Obama: Conduct Unbecoming, Part One

From Human Events and Floyd Reports:

Conduct Unbecoming, Part I


by Buzz Patterson



09/07/2010







When I was first named to serve at the side of President Bill Clinton and carry the nuclear “football” containing the nation’s nuclear capability as a young Air Force officer, I was proud and grateful. Over the next two years, however, my experiences in the Clinton White House turned my gratitude and awe into shock, revulsion, and sorrow as I experienced the cavalier and self-serving way Clinton went about the business of running our country. I wrote my first book, Dereliction of Duty, documenting our former President's contempt for the military, his indifference to important issues except insofar as they served his own political or personal purposes, and his failure to accept his responsibilities as our commander-in-chief. Indeed, it is my sincere belief that the dereliction of duty and negligence of Bill Clinton paved the way for the tragic events and deaths of September 11, 2001.



Now, tragically, I see history repeating itself with the presidency of Barack Obama. Only this time the conduct and dereliction of Obama and his administration are on pace to result in devastation of a much larger scale than that even of 9/11. In only a year and a half in office, Obama has not only reversed many of the successful accomplishments of his predecessor which have kept us safe; he’s done it at lightning speed. In doing so, Obama is clearly placing the United States in an increasingly vulnerable and threatened condition. As I hoped to accomplish in writing Dereliction of Duty, I again caution my nation in my new book, Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying Our Military and Endangering Our Security.



In Barack Obama we have elected a foreigner. He is a stranger in our midst. No, not in the fact that he was born in Hawaii and spent some years growing up in Indonesia, nor is it about his race, but in his approach to the land that he governs—the United States of America. We have elected a leader who is more comfortable bowing to the Japanese Emperor Akihito, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Chinese President Hu Jintao, then he is in embracing the character, the integrity and the exceptionalism of America—and defending the land that he calls home.



Among the more egregious policies and associations of Barack Obama and his administration that I explore in Conduct Unbecoming are:





• Barack Obama’s key California fundraiser and money bundler, Jodie Evans, and her organization Code Pink delivering cash and material support to the terrorists killing Americans in Iraq.





• Although he based his presidency on “change,” Obama’s administration consists of many of the same personalities I served with at the Clinton White House, e.g., Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Leon Panetta, and Erskine Bowles.





• Obama’s “World American Shame Tour” as he delivered addresses and offered apologies for American foreign policy in locales such as Cairo, Prague, Moscow, Berlin, Ankara, Oslo and the United Nations.





• The cessation of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on key terror leaders which have prevented attacks and American deaths.





• The emasculation of the Central Intelligence Agency and future intelligence gathering through threats of prosecution and the release of previously classified documents.





• The ambivalent and uninspired approach toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither seeking to win them or quit them.





• The announced closure of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the transfer of committed terrorists for incarceration on American soil.





• The dithering and feckless diplomatic efforts as Iran and North Korea build nuclear weapons and the vehicles to deliver them.



How can these two Presidents, Clinton and Obama, from the same political party but seemingly disparate backgrounds be so similar in their callous disregard for national security and defense?



As I outline and expose in Conduct Unbecoming, they were birthed from the same ideological cloth and have surrounded themselves with much the same political machine. Among their homogenous roots are their connections to George Soros, the Ford Foundation, MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, among others.



As I personally experienced as both an Air Force pilot and at the side of the President, Clinton’s military response to terrorist threats was negligible and did nothing to seriously address the problem. It was a mindset and an aversion to risk with which President Clinton never began, much less finished, a war on terrorism, because he never thought in terms of prosecuting a military campaign against terrorism, and he underestimated the rapidly evolving threat until it was too late.



Obama’s approach is eerily similar in this increasingly dangerous world in which we live. Clinton chose to defer the war on terrorism to law enforcement agencies thereby not having to make decisions as commander-in-chief; so too is Obama. This time, however, the stakes are much higher and Obama has shown neither the proclivity nor desire to shake the failed policies of former Democratic Presidents with regards to national defense.



While Obama has declared that he will triumph over the enemy we face in our “overseas contingencies,” jihadists continue to prosecute their war from Pakistan to Yemen to Fort Hood, Tex., to Detroit. While Obama spends his time attacking his predecessor and his policies, our enemy continues to plan, plot and execute attacks on America and Americans.



I thought I’d seen it all while working for Bill Clinton. Turns out I was wrong. Barack Obama is worse! Much worse!







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Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson, United States Air Force (Ret.), is the author of "Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying the Military and Endangering Our Security."



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