President-elect Obama has promised change. Change is what he'll deliver. Conservatives have pointed to Obama's cabinet picks and pointed out that there was no sign of change there. To be honest, Most of Obama's picks are an indication of his desire to go back to the Clinton era way of doing things.
Leon Panetta has been tapped to be the next CIA director. Even fellow Democrats are unhappy about this choice. Leon Panetta worked in the Clinton administration, for a while as Chief of Staff, and helped push the Clinton way. With Panetta's help, Clinton damaged America's intelligence agencies almost to the point of no return. The CIA and the FBI could not talk to each other, they could not exchange necessary information, they were forced to stand by and watch helplessly while terrorists trained for a fatal mission at flight schools in Florida. With Panetta's help Clinton made it impossible for the CIA to gain information from "less than reputable" persons, as if the more reputable people had the information we needed to keep our nation safe. Who could have possibly known that shopkeepers and construction workers would not have been able to tell us about whether Saddam Hussein was attempting to aquire nuclear weapons, how could we have known that we needed to talk to terrorists and illegal weapon suppliers to find out what he was up to? But at least the world knew that we didn't get bad information from disreputable sources. Leon Panetta has come out against coersive interrogation tactics or, as he refers to them, torture. It will be alot easier to get the needed intelligence from the terrorists when we can just fix them a nice bowl of humus and simply ask them what they were planning and who is involved with them. Mr. Panetta knows better than any of us just how accommadating the terrorists are, if we are just nice and polite to them. With all of his experience in questioning terrorists, Mr. Panetta would be the first to tell us that the terrorists are really very nice people that want to help us in our war againts terrorism.
Mr. Obama also chose Eric Holder to be the Attorney General. Another fine choice, to be sure. Eric Holder was in the Justice Department during the Clinton Administration. Eric Holder was instrumental in securing pardons from Bill Clinton for 16 FALN terrorists that had been convicted bank robbery, explosives possession and participating in a seditious conspiracy. Mr. Holders experience in these matters make him a fantastic judge of character, he recognized that these were not bad people but rather innocent victims mistakenly caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, obviously deserving of a pardon. Holder was also the architect of the Marc Rich pardon. Rich was the commodities trader that left the country in 1983 to avoid prosecution for tax evasion, racketeering and trading with the enemy. Eric Holder knew it was just a misunderstanding, an upstanding citizen such as Marc Rich would never have gotten himself involved in these atrocities; this was just another case of an innocent victim that was in the wrong place at the wrong time that got accidentally sucked into some slightly criminal activity through no fault of his own. Eric Holder was involved in the Elian Gonzalez case. Elian Gonzalez was the six year old Cuban child whose mother died attempting to reach the United States. According to American law, he should have been sent home to his father immediately upon his release from the hospital in Florida based on two American laws. The first law would be the "wet foot, dry foot" policy. Since he never made it to American soil before he was plucked from the ocean he was supposed to go back to Cuba. The second law that would govern his return was America's child custody laws, since his father had never been proven to be unfit as a father, when Elian's mother died, according to law custody went to his father. Bill Clinton and Eric Holder couldn't do the right thing until they knew what public sentiment was, this led to a process that ended when the FBI raided the home of Elian's mother's distant relatives to take the child at gun point. That entire nightmare could and should have been avoided by doing the right thing from the start, but Eric Holder knew better than anyone else.
Tom Daschle is Obama's choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Another fine selection. Daschle has a plan to make health care more affordable, less effective but more affordable(we can't have everything). His most recent plan would begin with the formation of a Federal Health Board. The FHB would be similar to the Federal Reserve but geared towards health care rather than the economy, this woulfd be a great idea considering how effective the Federal Reserve has been on the economy. The FHB would compare the effectiveness of various medical procedures and drugs. They would reduce health costs by prohibitibng procedures and drugs that are deemed to expensive for their effectiveness. Daschle's plan would be based on Britain's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence(NICE). "NICE considers treatments to be cost-effective if their cost-effectiveness ratio is $34,000 per QALY(quality adjusted life year)." One QALY is one year of healthy life expectancy. In other words, if your treatment exceeds $34,000 and it is a very slim chance that you will make a year or more of life expectancy, you won't get treatment. There's "Big Brother" for you, they will get to decide how long you can live and if you can have treatment that you need.
Obama wants Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security. Another great choice. In her position at Homeland Security, Ms. Napolitano will be in charge of border security among other things. While Ms. Napolitano supports a "virtual" fence, she is opposed to an actual fence that would help to stem the flow of illegals into the US. She also opposes the Real ID Act. But she is in favor of immigration reform, a temporary worker program and a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens who have already shown a disregard for American law by coming here illegally.
These are just some of the key positions that need to be filled and the people that Obama wants to fill these positions. With these people Obama will bring about the "change" he has promised. Amongst those changes will be the closing of Guantanamo's GITMO detention center where we hold our battlfield combatants. Rep. Diane Feinstein said,"the president-elect has clearly stated that he wishes to close Guantanamo and end the use of torture in interrogations. I look forward to working with the new president to achieve these goals." With the help of the Democratically controlled Congress Obama will achieve his goal at the detriment of the nation. Without GITMO and some more coersive interrogation techniques we will never gain the intelligence that Panetta lacks the experience to properly and effectively interpret. This failure will lead to attacks in this country that Bush's team has so far avoided since the first attack on 9/11/01. Add in Janet Napolitano's border plan and we will have a new way for the terrorists to get here so we won't even know they are here until we have another 3,000 dead Americans. On the plus side, there is Secretary Daschle with his health care plan. With this genius we can be assured that noone will be able to get health care when the terrorists do attack us, thereby killing any who might otherwise have survived the upcoming attacks.
Nobody can doubt that Obama means well. It would be impossible to believe that a man would suffer the indignaties of a presidential campaign with the goal of intentionally harming the nation from the vantage point of the Oval Office. What we, as a nation, must doubt is his ability to understand the risks we face as a nation in these trying times. Obama's cabinet choices only act to accentuate his failing to comprehend and effectively deal with the nation's most urgent security risks. His offer to speak to our most dangerous enemy, Iran, without preconditions and, most recently, with Hamas only reaffirms any belief that Obama lacks the judgement needed to be president in these times. Obama said in a speech to the US Senate in March 2007,"We are here to do the work that ensures no other family members will have to lose a loved one to a terrorist who turns a plane into a missile, a terrorist who straps a bomb around her waist and climbs aboard a bus, a terrorist who figures out how to set off a dirty bomb in one of our cities. This is why we are here: to make our country safer and make sure the nearly 3,000 who were taken from us did not die in vain; that their legacy will be a more safe and secure nation."
That sounds good for a speech. He also said in another speech, this time in front of the Chicago Foreign Affairs Council in April, 2007,"Our country's greatest military asset is the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States. When we do send our men and women into harm's way, we must also clearly define the mission, prescribe concrete political and military objectives, seek out the advice of our military commanders, evaluate the intelligence, plan accordingly, and ensure that our troops have the resources, support, and equipment they need to protect themselves and fulfill their mission."
Anyone can tell that president-elect Obama can read a teleprompted speech better than any person in politics today. The problem will come when he is sitting in the Oval Office, with no speech to make, but faced with a decision that could mean the death of hundreds, thousands or millions of Americans if he makes a mistake. Mr. Obama should show us some wisdom. He should look at what George W. Bush has managed to accomplish, while he admittedly has very low approval ratings, Bush has prevented additional terrorist attacks on American soil using the techniques that Obama wants to avoid in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment