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News Commentary Essays Book II
Poignant Responses to Fourth Estate Rancor
Charles Henderson,
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eBook - ePub
News Commentary Essays Book II
Poignant Responses to Fourth Estate Rancor
Charles Henderson,
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About This Book
Dr. Charles Henderson's newly released News Commentary Essays Book II: Poignant Responses to Fourth Estate Rancor is a vivid collection of sociopolitical writings.
The years 2014 to 2015 were significant in American history because they were filled with news stories about epic and sometimes controversial events. The presidential campaign began to slowly heat up and the news media reporters were caught flat-footed when two inexperienced candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, surprisingly, jumped into the lead. The military conflict in the Middle East shifted to Syria, causing the op-ed foreign policy writers to berate President Obama for hesitating to enter into a third insurgency war. And last but not least, the Supreme Court finally heard arguments on the constitutionality of overturning state bans on same sex marriage. That ruling, both epic and controversial, is expected to lead to the challenging of religious liberty.
Henderson's Book II is an entertaining and insightful volume of over four hundred essays touching on all manner of complex political policies and social issues. It contains eighteen different topics arranged in chapters, alphabetically, from "Drones" to "Women in the Military, " encompassing other chapters involving controversial subjects such as homosexuality, morality, race, and social issues. Pursuit of the unbiased truth is the hallmark of this book's narratives.
Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dr. Henderson's new book is a grippingly eloquent and mind- broadening work of educated opinion, with many of the essays written in response to the rather conservative op-ed pieces in the liberally inclined Washington Post. In his writings, Henderson offers a rare mind of clarity along with a serene strength of conviction, secure in his foundation in God's Word amid the raging din of the modern world's political drama and ethical battlefields.
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Chapter 2
Foreign Policy
2-1
2-1: A Continuing Flood of Blame and Contradictions
What a surprise! Charles Krauthammer managed to compose almost one-half of his recent op-ed piece without blaming President Obama for something that went wrong in the world. His column entitled “Bombing for show? Or for effect?” in the October 10, 2014 edition of The Washington Post begins with a legitimate criticism of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for failing to move readied Turkish troops across the Syrian border to save the Kobane Kurds from being overrun by Islamic State fighters. Well, duh! What did Krauthammer expect? The Turks hate the Kurds. Now Krauthammer can see the quagmire of ethnic animosity that exists throughout the Middle East and why President Obama wants to extricate the US before being bogged down for another ten years in another meaningless war.
However, it is the contradictions in Krauthammer’s op-ed column that are so nonsensical. For example, he snidely remarked, “The vaunted coalition that Obama touts remains mostly fictional.” Later, Krauthammer surprisingly said, “No one is asking for US ground troops.” Well, if the last sentence is true, then President Obama has no choice as a leader but to try to pull together a coalition of forces. He can’t be blamed for trying!
Next, Krauthammer complains about the scarcity of airstrikes—about twenty strikes in ten days, according to Centcom. Well, Obama doesn’t pick the targets; that responsibility falls on his military generals. Moreover, if the military doesn’t make an effort to minimize collateral damage to innocent civilians, then members of the Muslim community will become outraged. I should point out that the most effective weapon against the Islamic State’s armed pickup trucks and captured Humvees is the US Air Force’s A-10 “Wart Hog” equipped with a cannon firing armor piercing incendiary rounds. That attack aircraft can make multiple strafing runs and devastate a mobile vehicle column. Air Force generals decided to scrap that aircraft to pay for the F-35.
Finally, Krauthammer reluctantly endorses President Obama’s latest strategy—rollback in Iraq and containment in Syria. But he can’t resist one last dig at Obama. He ends his piece by drawing upon the memoirs of former secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates who characterized Obama as being indecisive and ambivalent. Such disrespect for a sitting president could only come from two disgruntled white underlings who think they are better than the first black president just because they are white. He trusted them and elevated them to high positions in his administration and that is what he receives as payback. Note: That cowardly Iraqi army that threw down their weapons when facing ISIS was trained by US forces under the guidance of those two secretaries of defense. They should be blamed for that fiasco, not President Obama!
2-2
2-2: Piling On but Failing to Stop the President
Michael Gerson like most conservatives who oppose President Obama scraped the bottom of the barrel in search of any scrap of information that can be used to diminish Obama’s legacy in the White House. By taking excerpts from Leon Panetta’s memoir called Worthy Fights, Gerson has without a doubt reached the bottom of the barrel in his op-ed piece entitled “Whispered critiques writ large.” That op-ed was published in the October 10, 2014 edition of The Washington Post. It treats Panetta’s unsubstantiated words as gospel. This was done in spite of the fact that Panetta himself, reportedly, claims to have been shut out of some of the White House decision-making and, hence, would have a reason to hold a vendetta against the president.
Three people in senior positions in the Obama administration—Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Leon Panetta—have all written books criticizing a sitting president. Why? It is because at some point, they all disagreed with President Obama and they now want to grab credit for showing that certain world events might be different if the president had taken their advice. Well, so what? That is the reason that they were hired so that they could provide the president with diverse views on foreign policy. But the president was presented with other views as well. He took a course of action that he thought was best for this nation, not some foreign power embroiled in ethnic infighting or some rebel group that bit off more than it could chew in a civil war. The bottom line is that America did benefit from most of Obama’s decisions, specifically: 1) Osama bin Laden (author of the 9/11 terrorist attack) was terminated; 2) Syria’s Assad gave up his chemical weapons without the US having to fire a single shot; 3) President Obama presided over a US troop withdrawal from Iraq after an eight-year war; and 4) the president is determined to end the Afghanistan war after over ten years of fighting.
For the critics to claim that the Syrian civil war would be over by now if the US intervened with troops on the ground, or if the moderate rebels were armed with sophisticated weapons are both cases of pure nonsense. A war-weary American public did not want to be involved in that Syrian conflict, and we saw what happens when Islamic State fighters took away US-supplied weapons from fleeing Iraqi soldiers. I find it hard to believe that a supposedly informed person like Gerson would continue to raise that “red line” issue. It was the threat of US force that brought both Putin and Assad to the diplomatic table to negotiate the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. Why should the US launch an attack against Syria when it obtained its goal? Gerson doesn’t know it (or maybe he does and won’t admit it) but Americans can breathe easier because those Syrian weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) did not end up in terrorists’ hands. All that talk about Obama’s lack of leadership is just that—talk. He goes on as the world’s most powerful and thoughtful leader and has not lost his way.
2-3
2-3: Plenty of Room to Participate in the Blame Game
The Washington Post editors must take their lead on US foreign policy from Charles Krauthammer. Like Krauthammer, they too fill their editorial writings with blame levied at President Obama (for everything) and contradictions in their own line of reasoning. The editorial entitled “The blame-Turkey strategy” in the October 11, 2014 edition of The Washington Post is a case in point.
First, The Post editors highlight the things going wrong in Syria because of Turkey. That includes the following: 1) Turkey blocking Kurdish reinforcements from crossing into Syria to help in the fight to save the Syrian-border city of Kobane from Islamic State fighters; 2) Turkey not making Kurdish refugees feel welcome as they flee the fighting; and 3) Turkey sitting with tanks readied at the border, but reluctant to move them across the border to help save Kobane. Then, The Post editors accuse the White House of invoking a “blame-Turkey strategy” in the event that Kobane falls to the Islamic State fighters and a massacre of its citizens follows. Well, duh! The US airstrikes originate from aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away and each attack aircraft can only drop a few bombs per sortie. In contrast, the Turkish tanks are almost within a stone’s throw of Kobane and US diplomats have been trying tirelessly to convince Turkey to join the ground war.
The Post editors foolishly suggest that the US should establish a no-fly zone over parts of Syria to prevent Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s aircraft from dropping barrel bombs on Syrian civilians in moderate-rebel-held regions. But the editors fail to recognize that Syria is an ally of Russia and Russia can supply Syria with air defense missiles capable on knocking US interceptors out of the sky.
President Obama, rightly so, doesn’t want US ground troops in large numbers embroiled in that Syrian civil war. There are too many other surrounding countries—Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—that have more at stake in the conflict than the US whose borders sit thousands of miles from the fighting. By brutally beheading American citizens, wantonly killing Christians and other religious sects, and threatening the US mainland with terrorist attacks, the Islamic State has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged America’s resolve. But what is happening in Syria and Iraq proves that this cannot be a US fight alone. A coalition of forces from around the world is needed to address this menacing threat called the Islamic State. No one wants to see innocent men, women, and children suffer in a war zone. Nevertheless, The Post editors are wrong in criticizing the Obama administration for exercising patience and restraint. If you think two hundred thousand dead Syrians is alarming, try getting out your calculators to count the likely number of dead if the US stumbles into a nuclear war with either Russia or China.
2-4
2-4: Oxymorons Raised to the Nth Power
The first sign that you know someone has gone off the deep end is when their attempt to elucidate logic runs headlong into illogic. This normally comes about when highly intelligent people become so filled with hate that they can’t think straight. That is a sin which has plagued Charles Krauthammer almost from day one of Obama’s presidency. Krauthammer gives the president credit for nothing and blames him for everything. As a commentator, he has shown so little respect for the office of the president that if Nixon was still president, Krauthammer would have a hard time typing op-ed columns because both hands would be enmeshed in plaster casts. Now, Dana Milbank joins his disrespectful colleague by attacking President Obama in an op-ed piece entitled “Dictator or bystander?” in the October 29, 2014 edition of The Washington Post.
Conservative Republicans don’t hate Obama for what he stands for; they hate him for who he is—America’s first African American president. Other Democrat presidents such as Carter and Clinton didn’t have to endure the kind of hatred that has befallen President Obama. Even Nixon who turned out to be a crook was despised for what he did (dirty tricks), not for who he was—a frowning cartoon character with an ever-present “five o-clock shadow.” The subliminal bigotry that emerges when a crisis arises in the world and that engenders fear among America’s citizenry is characterized by an overwhelming urge for them to blame Obama. Why? It is because of their stereotypical belief that nonwhites should be designated as followers, not leaders. After all, didn’t the European whites colonize the entire nonwhite world? By the way, China has not forgotten that!
Consider the situation in which President Obama finds himself in. After the 2010 midterm election, the Republicans (the party of No!) gained control of the US House of Representatives and prevented the passage of any meaningful legislation as a way of destroying Obama’s presidential legacy. When Obama used his executive authority to move the country forward, he was labeled a dictator by the Republicans. When he chose to keep war-weary US troops from entering a third conflict—the Syrian civil war—he was called timid and indecisive. Look at what Milbank said: “Obama the unfocused tyrant! The disengaged dictator! The man who shreds the Constitution with a void of leadership. Those are oxymorons raised to the nth power! Shame! Shame! Shame!
For someone like Milbank, a lowly columnist, to call the most powerful man in the world a passive bystander is not only an insult—it is an anathema. If world leaders think that Obama lacks leadership, it is because they can’t fathom how anyone with so much power would allow so much disrespect to come from newspaper columnists. Milbank and Krauthammer don’t count on the Constitution to protect you always! Your unwise diatribes may cause a Nixon-like president to arise once again in America.
2-5
2-5: Biting the Hand That Feeds You
The article by Mary Pat Flaherty, Jason Samenow, and Lisa Rein titled “US Weather, satellite systems hit by cyberattack from China” in the November 13, 2014 edition of The Washington Post doesn’t surprise me. The Chinese communists have been playing the Americans and the Russians for fools ever since the end of World War II. At that time, China aligned itself with the Soviet Union for the purpose of obtaining Soviet technology needed by China to rapidly acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles used to launch them. Now, some of those Chinese nuclear-ti...