Thursday, June 05, 2014

Torrential Bergdahl Fallout Continues

by JASmius

The fight does not go well for the Chicago Cherubim:

The White House is in "utter panic" over the fallout from the swap of five detainees at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for POW Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said.

Administration aides have pushed back against accounts of Bergdahl's fellow service members who suggested he left his post in Afghanistan voluntarily. Giuliani said it was "disgraceful" for the White House to essentially accuse Bergdahl's fellow soldiers of lying.

"I think they are in a state of utter panic," Giuliani, a Republican, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Thursday. "They are saying all these men are liars. These are men who did serve honorably. Who did put their lives at risk. Some of them are decorated. And, there's a lot of them who are saying the same thing."

I don't know that the White House is in any kind of "panic," utter or otherwise.  I think the White House is simply doing what they've always done - attack - with much less political cover in this instance.  For years Barack Obama has been able to rule this country with an iron fist and two extended middle fingers, and his party and the media were always on station to cut down any critics where they stood.  The difference now is, his party is headed for the tall grass, and the media has grown so disillusioned with him that they're leaving him to more or less fend for himself.

The result isn't pretty.  I've said on many previous occasions that Bill Clinton and La Clinton Nostra was they greatest propaganda machine in American political history.  They could sell ice to an Eskimo, the Pope a double bed, and the Vatican condom dispensers in their men's rooms, much less have low-information voters grunting like trained seals.  What Team Messiah lacked in quality they more than made up for in quantity, thuggery, and intimidation.  They lie crappily, but they lie constantly, so the perpetual dishonesty eventually fades into background "white" noise.  LIVs don't so much get fooled as they do overwhelmed into a drooling stupor.

But Bergdahl?  It's drawn too much scrutiny.  This is a scandal that is easily understood and all but impossible to spin: We turned loose not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE of the worst jihadists the enemy has to offer in exchange for at best, a deserter, and at worst, a defector.  Even numerically that's rank and utter folly; it's also trading foreign enemies for a domestic one - and one that sounds very simpatico with his commander-in-chief.

Rule #1 of scandals: Never let the president get too close to the "action".  Once Rule #1 is breached, comes Rule #2: Do not, under any circumstances, double-down on the same losing hand.

But doubling down is equally as instinctive to the Obamunists.  When the public is already in spluttering outrage at the Bergdahl trade, the worst thing to then do is smear all his platoon mates as "liars" - especially when they're all pretty much saying he's a deserter.  Yet that is precisely what the White House is doing.

It's kind of like breathing oxygen your entire life and having Earth's atmosphere suddenly change to methane.  You wouldn't know what to do other than to keep breathing, and sucking in methane until you keeled over dead.

It's absolutely marveling Joe Scarborough:

Talk show host Joe Scarborough said the explanation about the prisoner exchange of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl for five Guantanamo detainees was "the strangest thing I have ever seen coming out of a White House."...

Scarborough also questioned who sent National Security Adviser Susan Rice to report on Sunday talk shows about the prisoner exchange after questionable comments she made after the 2012 bombings in Benghazi, Libya. At that time, Rice was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and blamed an anti-Islam video for the Benghazi attacks.

Rice told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that Bergdahl had "served the United States with honor and distinction." Reports later emerged he had been captured after deserting his unit.

"Who sent Susan Rice out?" Scarborough asked. "I find it absolutely dumbfounding that she would go back on and say something that was patently false that everybody knew was patently false. That members of the unit knew it was patently false. The Intel Committee knew was patently false. That the White House administration had briefed the Intel Committee years before it was patently false."

Yes, Joe, but remember, that's Susan Rice's job description.  And remember something else: Last time, it worked.  So why, in their fevered minds, wouldn't it work again?  After all, they're deities walking the mortal world, and we're non-sentients.  Of course, it was going to work.  Not even the possibility that it might not ever occurred, or occurs, to them.

If Barack Obama ever did fall, it would be because his cosmic ego, his strutting narcissism, did not permit him to see that fall coming, and it would, accordingly, take him completely by surprise.  Is that fall on its way?  Who knows?  Impossible as it seems, stranger things have happened.

In the mean time, looks like future Vice Dictator Bergdahl isn't getting that ticker-tape hero's parade after all:

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl's hometown abruptly canceled plans Wednesday for a welcome-home celebration, citing concerns over its ability to handle the large crowds — both for and against the soldier — that were expected.

The town of 8,000 has been swamped with hate mail and angry calls over Bergdahl, whose release after five years of Taliban captivity in Afghanistan has touched off a debate over whether the 28-year-old should get a hero's welcome or be punished a deserter....

In Hailey, organizers of a celebration that had been scheduled for June 28 issued a statement saying the town doesn't have the means to handle such an event, given the prospect of big crowds on both sides of the debate.

"If you had 10,000 people, 5,000 on one side and 5,000 on the other, then just due to the national attention, we don't know what to expect," Police Chief Jeff Gunter said.

The proffered reason of crowds too large to handle for the small Idaho town is certainly plausible.  But that's not the real reason this event was scotched.  The White House was afraid that Bowe Bergdahl would be booed and rejected even in, and by, his hometown.  I'd wager it was at the "request" of Barack Obama himself that the celebration was called off.

Which shows what O knows about propaganda.  You're telling me the White House couldn't have taken the sights and sounds of a massive anti-Bergdahl protest and used them to counterattack against the Regime's numerous critics, casting them as "extremists" and "troop-haters" and "anti-patriots" and "hypocrites"?  La Clinton Nostra would have done that in their sleep.

If nothing else, "in for a penny, in for a pound," right?  If O is going to double down by vilifying other American soldiers who are telling the truth about Bowe Bergdahl, why do it in half-measures?

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