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According to the Huffington Post, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is “very disturbed” by President Barack Obama’s recent exercise of his executive powers, including the President’s recent “deal” with China on climate change, his intentions to move forward on his own on immigration and his suggestion that “the Internet should be regulated like a utility under so-called net neutrality rules.”
After all, Republicans are already angered because the President, using executive powers, has raised the wages of government contractors, strengthened protections for gay and transgender workers, stalled deportations of children and delayed parts of Obamacare.
After all, McConnell had hoped that after the recent elections Obama would eat some humble pie and would cry uncle to a GOP-controlled Congress.
“We’d like for the president to recognize the reality that he has the government that he has, not the one that he wishes he had, and work with us,” McConnell said according to the Post.
McConnell’s ultimatum is eerily reminiscent of the utterances of another all-powerful, all-knowing — of even the “known unknowns” — Republican during the GOP-orchestrated disaster known as the Iraq War.
Nearly two years after the Bush administration invaded Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a town-hall style meeting in Kuwait with approximately 2,000 Iraq-bound troops.
At the time, our troops were being asked to fight a war with inadequate equipment and protection.
There were widespread shortages of basic items such as body armor, vehicle armor—bulletproof windshields, Kevlar flooring to protect soldiers against exploding bombs underneath Humvees and trucks — and the like.
U.S. Army specialist Thomas Wilson asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles? And why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?”
Wilson was referring to pieces of rusty scrap metal and bullet-proof glass—”hillbilly armor”—soldiers had to scrounge through the local dumps to mount on their vehicles for protection against roadside bombs and other dangers in Iraq.
Rumsfeld’s callous, arrogant answer to this and to a related question was, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
In a piece on this issue — after lamenting the wrongfulness of addressing troops who are about to go into combat, some of who would sacrifice life and limb, in such a manner — I said, “If you are going to embroil the nation in an elective war, a ‘war of choice’ — which the Iraq war certainly was—why not first make sure that you have the army you need, fully trained, fully supported, and fully protected, before you go to war.”
Mr. McConnell: Had your Party done its job during the past six years, instead of doing nothing at best and obstructing and obfuscating at worst, we would have a Congress the President could work with, we would have the functioning government the American people wish and deserve, we would have a much better America now, not later.
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
