Impeachment...the Next Chapter

So with the constant, continuous, mind-numbing coverage of all of the impeachment follies, I'm sure that many are like me.  You're sick of it.  Sick that fellow Americans called Democrats can be so unfair and secretive and, well...slimy.  Sick that the media always tells only one side of any story and that is the story they want to tell.  Sick that we seem to listen and give credence to Twitter trolls than talk to each other.  So I don't need to add anything to the discussion of what's going on.  There's plenty of that out there.  But, not surprisingly, I do have a few opinions.

First, the House voted along party lines to conduct an impeachment inquiry.  There isn't anything surprising about this.  There was a lot of outrage and preening today, but soon they will move forward.

Second, the impeachment hearings in the House will be good theater.  There will be posturing, imploring, accusing, anger, rage, disappointment and humor.  There will also be predictability, no matter what anyone says.  The House will again vote along party lines to send articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.  It is a sham and a railroading...but we are where we are.  I like to think that the Dems will pay the price in the ballot box.  But not sure.  I have seen several "man in the street" interviews and most thing it's pretty stupid.  Like I said, I won't describe the supposed "high crimes and misdemeanors" here, but in my mind there is no way in hell that anything Trump did on the call to the Ukraine rises to the level of requiring removal.

Third, the so-called witnesses backgrounds and proclivities are starting to emerge.  And it's not pretty.  They all are pretty much never-Trumper's.  It's not remotely surprising that they would come up with this fantasy of impeachment.  There's been a lot of talk of collusion in the last few years when Trump is discussed.  Well, to my mind there was a lot of collusion going on with this crowd.

And Fourth, we'll see what happens in the Senate.  That will be the next chapter!  There needs to be 67 votes to convict.  From what I've seen and heard from the Republican Senators, there is no way that's happening.  But what will happen is even better political theater.  There will be every accusation and emotion thrown around to gain advantage.  But here are two things to keep in mind.  One of the rules is that while the trial is going on, no Senators can campaign.  Are you listening Elizabeth?  Bernie?  Kamala?  Cory?  Amy?  You'll be sidelined for several weeks.  On second thought maybe this will be a good thing!  The other thing is I think the unintended consequences are that the Dems will wind up looking like even bigger jackasses than they are.  So there you go.

Friday Funnies

This seems appropriate!

Motivation Monday

Friday Funnies

Doral, and Impeachment and the Kurds

There's an old saying that things come in threes.  It's uncanny really.  I've noticed that it's true more than once in my life.  So it seems sort of natural that Trump is getting the shit kicked out of him on three fronts.

All of these stories have been on the front page so I don't need to say much by way of explanation.  But here's my reaction and predictions.

Doral.  He's ostensibly put that behind him.  Of course, there will be the usual suspects who will harp on it, dredge it up in the future, and make reference to the "Emoluments Clause", as if anyone outside of some MSNBC talking head knows what the hell that is.  Here's the deal...it would have been a good deal.  The resort was going to do the G7 Summit at cost.  It's by all indications a perfect place to hold it.  But no.  Once again the haters cause the taxpayers to get screwed.  So be it.

Impeachment.  It's going to drag on.  Any thinking person knows that it's a bullshit charge.  The Dems will force it to the Senate and then we'll see what happens.  Can't imagine they can get to 67 votes.  But politicians are politicians.  They can bend with the wind.  That it is all being done in secrecy is a big black eye for the Dems.  But they clearly hate Trump more than they care about their integrity.

Kurds.  This whole situation will unfold over weeks and months.  There will be some shifting of the deck chairs and our folks will be moved around but not much will change.  The wild card will be how aggressive the Turks are.  If they decide they've had enough of the Kurds (remember they are considered terrorists by the Turks with some justification) then it could get ugly.  But I'm pretty confident we won't insert ourselves between them again.  And I'm pretty sure that Trump will keep the heat on to get more and more of our military out of the region.

Motivation Monday

Friday Funnies

Christopher Columbus...Racist Plunderer

Yesterday was Columbus Day.  It's a Federal holiday.  No mail service.  Lots of people had the day off.  Of course, as in so many things in today's world, there has to be controversy.  I've actually heard about this in past years but had largely forgotten about it, as I do every year until it comes around again.  There was also an article in the local fish wrap about a CC statue being hit with graffiti and splashed with fake blood that needed to be cleaned up.  

The controversy is all about how Columbus was a racist plunderer who only brought disease and other vestiges of the horrible Europeans to the pristine and perfect indigenous people of the new world.  I guess if he had never sailed West from Europe and discovered North America, it would still be a perfect paradise inhabited by a simple but loving people today.  But any rudimentary study of the natives who inhabited the area would indicate that they were a bloodthirsty, warlike people who by today's standards were appallingly violent, misogynistic, and ignorant.  

But I really don't understand why it's a zero sum game.  Why can't we celebrate a guy who got in a little rickety boat and sailed off over the horizon not knowing what was there and at the same time honor the heritage of the people who were here in the beginning.  I saw that a friend posted an article over on FB about all the cities and states who have opted out of Columbus Day and have changed the name to Indigenous People's Day.  You can read it here.  This article seems to me just another example of our woke and politically correct culture.  

I'm sure that old Chris wasn't the most benevolent guy.  He was probably a superior European upper-class guy who believed in manifest destiny.  I'm sure him and so many after him didn't exactly treat the native people very well.  In fact there were probably atrocities.  But it did take some big ones to jump in that boat and sail away.  And we should acknowledge the treatment of native people and do everything in our power to ensure it's not happening again and will never happen.

But I'm just not a fan of erasing history.  Because if we erase it, we have a depressing tendency to repeat it.  So for me I'd rather they keep both and tell a truthful story.  I know that is probably naive, but anything else is just dishonest.

LeBron F**ks Up

I wrote about the whole NBA vs China fiasco a few days ago.  You can read it here.

Bottom line is the GM of the Houston Rockets released a tweet supporting the Hong Kong freedom fighters and the collective heads of China and the NBA exploded.  For China, it's about a fundamental struggle they are having to keep control.  For the NBA, it's about money.

Now the biggest NBA star, LeBron James has come out critical of the GM and in opposition to the freedom fighters.  He tried to equivocate and overly define his words and in doing so fucked up even more.  Let me say this simply.  He's a coward and an unprincipled jerk.  There are a lot of articles out there but you can read one of them here.  Judge for yourself.

Motivation Monday

Don't let your kids be part of the 71%!

Eric vs Hunter

A friend sent this to me.  It’s classified under Miles Law (where you stand is where you sit), but I think it’s pretty spot on!

Hypocrisy creates unlevel playing field in politics

By Eric Trump

I am keenly aware of how fortunate I was to be born the son of one of the wealthiest and most well known businessmen in America. I am also the first to admit that things are different when you grow up as a Trump.

Anyone who has paid attention to the news, especially since my father announced his run for the White House, knows the media has attacked every member of my family viciously and given us anything but kind treatment. The adult “children” in our family are certainly not off limits. We did after all fight alongside our father in his quest to win the presidency. We stood on that stage and campaigned across the nation, and are certainly willing to take the punches where they are warranted and deserved. The double standard, however, is nothing short of glaring.

It would be a waste of print to recount every smear, hit piece, and invasion of privacy my family has faced. But allow me to sum it up by highlighting an article published by Forbes and reposted in virtually every major news outlet, attacking a charity that I started when I was 20 years old. In less than 10 years, I raised more than $20 million for terminally ill children at Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I maintained just over a 9 percent cumulative expense ratio, one of the lowest expense ratios of any charity in the nation, and funded the construction of one of the most cutting edge intensive care units and surgery centers dedicated to children.

The Eric Trump Foundation intensive care unit treats some of the sickest children in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it gives their parents and families hope. Yet I was viciously chastised by the Democrats and the media who relentlessly tried to manufacture stories about me, my mission, and my intentions with the charity. At the same time, the Clinton Foundation controversy was in full swing, and the media knew that it could use me as their punching bag to distract from one of their own.

One might say it comes with the territory, and that is absolutely true. As a Trump, I am held to an incredibly high public standard and I have lived an exceptionally clean and honest life with that in mind. But can you imagine, if they were willing to try and destroy a “kid” who dedicated his life to pediatric cancer and philanthropy, what the media would say if I had secured a $50,000 a month job on the board of a Ukrainian company, with no discernable duties, in an industry I knew nothing about, in a country where I did not even speak the language? What if my father on live camera threatened to cut off military aid to that country unless the prosecutor investigating that company for corruption was fired?

To make the hypothetical picturesufficiently vivid, also imagine that I had previously been kicked out of the United States Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine or was given a contract potentially worth $1.5 billion by China weeks after traveling to Beijing with my father aboard Air Force Two. I worked hard to raise millions of dollars for dying children, yet crickets from the media and weekly parodies on Saturday Night Live.

For the record, I do not know exactly what Hunter Biden did or did not do in Ukraine, in China, in his personal life, or elsewhere. There are plenty of other controversies that measure below the dignity and character of this article to regurgitate. I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt, since that courtesy is so seldom bestowed upon me and my family.

One thing, however, is absolutely certain. If the situation were reversed, I would have been front page news in every newspaper, online publication, and cable news outlet for the rest of my life. Reporters would be camping outside of my door, my family would have been picked apart, my name would have been smeared in the news every single week, and my father arguably would not even be president of the United States today.

I do not always agree with Bill Maher, but the late night host was honest enough to admit that if my brother or I had done what Hunter Biden did, “it would be all Rachel Maddow was talking about.” I do not know what he learned while growing up as a Biden, but if what we know about his life indicates anything, it is that there are different rules if you are the son of a powerful Democratic politician. Money grows on trees, there are no rules, and the press will always cover for you if it benefits the political left.

To quote the great Marcus Aurelius from The Gladiator, “Your faults as a son are my failures as a father.”  

I, Eric Trump, owe all of my work ethic, character, integrity, and moral fiber to my father. Hunter Biden can say the same.

Eric Trump is an executive vice president at the Trump Organization.

Breathtaking Hypocrisy

I've rarely seen a story that more clearly shows a case of unbelievable hypocrisy on a massive scale than the current dust up about the NBA and China.  And of course it's such a massive scale because it's all about money.  A lot of money.  A veritable butt load of money.  More money than you and I can conceive of.  And that is because China brings huge money to the NBA.  I heard yesterday that basketball is the most popular sport in China.  Upwards of 300 million people play basketball at some level (recreation through professional).  The NBA pre-season exhibition games are perennially sold out.  But an even bigger (much bigger) thing is gear (clothing, equipment, memorabilia, etc).  The NBA literally makes billions from the Chinese.  So it's no wonder that they don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.  

You've probably heard the story but if you haven't here's the Reader's Digest version.  The GM of the Houston Rockets put out a tweet supporting the freedom protesters in Hong Kong.  And heads all over the NBA and China exploded.  The NBA because China is a huge cash cow and China because they were supposedly offended.  There are a ton of articles about this issue, but a pretty good and comprehensive one is here.  

So this whole thing brings a couple things to my mind.  First, the freedom fighters in Hong Kong are fighting an unwinnable battle.  At least it appears unwinnable.  At the end of the day China will prevail.  They might not crush the protesters like they like to, but at least the status quo will continue. That is until 2047 when they take over.  Then Hong Kong will likely descend into the totalitarian state that is China.  So someone in the NBA tries to give them some support and he gets not only shut down but he might lose his job.  And the NBA grovels to new depths to lick the ass of The Chinese.  

But how they have gone about groveling to the Chinese by shutting down speech is disgusting.  At some point I would think they have to look at themselves in the mirror.  The epitome of the hypocrisy is an interview with Steve Kerr, coach of the Warriors.  Now he's a big lefty but his response to a question about China was reprehensible even by his standards.  Someone asked him about human rights abuses and he responded that no one asked him about "Americans with AR-15s mowing people down in malls".  Huh?  How is that remotely comparable to one of the most repressive and cruel governments on the face of the earth.  It's not difficult to find out what they do.  It's easy to understand about their massive internment camps of dissidents, their oppression of free speech, their unbelievable state sanctioned prejudice against some ethnic and religious groups.  It' goes on and on and it cannot be in even the same conversation with anything that happens in our country.  It was a pathetic and weak attempt at deflection that essentially summed up the whole story.  And here's another thing.  The NBA is the very first organization to cow tow to the politically correct crowd.  They regularly kiss Nike's ass.  They cancelled the All Star game in North Carolina because of the ridiculous  transgender bathroom issue.  They are spineless hypocrites in so many areas. 

So I get that you can hold your nose and engage in economic arrangements that are beneficial.  Because those benefits might accrue to a lot of people in our country.  But to defend, to repress your own people, to cow tow to the oppressors, especially in such a public and hypocritical manner, seems to me to be shameful.  I'm not a big fan of he NBA.  I'm much more of a college basketball fan.  And I'm quite positive that will remain the case.

Friday Funnies

"It's (way) More Complicated Than You Think"

In the last few days the latest Trump controversy (and there always is one) has come to light regarding moving some U.S. troops out of Northern Syria, thereby green lighting Turkey's incursion (invasion?) to attack the Kurds.  Many have come out strongly against this policy and claim that we are deserting a trusted "ally".  But as in all things in the Middle East, it's more complicated than it appears.  To paraphrase Churchill, "it's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside  an enigma".  I've read several articles that provide analysis of the situation but none better than Andrew McCarthy's explanation below.  

I've basically come to the point where I'm sick of Americans fighting and dying in some shit hole in the Middle East.  It is the quagmire of all quagmires and it will not get any better.  Trust me, I've been all over the region and studied it extensively.  It's not going to get any better anytime soon.  We've made enormous mistakes in the region and have been essentially at war for 18 years.  It's time to rethink the entire strategy.  McCarthy's explanation of this little corner of the quagmire makes as much sense as any.  

I get that Trump's actions are frustrating to those used to the workings of the national security apparatus.  The workings of the bureaucracy does not respond well to Presidential decisions that have not been fully and completely vetted.  The endless meetings, conferences, discussions, what-if drills, and wringing of hands has produced nothing.  I saw a speech he made earlier this week about the toughest part of his job.  It's signing letters to parents of soldiers who have died in some godforsaken desert on the other side of the world for dubious reasons.  It's going to Dover to welcome back the caskets.  It's going to Walter Reed to pin Purple Hearts on young kids missing limbs.  If there was a Congressionally sanctioned war that the people were behind, it would be one thing.  But that's not the case.  The average American doesn't know nor care what our brave young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are doing to maintain the peace and kill bad guys.  

So I say there will never be a good time to draw the line, but now is as good as any.  And if you think we're deserting an ally and we should stay, I say how long?  If you think we should be there indefinitely, I say what U.S. sphere of influence does that little corner of the world further?  Where are our national security interests in that region?  It's difficult to see.  They have been fighting for centuries and will be fighting for centuries.  But if you can't come off the idea of America as the regional policeman, while our European friends attend cocktail parties in Brussels and discuss what to do at the next well-attended conference, then I suggest you take your children to the nearest military recruiter and sign them up.

Turkey and the Kurds: It’s More Complicated Than You Think

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

October 10, 2019 

We are grateful for the Kurds’ help, and we should try to help them in return. But no one wants to risk war with Turkey.

On Monday, President Trump announced that a contingent of fewer than 100 U.S. troops in Syria was being moved away from Kurdish-held territory on the border of Turkey. The move effectively green-lighted military operations by Turkey against the Kurds, which have now commenced.

Some U.S. military officials went public with complaints about being “blindsided.” The policy cannot have been a surprise, though. The president has made no secret that he wants out of Syria, where we now have about 1,000 troops (down from over 2,000 last year). More broadly, he wants our forces out of the Middle East. He ran on that position. I’ve argued against his “endless wars” tropes, but his stance is popular. As for Syria specifically, many of the president’s advisers think we should stay, but he has not been persuaded.

The president’s announcement of the redeployment of the Syrian troops came on the heels of a phone conversation with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This, obviously, was a mistake, giving the appearance (and not for the first time) that Trump is taking cues from Ankara’s Islamist strongman. As has become rote, the inevitable criticism was followed by head-scratching tweets: The president vows to “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey,” which “I’ve done before” (huh?), if Turkey takes any actions “that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” We can only sigh and say it will be interesting to see how the president backs up these haughty threats now that Erdogan has begun his invasion.

All that said, the president at least has a cogent position that is consistent with the Constitution and public opinion. He wants U.S. forces out of a conflict in which America’s interests have never been clear, and for which Congress has never approved military intervention. I find that sensible — no surprise, given that I have opposed intervention in Syria from the start. The stridency of the counterarguments is matched only by their selectiveness in reciting relevant facts.

I thus respectfully dissent from our National Review editorial.  President Trump, it says, is “making a serious mistake” by moving our forces away from what is described as “Kurdish territory”; the resulting invasion by superior Turkish forces will “kill American allies” while “carving out a zone of dominance” that will serve further to “inflame and complicate” the region.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the basic fact that there is no Kurdish territory. There is Syrian territory on Turkey’s border that the Kurds are occupying — a situation that itself serves to “inflame and complicate” the region for reasons I shall come to. Ethnic Kurds do not have a state. They live in contiguous parts of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Most are integrated into these countries, but many are separatists.

The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help. They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots. Although such informed observers as Michael Rubin contend that the PKK has “evolved,” it remains a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. While our government materially supports the PKK’s confederates, ordinary Americans have been prosecuted for materially supporting the PKK.

The PKK has a long history of conducting terrorist attacks, but their quarrel is not with us. So why has our government designated them as terrorists? Because they have been fighting an insurgent war against Turkey for over 30 years. Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them — as I’ve detailed over the years. The Erdogan problem complicates but does not change the fact that Turkey is of great strategic significance to our security.

While it is a longer discussion, I would be open to considering the removal of both the PKK from the terrorist list and Turkey from NATO. For now, though, the blunt facts are that the PKK is a terrorist organization and Turkey is our ally. These are not mere technicalities. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, our government’s machinations in Syria have not put just one of our allies in a bind. There are two allies in this equation, and our support for one has already vexed the other. The ramifications are serious, not least Turkey’s continued lurch away from NATO and toward Moscow.

Without any public debate, the Obama administration in 2014 insinuated our nation into the Kurdish–Turk conflict by arming the YPG. To be sure, our intentions were good. ISIS had besieged the city of Kobani in northern Syria; but Turkey understandably regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, complicit in the PKK insurgency.

That brings us to another non-technicality that the editors mention only in passing: Our intervention in Syria has never been authorized by Congress. Those of us who opposed intervention maintained that congressional authorization was necessary because there was no imminent threat to our nation. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, having U.S. forces “deter further genocidal bloodshed in northern Syria” is not a mission for which Americans support committing our men and women in uniform. Such bloodlettings are the Muslim Middle East’s default condition, so the missions would never end.

A congressional debate should have been mandatory before we jumped into a multi-layered war, featuring anti-American actors and shifting loyalties on both sides. In fact, so complex is the situation that President Obama’s initial goal was to oust Syria’s Assad regime; only later came the pivot to fighting terrorists, which helped Assad. That is Syria: Opposing one set of America’s enemies only empowers another. More clear than what intervention would accomplish was the likelihood of becoming enmeshed, inadvertently or otherwise, in vicious conflicts of which we wanted no part — such as the notorious and longstanding conflict between Turks and Kurds.

Barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) come into existence because of Islamic fundamentalism. But saying so remains de trop in Washington. Instead, we tell ourselves that terrorism emerges due to “vacuums” created in the absence of U.S. forces. On this logic, there should always and forever be U.S. forces and involvement in places where hostility to America vastly outweighs American interests.

President Obama has wrongly been blamed for “creating” ISIS by leaving a vacuum in Iraq. Couldn’t be the sharia-supremacist culture, could it? No, we’re supposed to suppose that this sort of thing could happen anywhere. So, when Obama withdrew our forces from the region (as Trump is doing now), jihadist atrocities and territorial conquests ensued. Eventually, Obama decided that action needed to be taken. But invading with U.S. troops was not an option — it would have been deeply unpopular and undercut Obama’s tout that Islamic militarism was on the wane. Our government therefore sought proxy forces.

Most proved incompetent. The Kurds, however, are very capable. There was clamor on Capitol Hill to back them. We knew from the first, though, that supporting them was a time bomb. Turkey was never going to countenance a Kurdish autonomous zone, led by the YPG and PKK elements, on its Syrian border. Ankara was already adamant that the PKK was using the Kurdish autonomous zone in Iraq to encourage separatist uprisings in Turkey, where 20 percent of the population is Kurdish. Erdogan would never accept a similar arrangement in Syria; he would evict the YPG forcibly if it came to that.

Yes, we had humanitarian reasons for arming the Kurds. But doing so undermined our anti-terrorism laws while giving Erdogan incentive to align with Russia and mend fences with Iran. ISIS, meanwhile, has never been defeated — it lost its territorial “caliphate,” but it was always more lethal as an underground terrorist organization than as a quasi-sovereign struggling to hold territory. And al-Qaeda, though rarely spoken of in recent years, is ascendant — as threatening as it has been at any time since its pre-9/11 heyday.

Those of us opposed to intervention in Syria wanted Congress to think through these quite predictable outcomes before authorizing any further U.S. military involvement in this wretched region. Congress, however, much prefers to lay low in the tall grass, wait for presidents to act, and then complain when things go awry.

And so they have: The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)

It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria.” That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep U.S. forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.

President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. I hope he is up to it. For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.

Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS. We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out. Of course we must prioritize the denial of safe havens from which jihadists can attack American interests. We have to stop pretending, though, that if our intentions toward this neighborhood are pure, its brutal history, enduring hostilities, and significant downside risks can be ignored.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and an NR contributing editor.

UPDATE:  Things have been unfolding as expected the last few days.  The Turks are invading Northern Syria.  There has been some killing.  Some ISIS terrorists have escaped.  Trump has implemented sanctions on Turkey.  Tensions are rising.  So-called experts on both sides of the aisle are offering opinions.  In other words, no surprises.  One of my favorite commentators on the National Security scene, CDR Salamander has a great analysis on his blog today called "A Festival of Bad Options".  I think it is spot on.  You can read it here.

Motivation Monday