RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Taliban is pissed off at getting pissed on. After four U.S. Marines apparently urinated on the faces of their dead enemies in Afghanistan—and after the event was captured on video and spread on YouTube—the Taliban condemned the action as “inhuman.” And listen, if anyone knows inhuman it’s the Taliban.

The Obama administration made a great show of condemning the Marines’ actions. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the pissing “utterly deplorable,” and promised an investigation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.”

In angry response, commentators and politicians on the right puffed up and got their macho on. “Shut your mouth. War is hell,” said the wonderful congressman and war hero Allen West wonderfully. The adorable pundit Dana Loesch added adorably, “I’d drop trou and do it too.”

But let’s face it, it is an infraction: the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids such shenanigans. The Corps must maintain decorum with its corpses. (For Obama supporters: that’s a joke, because corps and corpse are pronounced differently.)

Most organizations have a time-honored way of dealing with this sort of thing. In this case, some high-ranking superior officer ought to call the piss-men onto his hopefully plastic-covered carpet and say something to the effect of: “I rebuke thee! Go thou forth and urinate upon thine enemy no more.” After which, there would be a brief period of embarrassed feet-shuffling, a brisk and coordinated “Yes, sir!”and then off the chastised men would go to kill and piss on more Taliban, only without the video guy this time.

But the Obama administration can’t afford to behave with that sort of decency and common sense. They have to over-react—they have no choice.  They are desperate to appease these Islamist murderers in order to hold together an attempt to negotiate a phony settlement with them. Only then can they pull our troops out of the country with some display of make-believe honor before the wild slaughter there starts again.

Obama promised he would end the war in Iraq in order to free our forces to win the war in Afghanistan. But the war in Iraq was already won by the time he arrived and the war in Afghanistan was probably never winnable. Yet because no change in circumstances or information could induce the man to change his ideologically rigid mind, he has found himself jeopardizing our Iraqi victory by pulling out too soon and must now try to surrender in Afghanistan without anyone being able to call it what it is. Same difference, right? Whatever.

Obama’s War on Terror policy has been a complete disaster. We keep hearing about how he killed Osama bin Laden and about the assassination of high ranking terrorists with drones. (And I approve of this by the way, although I’d prefer if after the drone kills a terrorist, another specially designed drone would come along and piss on him.) But do you remember how the media always judged George W. Bush by the so-called Pottery Barn Doctrine: “You Break it, you bought it?” It wasn’t enough for Bush to oust and capture and kill the mass murdering tyrant Saddam Hussein. No, no. He also had to successfully install a working constitutional republic in Hussein’s wake or else the whole business was a rank failure. Well, with Obama, we seem to be operating under The Lindsay Lohan Doctrine:  “You broke it—whoopee!” Obama has helped remove bad leaders almost randomly, leaving the Islamist problem more terrible than before. He surrendered our victory in Iraq, endangering the democratic buffer-zone between Iran and Syria.  He refused help to the rebels in Iran in 2009, leaving an insane regime in place to continue their search for nukes. He then facilitated overthrows in Egypt and Libya, leaving those countries to almost certain domination by the jihad-loving Muslim Brotherhood.  And now he’s about to leave Afghanistan to be taken over by the same cut-throats who provided the training ground for the World Trade Center massacre. All this while cutting our military budget to the point where retreat will not only be an option, but pretty much the only option. That’s pushing the reset button all right—if you’re trying to reset the 9-11 disaster.

Barack Obama’s people keep telling us that he has fulfilled his promises. He has. We used to be the freest, wealthiest, strongest nation in the history of the world. He promised to fundamentally transform us into something else.

Good job, Barack.

[For an excellent — though somewhat terrifying — explanation of the “Arab Spring,” check out this terrific article ^[1] by Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review.]