Tag Archives: government

An Illustration

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…of an unacceptably bloated bureaucracy.

As most of you know, President Barack Obama is bent on releasing as many terrorists from our Guantanamo detention facility as he can, moving the remainder to US prisons, and closing Gitmo. Whether or not this is a good idea, there is bureaucratic failure involved in the thing.

…officials note that Carter has approved some transfers and is pushing his staff to move quickly to get more to his desk. But many other proposed transfers are slogging through the bureaucracy, under review by a long list of defense, military, intelligence, and other administration offices.

There’s no excuse for this. It’s a simple, yes or no, question. The terrorist can be released or not. There’s no reason for delays.

DoD and the other cabinets and agencies in the Executive Branch (and in the other Branches) badly need personnel downsizing, military and civilian, with the personnel—highly experienced, all—returned to the private sector.

There is no excuse for the slow-walking.

What Do They Know?

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Stanley Kurtz has asked a very important question regarding Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous handling of our nation’s secrets on her personal, private email server while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair (or in her airplane seat as she jet-setted around the world on her State Department travels.

…shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information?

Kurtz also quoted from a Daily Beast piece a related aspect:

[S]enior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.

That brings me to my point: there’s no need to assume the worst; by inspecting Clinton’s private server—forensically, if needs be, since by her own admission she’s committed the felony of evidence tampering by deleting a potful of emails—we know what the Russians and Chinese (and the Brits, Israelis, Germans, and any script kiddy with an app) know. We don’t have to spend a lot of resources or money guessing at that.

Undoing a Unilateral “Presidency”

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Lahnee Chen closed his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar title with this:

By revoking Mr Obama’s executive actions, and beginning the arduous task of identifying and addressing his many other unilateral moves, the next president wouldn’t have to jettison the entire Obama legacy.

But our next President should.

On the next president’s first day in office, the president could simply issue an executive order revoking all of his predecessor’s executive actions, except those necessary for national security or the basic functioning of government. This includes Mr Obama’s executive orders, but also a flood of presidential memorandums and directives, as well as informal guidance and orders from federal agencies, that he has used to reshape federal policy.

Not “except for.” Every single one. Don’t waste time sorting through the mess to find the occasional nugget that might be useful. Rescind every single one. The next President should issue his own few Executive Orders regarding those narrow areas of national security and the basic functioning of government. That last, especially, doesn’t need many, since government can, and should be, shrunk drastically by the next President and the next two (at least) Congresses.

In the name of actual transparency, this item, too. Those Presidential Memoranda don’t need to be, and so they’re not, published in the Federal Register, and so the public has very limited access to them. The next President, on day two, should publish those memoranda. Every single one of them.

Keep in mind this, too. It’s not only Obama’s legacy. It’s our nation’s legacy, it’s the legacy of us citizens, it’s your and my legacy. It needs to jettisoned in its entirety, every single syllable. For our national honor.

Who’s In Charge?

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…of our foreign policy—us, or foreign entities?

Here’s the latest, against the backdrop of Russian reestablishment of an archipelago of its Cold War military bases across the Arctic?

After invading Ukraine, Russia pulled out of the Arctic Council, a consortium of eight countries that includes the US.

In response, there’s this [emphasis added]:

Asked about Russia’s recent moves in the Arctic, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: “And so do we have concerns specifically about Russia? I would say…we have concerns about how militaries conduct themselves in the Arctic, but that’s for all of the Arctic Council members to discuss.“

Hmm….

John Kerry on the Law

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Paul Mirengoff, over at Power Line, highlighted this exchange between the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair and Congressman Brad Sherman (D, CA) while Kerry testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee regarding the Iranian nuclear weapons deal.

Sherman: You strongly do not want [Congress] to override a presidential veto, but if we do, that triggers certain American laws…. You don’t want us to do it. You think its terrible policy. You think the rest of the world would be against us.

But let’s say Congress doesn’t take your advice—we override a veto—and the law that’s triggered then imposes certain sanctions. Will you follow the law even though you think it violates this agreement, and even if you think it’s absolutely terrible policy?

Kerry: I can’t begin to answer that at this point without consulting with the President and determining what the circumstances are.

Sherman: So you’re not committed to following the law?

Kerry: I’m not going to deal with a hypothetical, that’s all.

But, Skipper, what’s hypothetical about whether you’ll follow the law? And why do you need to consult with President Barack Obama before you’ll say whether you’ll follow the law or break it?