Monday, February 1, 2010 – Charles Krauthammer, Claudia Rosett

Frank begins the show discussing the forthcoming hearing for ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Congress later in the week. He asks, ‘is Obama competent as Commander-in-Chief?’ With more on this theme, Charles Krauthammer weighs in on on Team Obama’s ineptitude in fighting the war for the free world. Next, Claudia Rosett joins Frank to discuss the UN’s international taxation schemes.

Monday, February 1, 2010 – Monologue

I’m going to give you my thoughts on a hearing that’s going to be taking place in the Senate Armed Services Committee tomorrow. This is a committee I had the privilege working for several years. What’s setting up there is a battle of truly enormous portend. It is over the fight to fulfill President Obama’s opt-repeated commitment to repeal what he misleading persists in calling “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” that is to say: the policy that says gay people are allowed to serve in the military as long as nobody knows they’re gay. But in fact what the President is not talking about repealing is not an executive order signed by Bill Clinton, but a law, a statue that actually says gay people can’t serve in the military at all, for very good reasons.

And my view is that whichever way this comes out—there will be remarkable impact on either the Obama Presidency or the US Armed Forces. If this law is repealed, I think the all-volunteer force will be terribly damaged. This comes of course, this fight, against the backdrop of a considerable body of opinion that has been most recently, I think, manifested in Scott Brown’s successful election campaign in Massachusetts, a fight over: is the Obama Administration actually competent with respect to our national security; more specifically, is President Obama simply demonstrating a gross inadequacy as our Commander-in-Chief?

There are a couple examples of the problem. The President just today, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen revealed their new program for 2010 coming with a strategy change: apparently we’re not going to be worrying about fighting major wars, we’re going to be focusing virtually exclusively on fighting the kind of wars we’re in today. And that’s fine, except it’s almost certainly not the case that our more substantial enemies, notably Communist China, are going to miss the opportunity to take advantage of the down-scaling, down-sizing in some cases, of America’s military, its programs, its power-projection capabilities. And I submit to you that if we persist in this kind of thing, you will see it much more likely that we will be fighting a major war, rather than less.

Then there’s the problem of course of the protracted dithering that President Obama engaged in with respect to Afghanistan that has now sort of morphed into transparently half-hearted efforts to prevail there and the prospect it seems of a hoped-for negotiated surrender of the place to the Taliban. That’s bad enough. On top of that we’re seeing, as we’ve talked about here at Secure Freedom Radio with Diana West last week, it looks as though the devil-take-the-hindmost kind of approach to withdrawing Iraq is giving rise to the distinct possibly that you will have Iraq simply turned into a vassal state of Iran: not a good thing. And then of course the public has been horrified, and we’ll be talking with Charles Krauthammer about this shortly (he’s written brilliantly on the subject), but the succession of debacles on the home front as Obama’s team of Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair, and Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan have seen ever more inept, if not actually malfeasant (and malfeasant is simply a fancy word for doing things that are wrong, and if not illegal, certainly reprehensible in the extreme) and I worry that that’s what we’re now seeing tallied up on the scoreboard by this Team Obama.

Incredibly, amidst this background, this troubling Record; President Obama evidently thinks that he will be able to persuade Blue-Dog Democrats, who are already skittish about what happened in Massachusetts and before that in New Jersey and Virginia with respect to their electoral prospects, and then of course all of those Republicans who are generally more sound on national security. The President seems to think that he’ll be able to induce enough of them to go along with him to repeal this statute which was very carefully thought through and enacted, I think in 1994, by the Congress after hearings on the subject, extensive investigation of the wisdom of bringing in not only homosexuals but transgender and bisexual ones and even hermaphrodites if this agenda is to be taken seriously, all of those have to be accommodated in the United States military.

And back in the mid-1990s, the Congress quite wisely said no, you know, we’re not going to do that—not because they were interested in discriminating against people or denying them some right to serve in the military; but rather because there are practical problems that inflicting upon particularly an all-volunteer force, such as we rely upon today to keep us secure, that cannot simply be accommodated by the wave of a hand or the direction of a President. There are personnel issues, there are logistical issues, there are operational issues; all of which can afflict the good order and discipline upon which our military, and in turn, upon which the rest of us depend. And if we go down this root of trying somehow to ignore these realities, continue to bludgeon the military into believing it simply has to accommodate this program, the President has said so; get the Congress to go along with it somehow.

I’m fearful that we will see substantial numbers of people serving in the military simply saying, you know, I put up with the myriad deployments to combat zones, I put up with the sacrifice that this entailed in terms of my time with my family, all of the other hardships needless to say the possibility of getting killed; but I’m not going to put up with situations of forced intimacy with people who may find me attractive and may decide that they want to act on that impulse, it’s just more than the traffic will bear. And by some estimates, there have been as many as 25% of the military currently serving today, particularly in key positions particularly in field-grade officer ranks and among specializations that are very important to our combat operations who have simply said that they would leave the military or seriously consider doing so in the event this law were to be repealed.

So where does this leave us folks? The hearing tomorrow we’ll hear I’m sure from the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that they’re trying to get their around what it’s involved here and they’re working hard at trying to accommodate it. The reality is, when the dust settles on this battle, one that will be waged not only by those on the Hill but also I’m happy to say by over 1,100 Senior military officers now retired who had weighed in, and said they are not going to allow this to happen without a fight because they are understand exactly what it portends for their comrades still in uniform and for their incredibly important capability that they represent.

But my guess is this is as I said, when the dust settles on this battle, the American people and their elected representatives will continue overwhelmingly to oppose conferring upon gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender individuals and yes hermaphrodites a non-existent “right” to serve openly in the military, and thereby we will avoid breaking the all-volunteer force and it will be instead President Obama’s standing as Commander-in-Chief that has suffered further grievous and who knows, perhaps irreparable harm.

Again, that’s my take on this subject. This is the War of Ideas, I’d like to know what yours are, engage! Let us know. Securefreedomradio.com is one way to do so, the Frank Gaffney twitter or facebook accounts are another. We’ll be following this story of the Senate Armed Services hearing and the campaign that this hearing tomorrow will kick off; you will not want to miss what we develop and our grounds for opposing this repealing very sound law.