RUSH: This next item happened yesterday, and I remember commenting on it, and I forgot about it until I started do show prep for today. Here it is again. Yesterday morning Obama went to the Bergdahl garden at the White House and announced that an American hostage had been killed in a counter terrorism drone strike, an American drone strike, and we had inadvertently killed an American citizen that been held hostage.
Obama went out to the Bergdahl garden to announce this, and while he took responsibility for it, the minute he stopped talking they went to other members of the Regime who then said, “No, no, that’s Obama being a leader. He had really nothing to do with this. I mean, individual operations like this, Obama didn’t know about this, I mean, this is way beneath the pay grade of Obama. Underlings are responsible for this.”
To which others said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” That doesn’t jibe because prior to this one incident, Obama was bragging about being the guy in charge of naming targets. Obama was bragging about he’s the guy that had the kill list. You remember? A lot of leftists at the time didn’t like it. They didn’t think it’s cool for Obama to be sitting there running the drone program and deciding terrorist A gets killed. I tell you what did it for them, when an American citizen terrorist got wiped out in Yemen. Olaki, Shalaki, Shylocky whatever his name was. He happened to be a guru to the Fort Hood shooter.
Obama took him out with a drone strike, and Obama’s been bragging about it because Democrats are well known to be wusses when it comes to power and military force. They don’t particularly like it, so Obama started bragging that he was in charge of the kill list. Now all of a sudden an innocent American hostage is killed and Obama is said to have nothing to do it, and furthermore you know who is to blame? All of a sudden, who is it that all of a sudden has a role in this? That would be Congress. Yes siree.
I saw that yesterday morning and I about spit. Blaming Congress for a drone strikes, saying Congress has a role in drone, they don’t have a role in anything else. Congress doesn’t have a role in confirmations or in executive action on amnesty or anything else, but all of a sudden they are culpable and have a responsibility when it comes to drone strikes? Can anybody say: pass the buck?
Here’s the story as it appeared in the French News Agency: “President Barack Obama’s admission that a US drone strike accidentally took the lives of two hostages has raised fresh questions about the limits and the risks of the country’s ‘targeted killing’ campaign. … the botched strike revealed that the US had no idea an American aid worker, Warren Weinstein, and an Italian humanitarian, Giovanni Lo Porto, were in the same compound as Al-Qaeda militants when the drone raid was launched in January.
Why would our intelligence be flawed after Obama has decided to no longer capture or interrogate prisoners? And why all of a sudden is it okay to blame intelligence after eight years of denying intelligence had anything to do with what George Bush screwed up, in their words?
“Human rights groups and some lawmakers have long questioned the legality and the morality of the drone air war, citing estimates of thousands of civilian casualties caused by the strikes. Military experts have cast doubt on the ultimate effect of the raids on extremist groups.” But Obama is our foremost moral authority and our foremost military expert. And now he is trying to pass the buck. I mean, I remember Obama leaking to the New York Times the news that he alone picked the people to drone, and now all of a sudden he has nothing to do with it.
And here’s the story about blaming Congress. This is from the White House press briefing yesterday. Reporter says, “Lastly, on this issue of revealing what happened. ThereÂ’s been a flurry of statements this morning from members of Congress, not only joining president in offering condolences, but promising rigorous oversight from some of the relevant congressional committees. Does the White House feel that Congress has a role to play in figuring out what went wrong here and how to possibly prevent it from happening again?”
What White House official fed that question to the reporter? Of all questions, does Congress have a role? Who thinks this stuff up? Somebody at the Regime had to feed that question to this reporter. And here’s what Josh Earnest said when asked, “Does Congress maybe have a role? Is there maybe congressional culpability here in the deaths of these innocent victims?” Answer: “Well, I can tell you that the president believes that Congress does have very important oversight role over these kinds of programs. ThatÂ’s why in presidentÂ’s National Defense UniversityÂ’s speech that he delivered a couple of years ago, he made clear that when these kinds of terrorism operations are carried out, the relevant members of Congress are briefed about each operation.”
Lo and behold, a reporter is fed a question, “Does Congress carry any kind of responsibility for this botched drone business?”
“Well, you know, now that you ask, the president believes that Congress does have a very important oversight role, and in fact –” implied here: it could well be that if Congress had been responsible this might not have happened. It’s just passing the buck 101. All of these years that Congress has ceased to exist, doesn’t have any legitimacy, as far as Obama’s concerned, now when he needs a scapegoat, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner raise their hands, “Yep, yep, we’ll bite.”
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