Saturday, June 7, 2014

Bergdahl Bungle

"Hey, Elvin!  You asleep?"
"Sorry, Rube, I dozed off for awhile.  I had this really weird dream about Thomas Edison in a submarine that surfaced near Battery Park."
"What?"
"Never mind, what's up?"
"President Obama may have broken the law, Elvin.  Them Tea Party boys got an opportunity to impeach him and maybe destroy his Presidency."
"Wha?  Now, come on, boy, Obama ain't stupid, he got more sense than that . . ..  What did he do?" 
"He freed a soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan by the Taliban."
"Why, that's good, what's so wrong about that?"
"Well, Elvin, he swapped five Taliban prisoners bein' held out in Cuba for this kid, Bergdahl's the name.  And he didn't tell Congress a month beforehand, like he was supposed to.  Says so in the law."
"So he broke the law?"
"Sure does sound like it. Although the Prez is a con-sty-tutional lawyer, he may have violated that there system of checks and balances by goin' over the will of Congress.  One of the leading members of the Yoo-nighted States Senate says as much."    
Which of them red-state righties is saying that?"
"Dianne Feinstein."
"Oh . . . that's bad."
"Yeah, seems these Taliban dudes are five of the biggest motherf---ers in their organization, too, so the GOP is calling it a bad deal.  These five dudes are going to be in the country of QUA-tar for a year, under supervision by the local authorities, but the deal is only good for a year."
"So, what yer sayin,' Rube, is that after June 2015, these guys could try to topple the Willis Tower in Chicago for all we know."
"That's how it looks now."
"So why did Barry do it?  He knows the GOP is out to get him."
"You mean the Prez?  He said Bergdahl was sickly, been a prisoner for five years, he had to act quickly to get him home as the war in Afghanistan is winding down."
"'Winding down?'  Din' he say earlier that a residual force would remain in Afghanistan through to 2016?  Aw, heck, he got one of our boys home.  That there boy's a hero, no question about it.  The GOP can't knock the President for bringing back one of our boys, a hero at that."
"Well, Elvin, that's not exactly the case here.  Seems this Bergdahl kid wasn't captured in battle, he kind of walked off on his own, and his unit suffered causalities tryin' to find him.  And as far as his health is concerned, well, he didn't look too sickly when the Taliban handed him over to our guys.  Couple of boys in his unit kind of have it in for him for what they said he did."
"So he's not a hero, he's a heel."
"Or a dadburned fool."
"Anything else, Rube?"
"Well, Elvin . . . the State Department explained that if efforts to free him had been made public, his life'd be in danger, like a guard possibly disagreeing with the deal and killing him.  Barry still says he saw a video from January showin' this Bergdahl kid in bad health, he had to act to save him, he makes no apologies for the swap."
"Well, Rube, who would find fault with that explanation?"
"How about Lindsey Graham, that Republican feller from South Carolina?  He said, 'I don't believe any of this.  First, we had to do the prisoner deal because he was in imminent danger of dying. Well, they saw the video in January and they didn't act until June. So that holds no water. Now the argument is the reason they couldn't tell us is because it jeopardized his life. I don’t buy that for a moment because he was a very valuable asset to the Taliban.'"
"Oh."
"Not oh.  Uh-oh."
"Well, Rube, if all of this is true, and if there was no justification for breaking the goshdarn law, well . . . this won't just kill Obama's Presidency, it could kill the whole darn Democratic Party!"
"Well, given that the Democratic Party is just as corporate-dominated and Wall Street-friendly as the Republicans, well, that might not be a bad thing."
*
Sometimes a fictional dialogue like this is the only way to explain a story like the Bergdahl mess in layman's terms.

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