Your Laughable Breitbart.com Post of the Day: ‘What Gutsy Call?’
You can tell that President Obama’s successful operation to find (and kill) Osama bin Laden really eats at the right wing; the faux arguments from the wingnut blogosphere are getting more and more obtuse and absurd. Of course, they’re writing for an audience that doesn’t care, as long as they get their daily serving of rancid Obama Derangement stew.
Today’s case in point: breitbart.com blogger Ben Shapiro, who actually seems to be arguing that because Obama put a military commander in charge of the operation, and carefully considered the risks, he doesn’t deserve any credit: What ‘Gutsy Call’?: CIA Memo Reveals Admiral Controlled Bin Laden Mission.
The memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.
The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.
The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.
Uh… because Obama studied the possible risks of the operation, this means he was just “covering his ass?” How does that make any sense at all?
And what evidence is there for the far-fetched assertion that Obama would have “thrown McRaven under the bus” if the operation had failed? Why, none, of course! Wingnut bloggers have no need for such pedestrian concerns. Obama EVIL!
