Barack Obama has made Bradley Manning the symbol of his disgraceful legacy.
“Look at the way Obama treats America’s friends and compare it to the way he treats America’s enemies, and it’s obvious that Obama’s interests and America’s only rarely coincide.”
— Stephen Green, Jan. 18, 2017
Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan’s book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama should be required reading in America’s schools. The media are never going to admit the scope of failure — and beyond failure, deliberate destruction — that has characterized the eight-year reign of error that comes to an end tomorrow. Obama inflicted more damage on the nation this week by pardoning a Puerto Rican terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera, and commuting the sentence of the traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning. The extent of Manning’s damage to America’s interests is beyond calculation. Manning “knowingly and intentionally placed lives in danger by indiscriminately placing our nation’s secrets in the public domain,” as David French writes at National Review:
It’s not that long ago that actions like Manning’s would merit execution, and he should be grateful that he merely received a 35-year sentence. Instead, however, both the [New York] Times and the Obama administration treat him more like a messed-up kid than a soldier who betrayed his nation.
Every soldier in the Army has sworn an oath to follow orders. Military discipline cannot be maintained otherwise. The authority that the sergeant exercises over the privates in his squad, and the colonel’s authority over the soldiers in his regiment, is derived from that duty of obedience which extends all the way up to the Commander-in-Chief who, like every soldier, is sworn to an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Every soldier in the ranks is volunteer, a servant of the nation willing to die for his country, and our troops deserve a Commander-in-Chief who appreciates their service because he loves their country the way the soldier loves his country.
Bradley Manning disobeyed orders. He deliberately violated his oath. Every day, soldiers are punished for such violations. A failure to obey orders can be punished in many ways. Squads of soldiers are “smoked” — put through punitive physical training, made to run and do push-ups until they’re soaked in sweat and panting from exhaustion — because they have failed as a unit to meet their sergeant’s expectations. The good soldiers must sweat along with the bad soldiers, because combat troops must function as a unit, responding to orders, or else they will suffer defeat as a result of the failure to instill unit cohesion through proper discipline.
Bradley Manning did more than merely fail. He betrayed his country. The very fact that someone like Bradley Manning was deployed to Iraq, as a member of a military intelligence unit, speaks volumes about the Obama administration’s disregard for America’s national security.
In his Bible Belt hometown that he once mockingly wrote in an e-mail had “more pews than people,” Private Manning refused to recite the parts of the Pledge of Allegiance that referred to God or do homework assignments that involved the Scriptures. And if a teacher challenged his views, former classmates said, he was quick to push back.
“He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn’t listen to him or understand his point of view,” said Chera Moore, who attended elementary and junior high school with him. “He would get really mad, and the teacher would say, ‘O.K., Bradley, get out.’ ” . . .
He enlisted in the Army in 2007, to try to give his life some direction and to help to pay for college, friends said. . . .
He was granted a security clearance and trained as an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., before being assigned to the Second Brigade 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y.
Before being deployed to Iraq, Private Manning met Tyler Watkins, who described himself on his blog as a classical musician, singer and drag queen. A friend said the two had little in common, but Private Manning fell head over heels. Mr. Watkins, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, was a student at Brandeis University. On trips to visit him here in Cambridge, Private Manning got to know many in Mr. Watkins’ wide network of friends, including some who were part of this university town’s tight-knit hacker community.
Read the rest of that 2010 profile of Bradley Manning and ask yourself, “Who was responsible for putting this guy in an Army intelligence unit?”
The apprehension of Bradley Manning should have prompted a massive investigation at the Pentagon to ascertain what kind of lapses in training — and laxity in personnel policy — had resulted in the failure to drum that worthless cowardly son of a bitch out of the Army long before he could have had a chance to betray his country. One of the obvious sources of the problem was that, as a result of the long war in Iraq, the military lowered its standards and by 2007 was accepting recruits who should have been rejected for service. Another source of the problem could be traced back to the Clinton administration’s misguided 1993 decision to abrogate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, resulting in the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Democrats hate the American military, and whenever a Democrat is in the White House, our troops are subjected to absurd social-engineering experiments that undermine unit discipline and morale, so that when Republican presidents take office, they must try to undo the damage done by their predecessors. Because 9/11 happened so shortly after George W. Bush became president, however, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought without having fixed the problems created by the eight years of Bill Clinton’s anti-military policy.
Now, President Trump will take over as Commander-in-Chief of a military that has been under the perfidious command of anti-American Democrat presidents for 16 of the past 24 years. Our new president’s promise to “Make America Great Again” will first require him to fix the problems at the Pentagon which allowed Bradley Manning to wear an Army uniform long enough to betray his country by violating his oath:
President Obama defended his decision to commute the remainder of Chelsea Manning’s sentence during his final press conference as President on Wednesday, arguing that she’d done enough time already.
“Given she went to trial, that due process was carried out, that she took responsibility for her crime, that the sentence that she received was very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received, and that she had served a significant amount of time, that it made sense to commute, and not pardon, her sentence,” he said of the woman who as a private leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. “I feel very comfortable that justice has been served and a message has still been sent.”
No, sir, a firing squad would have been the proper “message” for Manning, and by commuting the sentence of this traitor, Barack Obama has permanently secured his legacy as The Worst President in History.
