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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bonefish who wrote (897085)	10/28/2015 1:22:13 PM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575549

Obama aides explain how a deadly firefight with ISIS isn't really combat BY ANDREW MALCOLM 10/27/2015 08:48 AM ET news.investors.com Delta Force Army, file. Here's the scene last week: Army Delta Force troops, in boots on the ground in Iraq, swooping into an ISIS prison camp along with Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers. The mission: Free more than five dozen Kurdish and Iraqi captives believed in imminent danger of mass execution. In the darkness, a fierce firefight erupts. The Kurdish and Iraqi break-in stalls. The experienced Special Ops guys, who happen to be heavily-armed in body armor, night-vision goggles and full combat gear, open up. Numerous ISIS troops fall. So does one U.S. operative, Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, a veteran of 14 deployments. They breach the buildings. Prisoners are freed. Valuable intell gathered. As choppers whop-whop away, smart bombs whistle in out of the night. Prison camp disappears. All this, according to the silly parlance and ridiculous rationale of Obama administration officials, is not real combat. How, normal people might inquire, is a blazing firefight with fatalities and large explosions not really combat? Because these officials are once again unfortunate hostages to yet another unfortunate statement by Barack Obama. Remember the red line in Syria? The ObamaCare promises? Again, contemporary reality must be twisted to conform to Obama's past rhetoric. On Sept. 17 last year -- oh, look, during the run-up to mid-term elections -- Obama spoke briefly to troops at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, home to the Joint Operations Center of U.S. Central Command. Here's what Obama told those men and women: "I want to be clear: The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission." That same day an obedient Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "U.S. ground troops will not be sent into combat in this conflict." Uh-huh. This actually is a familiar scenario when American military personnel are sent in to "advise and train." In 1961-62, when another Democrat, John F. Kennedy, first sent U.S. advisers to help South Vietnam combat communist rebels, the Americans were not even allowed to shoot back if fired upon; 58,220 American military later died there. Have you ever seen a woodlands hiker walk into a massive cobweb? Sudden cardio workout. Here's the verbal jiu-jitsu now ensuing in Washington. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter explaining there would be more such raids, maybe many: "It doesn't represent us assuming a combat role. It represents a continuation of our advise-and-assist mission. And I said right from the beginning....when we find opportunities to do things that will effectively prosecute the (anti-ISIS) campaign, we're going to do that." Carter sought to turn attention to Wheeler's can-do heroism: "The plan was not for the U.S. advise-and-assist and accompanying forces to enter the compound or be involved in the firefight. However, when a firefight ensued, this American did what I'm very proud that Americans do in that situation. He ran to the sound of the guns....and made the mission successful." On Monday, Obama's press secretary, Josh Earnest, took a very deep breath and sought desperately to avoid creating a sound-bite containing the word "combat": "Our men and women in uniform who are serving in Iraq in a train, advise and assist role are serving their country in a very dangerous place. "And in the situation that occurred at the end of last week, you had American military personnel who are serving in an advisory capacity as Iraqi Peshmerga forces carried out a dangerous operation, and when those forces that are backed by the United States came under fire and were pinned down, our special operators in the field made the decision to respond. "And it put them in a situation where, yes, they were exchanging fire with the enemy." But that's not combat. So, how about we plunk Word-Boy down in a firefight, see if maybe his definition changes.

To: Bonefish who wrote (897085)	10/28/2015 4:11:10 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575549

Charles Koch, the tea-party billionaire who helped finance it all, as good as admits in his new book that it was a load of crap. In “Good Profit,” his new management guide and libertarian political manifesto, Koch laments the rise of collectivism and socialism and holds out New Zealand, Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong as the models of economic freedom that the rest of us should follow instead. What he somehow forgets to mention? All four of those libertarian paradises have universal health-care systems that are as “socialized” as Obamacare or more so. Oops.