annoy the British, our closest allies, by returning the Churchill bust as soon as he could. “I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought it would be contrary to American national security” may be the biggest lie told by a fundamentally lying-his-face-off president.
Obama might be scandalized by the accusation that he is surrendering without honor, if he had any honor or understood the meaning of the word. Clearly, obviously, he does not. And neither do any of the miserable leftists he has surrounded himself with. “Honor” is just another antiquated abstraction to these people.
It would be obvious to anyone who does have honor — and common sense — that putting five hardcore terrorists back in the wild is a stupid thing to do that will endanger Americans. It would be obvious to anyone with honor that celebrating a deserter as a war hero who served with “honor and distinction” is bound to backfire. That it was not obvious to Obama or any of his advisers says a lot, and what it says is terrible.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member