The Audacity of Wag the Dog

Posted: August 25, 2009, 9:25PM


President Obama’s decision to expand the CIA investigation is not only poor judgment, reckless and perhaps the worst decision he has made in his presidency, but it is a very dangerous political game.

He had said, "I don't want to look back, I want to look forward," but when Attorney General, Eric Holder, said he was going to expand the investigation, the President pretended that it was up to the attorney general.

That is disingenuous. President Obama can reject this outright and shut it down immediately if he wanted, but he doesn’t want to. He needs to change the subject from the health care fiasco, so he ordered Holder to expand the investigation. It should be mentioned, too, that Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burlin, represent 18 Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The Washington Post reported that Holder has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects.  Holder will name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry. Durham’s mandate will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees.

This is outright unconscionable. This is a two-prong dangerous political gamble that President Obama and the Democrat Party are engaging in now at the expense of our national security. It is outrageous.

While on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, the President is reaching into his political bag of tricks, going back to the graveyard of forgotten favorites of attacking the previous administration, President Bush, to distract the public from the debacle and unpopular health care mess.

This ties into his second strategy, which is to rally his far-left, liberal base. Last weekend President Obama sent Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius out to float a trial balloon on removing the public option so they can gauge the public reaction.

While the majority of the informed public didn’t buy it, his base was outraged. By Monday morning, the President was denying he was removing the public option and he said that Sebelius was taken out of context. Sebelious came out and retracted her statement, saying that she didn’t say what she had said.

Sadly, this is an attempt to change the subject. This is this administration’s audacity to wag the dog at the expense of our national security. It is an attempt to get his base back on his side again because President Obama knows that the democrat base, the far left radical fringe base, cares more about this country being humiliated militarily, foreign policy-wise, than they care about the public option.

It's working.  Moveon.org and the liberal blogosphere are energized and ecstatic, full of support and praise for this despicable move by  their leader.

This is an act of desperation. President Obama and the Justice Department have now officially declared war against the CIA. They are attacking the very people they themselves, and the American people, demanded keep us safe immediately following 9/11.

Remember that Tuesday morning? Nobody knew what hit us. Nobody knew if it were going to happen again or when. We gazed at the skies in fear as we emptied the skies. We closed the markets, and we mourned, prayed, and supported each other as one bipartisan, patriotic country. We were united.

It lasted two weeks.

President Bush knew that he had to do everything he could so that it didn’t happen again. If another plane hit another building, or another attack of some sort followed; if we were hit again it would have paralyzed this country. Out of fear, commerce would have halted, people would have been too afraid to shop, to leave their homes; the economic fallout here and around the world would have been catastrophic.

Now, under President Obama and a democrat-controlled congress we are releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, and they are going back to the battlefield. The President is apologizing for America everywhere he goes and he’s investigating our heroes. He is attempting to prosecute the men and women who saved American lives, who did everything they could to keep us safe following the worst domestic terrorist attack on our country’s soil in our history.

These people deserve a ticket-tape parade, not the wrath of an angry president who has a chip on his shoulder for whatever reason. They are being prosecuted and humiliated under President Obama’s orders for the sole purpose of rallying his base and getting health care off the front page of the papers.

It won’t work. Americans don’t want their heroes prosecuted.  In fact, there may not be anything President Obama can do to distract a majority of Americans from 10% unemployment, trillion dollar deficits, pulling the plug on grandma, and attacking the people who kept this country safe when nothing and no one seemed to be safe.

President Obama may have  the audacity to wag the dog at the expense of our national security and bring America to her knees in the eyes of the enemy, but he will not bring the American people to their knees and surrender to his radical, culture-of-death health care disaster.

Chuck

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Comments

LorrieK August 26, 2009, 5:29AM | http://lorriek.wordpress.com

Great reporting, Chuck! And you are right this distraction and the cost of our security will not work. It reeks of desperation and anyone who believes that this investigation is not going forth with the President's full endorsement are gullible. It's bad enough that americans who protest his huge deficit spending are being degraded for doing so,but the american people will not take lightly the fact that this latest action will not only denegrate the men and women who serve this country but will put us in harm's way. Nope, this time, his game plan of distraction will back fire.

Former Republican Voter August 26, 2009, 11:22PM

"Obama knows that the democrat base, the far left radical fringe base, cares more about this country being humiliated militarily, foreign policy-wise, than they care about the public option." I can only laugh at this. Really? Only cares about humiliating the country? If what you say is true that removing the public option was floated out there to measure a response I say that is an ingenous political move. I doubt he's the first to use this move though, what do you say? I have news for you though. Foreign policy humiliation occured prior to January 2009. Take a trip overseas and ask the ordinary citizen of that country what they think of Bush's U.S.A., our foreign policy, education system, healthcare system, our unilateral bullying, greed, overconsumption, dependence on oil etc. etc. In fact, the only good thing I was told was our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. The rub on that was how we take it for granted though, so...

"President Obama and the Justice Department have now officially declared war against the CIA." It's about time someone tried to clean that dirty house. If it works then at least we can figure out what page we're supposed to be on rather than a bunch of splinter groups working on behalf of separate administrations. I can imagine the CIA still has remnants of what the American people don't want. I would imagine this administration is pushing through with the promise of "Change" after all, wouldn't you say?

I suppose it's too bad we don't have bogus "Terror Alerts" though to keep our attention away from the real problems. "Code Orange" everybody...

Good stuff, Chuck.

Chuck Rahi August 27, 2009, 6:39PM | http://conservativefoundry.com

Former- would you care to share what inspired you to change parties? I ask because by a wide margin people move from liberal to conservative. Rarely if ever from conservative to liberal. It was the independent vote that turned the election to Obama's favor. The conservatives turnout was low cause frankly there wasn't a conservative on the ballot. Polls this month showed that the US is a conservative nation with every state polled over 50% of the people claimed to be conservative while under 50 were liberal. Perhaps you're an independent, which is another word for democrat, cause independents tend to switch parties often than do libs or conservatives. I ask cause you sound liberal with independent tendencies so I'm curious.

Thanks, and thanks for posting.

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