War Stories With Barack Obama

At last nights debate in Austin Barack Obama used a war story to prove that Hillary Clinton’s vote to go to war was a bad decision. This was the vote he couldn’t have even participated in since he wasn’t in the Senate yet. Obama brings it up so often that many of his supporters believe that Obama actually voted against the war. He continues to attack Clinton for making a bad decision based on bad intelligence. Clinton was a junior Senator from the state that was actually attacked by the terrorist. Obama’s votes on the Iraq debacle have been identical to Clinton’s since he joined the Senate, and that was the “fairy tale” Bill Clinton was referring to. That reference to the truth was turned around to make the first black President, Bill Clinton, out to be a racist. We hear his slogan for “change,” but the truth is he is just more of the same misinformation, and manipulation of facts kind of politician like the one we have in the White House right now. It is clear that his popularity is a cult of personality, since he lacks in any real substance. In the debate Obama told us, “You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.” Jake Trapper of ABC news did a little bit of fact checking on Obama’s story and found it to be “quite credible.” There are some problems with the story though. First off the story was from 2003, yet Obama makes it sound like it was from 2008. The story from the actual unnamed Army Captain, according to Trapper was, “the purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” but they would use them if captured. That doesn’t help Obama’s argument though. A spokesperson for the Pentagon said that Obama’s claim was “hard to believe.” The Pentagon went on to say, “Despite the degree of skill and finesse that it takes to manage a large force with the number of deployments we have going on — and despite the stress that we have readily acknowledged on the force, one of the things we do is make sure that all of our servicemen that are going into harm’s way are properly trained and equipped with the leadership they need to be successful.” This story is just another example of Obama telling us what we want to hear just to get elected. He rallies for change, but he is just more of the same.
Alan Cosgrove