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Under the Hammer
November 15, 2012
The head of the CIA, Gen. David Petraeus – who is credited with making the surge in Iraq work and who made major changes in the way the war in Afghanistan was being fought – was scheduled to speak before the House committee investigating the attack on the Benghazi consulate this week.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol Building. The FBI released information it had been sitting on for months about a sexual affair that Petraeus had with his young, attractive biographer.
The amazing thing is that so many people don't seem to think that it is odd for the FBI just to happen to release this information about Petraeus, forcing him to resign after the election but before he is scheduled to testify. Talk about timing; the window there was tiny.
Petraeus, by the way, went to Benghazi and did his own investigation of what happened.
He had earlier said that no one in the CIA told CIA operatives to stand down and not go help the Americans at the consulate who were under attack by a vastly superior and better armed force.
The CIA operatives disobeyed orders and went to help, but the question is, whose orders did they disobey. There is only one person in the government who can overrule the head of the CIA when it comes to commanding his own men, and that would be the president.
So Petraeus first said that he didn't tell his men not to go help the consulate when it was under attack. Then he initiated his own investigation of the attack. Remember, the FBI was not allowed onsite until three weeks after the attack, and then only for a day. For three weeks the site was not secured. A CNN reporter found Ambassador Chris Stevens' journal, which said Stevens had been worried about having enough security. Later another reporter found emails that had been printed out.
So the site was safe enough for reporters and any Libyan who wandered past, but was too dangerous for the FBI with an armed security force to investigate for longer than a few hours three weeks after the attack.
It seems likely that President Barack Hussein Obama was not too excited about the head of the CIA going and doing his own investigation.
Remember, sexual scandals are no stranger to Obama's political career.
Obama was given a pass into the Senate because the child custody documents for his opponent, Jack Ryan, which had been sealed by the court, were released. The documents included testimony that Ryan liked to frequent bizarre sex clubs and had asked his wife to perform sex acts in public.
Ryan, who was considered a shoo-in to win the Senate seat, withdrew – paving the way for Obama.
It was highly unusual for the judge to decide to release the custody files against the wishes of both parents who said it would not be in the best interest of their child to make these allegations public.
Before the records were released Obama was not given much chance of winning; after they were released and Ryan withdrew it was a cakewalk.
Now Obama is caught in another bad situation. It is difficult to see how his lies about Benghazi are not going to create controversy, though Obama has successfully pushed any investigation past the election. But Obama finds himself in a tight spot, and suddenly another sex scandal emerges that vanquishes another opponent.
At first it seemed Petraeus was going to testify but his testimony would be delayed. Now they are saying that there may be no need for Petraeus to testify because the acting director has all the information.
But, of course, the acting director didn't say that no one in the CIA gave the order to stand down, and he didn't investigate Benghazi on his own as Petraeus did. He also is not a retired four-star general and genuine war hero.
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Here's one of the scary things about Obama reelection for those who are not big fans of the president. He has four years now where he can do whatever he wants.
If he wants to hunker down and work 16-hour days trying to get his policies through Congress he could do that. Nobody is quite sure what his policies are, but he could develop some and then try to work with Congress. That doesn't seem likely, but it is certainly a possibility.
Or he could decide that he is never going to be a decent golfer if he just plays once a week and start playing 18 holes a day. He and Michelle could decide to throw huge parties every Friday night and have the top bands in the world playing for parties at the White House every week.
Obama was one of the few players on his high school basketball team who couldn't dunk. Now he has access to the best trainers in the world. Maybe he will decide he is going to devote eight hours a day to working on his leaping ability so before he leaves office he will be able to dunk.
I will be surprised if this four-year term doesn't involve an around-the-world tour where he is gone from the White House for a month or months.
Obama was not a very hard worker in the Illinois state Senate, or in the US Senate, and he doesn't seem to have overworked himself in his first term. With his second term, he could decide to go back to Chicago and hang out with his old buddies.
Wait a second, he would have trouble doing that. Tony Rezko, who helped him buy his house in Chicago, is in prison, and so is former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who Obama used to brag about getting elected.
But then he is president of the United States and can pardon criminals, so maybe he could.
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Obama is going to be negotiating with the Republicans to try and avoid the financial cliff, but early reports indicate he is going to negotiate the same way he has in the past.
Those who are supposed to know say that Obama plans to tell the Republicans what he wants and he expects them to agree.
The Republicans cannot agree to a tax increase. They have repeatedly said they would not, and they know from recent elections that it will be political suicide for most of them to agree to raise taxes.
Obama was reelected so there is no reason for him to change his stripes, but what he doesn't seem to realize is that every single member of the House Republican leadership was also just elected. They each have as much a mandate in their districts as he does in the country.
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Obama's reelection was brutally disappointing, but the truth is that the Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Republican voter turnout was dismal. Mitt Romney won the independents by 5 points, which in most cases would mean that Romney would win. But the voter turnout among Republicans was so low compared to Democrats that Romney still lost.
Romney did lose, but switch over a couple hundred thousand votes in key states and you have a whole different ball game. But it's too late to switch those votes.
It turns out what his primary opponents kept saying about Romney was true. He couldn't energize the base and get mainstream Republicans out to vote for him. Of course, all last year he had fellow Republicans painting him as an uncaring rich guy, and once he won the Republican nomination that job was passed over to Democrats and you had many more months of the same.
Romney made some critical decisions in the race that in hindsight may have been mistakes. He chose not to make Benghazi a big part of the foreign policy debate, even though he was given the opportunity with the first question.
He, for the most part, chose not to attack Obama but to stress his own programs. Obama did the opposite and attacked again and again. It was all Obama had because he couldn't run on his record. But Obama's campaign resonated with his base and Romney's did not.
Republican presidential candidates run right in the primary because the primary voters are more conservative than the voters in the general election, and then turn after the primary and run to the middle. Some people call it being wishy-washy, but it is just reality.
Romney as the former governor of a Democratic state started out at the left end of the Republican spectrum and during the primary he had to move far to the right side. So when he won the nomination and turned to run back for the middle, it may have just been too many changes for some Republicans to take and that may be why so many stayed home.
It is just unbelievable that Sen. John McCain, who ran a pitiful campaign, got more votes than Romney who appeared to have run a much better campaign. But since the goal of the campaign is to get votes, by definition he did not.
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Fans of Marco Rubio are having a heyday saying, I told you so. The Hispanic vote went heavily against Romney and that might have changed with Rubio on the ticket. But Rubio had some negatives that would have come into play, and he is so young and inexperienced that it did appear that Rep. Paul Ryan was a much better fit for the staid conservative Romney campaign. But maybe that was just the wrong campaign. Maybe Romney should have campaigned in baggy shorts and T-shirts carrying a skateboard out on the stage, wearing a backwards baseball cap, but that just doesn't seem like it would have worked.
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The vice presidential candidates are a great example of the bias of the mainstream media. Ryan made a big mistake on his time for a marathon. He is not a marathoner but ran in one 22 years ago. He was asked about it in a radio interview and he missed his time by an hour. Months later the mainstream media was still bringing this up as an example of Ryan not being honest.
It was simply a mistake and people who have had experience being interviewed on the radio should know that it is easy to make mistakes, particularly with off-the-wall questions. Long-time Greensboro talk show host Dusty Dunn was a master of asking questions that caught people completely off guard. After being on the air with him for over 10 years I was still floored by some of his questions. It's one of the qualities that made him a great interviewer, that and a fantastic sense of humor.
But Ryan made an honest mistake and the media never let him forget it.
Vice President Joe Biden not only said stupid stuff all the time, he said things in the vice presidential debate that simply were not true. Biden said that he voted against the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. He in fact voted for both of those wars. How could he get that wrong and why isn't it a big deal for the vice president to get important votes in the Senate wrong? He wasn't asked a question about it. Biden brought it up and was wrong about how he voted.
When talking about raising taxes he raised the income limit by $800,000 and that was OK. Biden said that Obama only wanted to raise taxes on those with incomes over $1 million. Obama said he would raise taxes on those with incomes over $200,000. How could Biden misremember $200,000 as $1 million?
Biden is a Roman Catholic, but he said that no religious institution including the Catholic Church would have to provide or pay for contraception under Obamacare, which simply is not true. But perhaps what Biden meant was if the Catholic Church wins the court case against the Department of Health and Human Services then it won't have to provide contraception including some forms of abortion.
Biden simply gets a pass from the mainstream media and he is our vice president for another four years. One prayer everyone in the country should be saying every night is for the health and well being of our president, because if anything should happen to Obama then Biden becomes president.
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This election will get analyzed to death, but one thing the Republicans might want to look at in the next election is using a time-tested method of advertising – newspapers. If Romney spent 50 cents on newspaper advertising, it was in some little paper in Maine or somewhere.
The Republicans have this passion for robocalls, which most people I know find extremely annoying; direct mail, which gets thrown away; and network television, which people don't watch nearly as much as they used to.
Would anyone be upset if Republicans gave up the robocalls? People do not find newspaper advertising annoying, which is an important factor to consider when running for office.
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Although nationwide, and particularly in states where it mattered, the Republicans got beat bad in the get-out-the-vote race, in Guilford County they did not. Guilford County had about 20 percent more Republicans vote than the state average, so the Republicans have a model. In the next election they should do what the Guilford County Republicans did all over the country.
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It turns out the polls that predicted the voter turnout demographics would mirror those of 2008, and not those of 2004, were correct. Many Republicans were postulating that 2008 was an anomaly because Obama was the first black with a chance to be elected president and that McCain was a tired old fellow that nobody was very excited about.
It turns out the 2008 and 2012 demographics are the new demographics for national elections, which makes it much harder for Republicans to win because not enough Republicans vote.