Monthly Archives: September 2013

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POTUS faces key moment if Congress says ‘no’

Secretary of State John Kerry says President Obama can bomb Syria even if Congress votes against authorizing him to do so.

Not so fast, Mr. President.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/john-kerry-congress-syria_n_3881200.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Kerry makes the point in an interview with the Huffington Post that the president, as commander in chief, retains the authority to authorize military strikes even if he doesn’t have the backing of the legislative branch of government. Yes he does, but …

There is a huge political calculation at home the president must consider, which the Huff Post notes. It is that the Republican-led House of Representatives seems almost certain to push ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Obama. That, in my mind, would be a grotesque overreaction. It is, however, part of today’s political reality in Washington. Those who oppose the president really detest him and his policies.

I happen to believe the United States must strike at Syria to punish the government there for using Sarin gas on civilians. Obama has threatened to strike at Syrian military targets; the military has drawn up plans; Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says the military machine is ready to strike when it gets the order.

The strikes must be surgical, effective and must get the job done in short order. There must be a commitment that U.S. troops won’t storm into Damascus once the bombing stops.

However, the president is having a tough time selling this strike to reluctant lawmakers.

Should he act on his own, without their authorization? No. As the president himself said, in addition to being commander in chief, he also is the leader of the world’s largest representative democracy.

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‘Patriots’ becoming a perverted term

Paul Burka is among my favorite Texas political pundits — and he’s nailed it once again in criticizing a video supporting Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s campaign for governor.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/greg-abbott-freedom-worth-fighting

The video shows Abbott praising the “patriots” who fight for “freedom.” The patriots to whom he refers, of course, appear to be the tea party warriors who comprise a significant portion of the Texas Republican Party.

Abbott has enlisted as a tea party “patriot” in an attempt to tack to the far right wing of his party.

That takes me to a point that has bothered me since the tea party branch of the GOP began taking root in Texas and the rest of the country.

They call themselves “tea party patriots,” taking sole ownership of the term “patriot” they are so proud to wear. Well, I consider myself as much as a patriot as anyone who boasts of his or her tea party credentials. I am not a tea party follower. I dislike intensely the tea party wing’s view that no government is the best government. They adhere to some notion that it’s all right, for instance, to shut the government down as long as it defunds the Affordable Care Act — ignoring blatantly the effect that such a shutdown would have on those Americans who actually derive some benefit from the services that government delivers.

These folks call themselves “patriots” but their so-called “patriotism” is a version that I don’t recognize.

I kind of consider it a perversion of the term, not unlike the way Islamic terror groups have perverted their own religion or, dare I say it, some so-called Christians (e.g., the Westboro Baptist “Church”) pervert their faith.

I used to think of Greg Abbott as being above that kind of demagoguery.

Silly me.

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Thanks, Mr. Chief Justice

I’ve commented on this already, but it bears repeating with the news that Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson is leaving the bench soon.

I wish the chief well as he goes on with the rest of his life and, presumably, his legal career.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/09/07/playlist-had-enough/

My fondest memory of the chief justice has nothing to do with his knowledge of jurisprudence — but it has everything to do with his sense of decorum and propriety outside the courtroom.

Chief Justice Jefferson came a’callin’ at the newspaper where I worked a few years ago. He was running for re-election and wanted to visit with the editorial page “staff” — that would have been yours truly — to make the case for sending him back to office for another term.

We sat at a large conference table, along with a young aide who was traveling with the chief justice.

The aide, a woman of about 24 or 25, was sending text messages while Jefferson and I talked about court matters. The chief justice stopped talking suddenly and asked his aide what she was doing. “I’m sending a text message,” she said. “Put the device down,” Jefferson said. “But this is important,” she responded, to which the chief justice said in a tone approaching anger, “Then take it outside!” She left the room.

I thanked the chief justice for his attention to good manners.

And I am thanking him now for his service to the Texas judicial system.

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Sessions ‘not being partisan’?

U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is using an interesting tactic in criticizing President Obama’s handling of the Syria crisis.

He said that President George W. Bush would have frightened Syrian dictator Bashar as-Assad enough to prevent the Syrians from using chemical weapons on innocent civilians.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/09/06/sen_sessions_if_bush_threatened_assad_he_wouldnt_have_used_chemical_weapons.html

Sessions assured a town hall audience, mind you, that he isn’t being partisan. “We have only one president at a time,” he said. But by golly, if the 43rd president had said the same thing the 44th president said in warning Assad, the dictator would be scared.

I think the senator, who’s as partisan as they come in his view of policy and politics, has thrown out the Mother of All Hypotheticals.

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Is a Rodman defection on tap?

I am acutely aware that this is not an original thought, but I cannot prevent myself from weighing in.

Is Dennis Rodman ready to defect to North Korea?

He made a second trip there supposedly to seek the release of an American being held captive. He went there a few months ago and declared for all the world — or at least that part of the world where people actually care what he thinks — that North Korean dictator/weirdo Kim Jong Un had become his “friend.”

Well, with Rodman, one never knows what the term “friend” actually means. The pro basketball Hall of Famer flipped many years ago — about the time his coach at Detroit, Chuck Daly, retired from the game. Rodman couldn’t continue acting like a semi-normal human being without his mentor and friend to hold his hand.

So he died his hair many colors, got all tatted up with body ink and now has pierced just about every visible appendage on his body — and maybe even some he keeps hidden in front of decent company.

Rodman’s friendship with Kim Jong Un is a match made somewhere, but certainly not in heaven.

The dictator presides over a nation that still starves its people while building one of the strongest military machines in Asia. But he’s Rodman’s pal.

I’m waiting — and hoping — for a defection. These two weirdoes deserve each other.

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Follow John Kerry’s lead, Mr. President

I’m beginning to think President Obama needs to change the way he views his administration.

Instead of referring to everything and everyone who works within the administration in the first person singular — as in “my national security team” or “my administration” — the president needs to start using the first person plural.

Bill McKenzie, a columnist and blogger for the Dallas Morning News, is on point with his view that Secretary of State John Kerry has been more “out front” on the Syria crisis than the president.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/09/obama-needs-the-moral-clarity-of-john-kerry-but-what-are-conservative-isolationists-thinking.html/

Obama needs to follow Kerry’s lead.

To do that, though, he’ll need to start adapting to the view that the administration and its policies don’t belong to the man at the top. It’s a shared responsibility. “Our administration,” or “our national security team” would be the more appropriate way to define the team that occupies the White House, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and all the other institutions that comprise the massive federal government.

It’s all been a part of one element of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House that has bothered me. The president tends to treat the government he administers a tad too personally — as if it all belongs to him. He took ownership of the presidency the moment he took the oath of office. The reality, though, is that the office actually belongs to us, the people.

I’m sure y’all have heard him use the first person singular perhaps a bit too liberally during his more than four years in office. Well, he’s now facing arguably the worst crisis of his time in the White House since the very beginning, when he walked into a financial firestorm.

The Syria crisis is testing the president’s resolve. His secretary of state, however, seems to be speaking with tremendous moral authority, not to mention outrage over the Syrians’ use of chemical weapons.

The man in charge of things in D.C., Barack Obama, ought to adopt John Kerry’s outlook — while understanding that everyone on duty at this moment has a shared responsibility to find a solution to this crisis.

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Our nation is all ears, Mr. President

President Obama is going to speak to the nation on Tuesday in an effort to persuade his fellow Americans that a military strike against Syria is the right thing to do at precisely the right time.

I’m looking forward to this presidential speech.

20354377-obama-will-address-country-on-syria-calls-crisis-threat-to-global-peace

It’s not that I really need persuading that Syria needs to be punished. It used chemical weapons to kill civilians, including small children and women. That act needs a response. I do need persuading, though, that the president has signed off on a precise plan that includes an exit strategy. It needs a beginning, middle and an end.

What should the president say Tuesday night? Let’s start with these points:

* What precisely is the nature of this strike? Who and/or what will be the targets? No, the president need not be specific. He need not take a dive and surrender too much information to the Syrians.

* He’ll need to pledge, make a solemn vow, that the United States is not going to send troops into battle. Yes, we’ve done this kind of aerial campaign before, in Kosovo. It worked.

* The president will need to send a clear message as well to Syria’s allies in the region — namely Iran and the Hezbollah terrorists who run Lebanon — that they should think twice about committing reprisals against U.S. diplomatic personnel in the region.

* And the president will need to acknowledge Americans’ fear of yet another ground war. He needs to assure them in the strongest terms possible that a ground war is not in the cards. We have plenty of weapons capable of delivering much damage and misery to the Syrian military. They are the most sophisticated precision weapons on the world and we have a military force that knows how to use them.

The nation awaits your message, Mr. President.

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Iran awaits word on U.S. resolve

I’m beginning to think the fundamental question of whether the United States should attack Syria over its use of chemical weapons is this: If the United States pulls back on a direct challenge to make Syria pay for its actions, will it embolden Iran to commit even more mischief in the Middle East?

President Obama has pledged to strike Syria if it crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons on civilians. The Syrians did the deed and the United States is now poised to launch air strikes. Obama has formally asked Congress for authorization and it appears that while the Senate might approve the request, the House of Representatives will pull back.

Without full approval by both houses of Congress, the president is left with two terrible options: walking away from his threat to strike the Syrians or acting on his own as commander in chief by issuing the order to strike.

If he goes it alone, he faces the wrath of a Republican-led House of Reps that detests virtually every policy he proposes. If the president walks away and gives Syria a pass on the hideous act of gassing civilians, he risks looking feckless in the face of imminent threats to a critical region.

Waiting in the wings is the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s primary allies, an exporter of terrorism and a known hater of the United States, aks “The Great Satan.”

The Iranians can bring a lot of misery to the region in a huge hurry if we fail to act.

The world awaits to learn how Congress will respond.

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Bush kin on right immigration track

The Bush family name be politically toxic in much of the nation, but it remains fairly golden in Texas.

The reasons for that long-lasting good will might be difficult to explain. I’ll add that on immigration reform, the Bush family is ahead of the curve and is on the right side of history.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/09/bush-family-back-in-political-spotlight-with-immigration-reform/

As the San Antonio Express-News blog notes, the Bushes can mark their return to public life with their strong stance on reforming the nation’s broken immigration system.

George P. Bush, the son of the former Florida governor, Jeb, is running as a Republican for Texas land commissioner — an office that doesn’t have much to say directly about immigration issues. But his father and his mother — Columba, a native of central Mexico — both have been strongly encouraging serious immigration reform that includes a “path to citizenship” for those who are here illegally. And as someone with Latino blood in his veins, George P. is seen as a rising Latino star within the Republican Party.

Uncle George W., the 43rd president of the United States, is another one who speaks wisely about immigration issues. The Express-News blog notes that former President Bush’s silence since leaving office in 2009 is beginning to break with his views on the subject. He was strong on immigration while serving as Texas governor and as president.

To his great credit, Rick Perry — who succeeded Bush as governor — has been equally outspoken on the issue, much to the dismay of his conservative allies within the GOP, some of whom argue stupidly that we should just round up all them “illegals” and send ’em back to where they came from. Perry, meanwhile, has supported legislation granting undocumented immigrants who’ve grown up in Texas “in-state tuition” incentives to enroll in our state’s public colleges and universities.

It encourages me to know that not all Republicans have gone around the bend on some of critical issues. I just hope they’ll listen to the wisdom — at least on the matter of immigration — to the Bush family of Texas.

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Major Hasan gets well-deserved shave

Nidal Hasan got a close shave this week, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

This wasn’t your ordinary grooming. Hasan is now getting set to serve a prison term while awaiting a death sentence for killing 13 people in that horrific massacre Nov. 5, 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan also was a psychiatrist and was a commissioned officer in the Army.

Then he decided he didn’t want to report for duty in Afghanistan. Why? Because he opposed our military activities in that nation. Hasan, a devout Muslim, took matters into his own hands and committed a horrendous capital crime. He was court-martialed, convicted and sentenced to die.

But along the way, Major Hasan had refused the Army’s orders to shave his beard. He claimed he was entitled to grow the facial hair in observance of his religion.

That, of course, is an absolute pile of crap. He was entitled to nothing of the kind.

Hasan took an oath when he enlisted in the Army to obey lawful orders. One of them was that he couldn’t have facial hair. He defied the government he was serving by growing the beard.

Back in the old days, such as when I served in the very same Army as Nidal Hasan, such insubordination would result in what we used to call “dry shaving,” meaning that our sergeants could hold us down and shave our faces without shaving cream or even water.

Well, the major is now locked up. He’ll never be free again. The Army took matters into his own hands by shaving his face clean of the facial hair.

Religious freedom? Forget about it. He’s still in the Army and was ordered to shave his face. As he’s known all along, the U.S. Army isn’t a democratic institution. That’s why they call those directives “orders.”