Controversial Matters!

This gist of the matter is this. General McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan had his feelings hurt when he asked for additional troops in Afghanistan and didn’t get them…then to add insult to injury because the president was not as familiar with who he was as McChrystal thought he should be he let his frustration or shall I say his a** overload his mouth. Apparently as indicated by the remarks made he had been stewing in these juices for sometime and either his staff felt somewhat the same or went along with the program because that’s what some people do and you know how the old expression goes…kill the general and the troops will fold. Now because the president is a smart man and somewhat very classy he of course he was not going to stoop to the level of the general. He spoke very highly of the general and allowed him the dignity of resigning (when we know he really got fired).

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

I’m a Huge believer in the first amendment (our right to free speech) so my first thought was that you shouldn’t fire someone for speaking their mind and if the president fires the general it’s going to look like he’s doing just that…and being petty, kinda junior high school, but when I thought about it some more I’m sure the president was mad but not for the reasons we think and he didn’t lose his job for the reasons we think. I would have let him resign as well because he apparently was good at what he was doing but just like in the rest of the world no one is irreplaceable…I can attest to that (let me tell you how good I am at what I do and then I’ll tell you about the times I was let go, most of the time with severance pay) but he definitely had to go because you cannot have (especially in a position of power) the people working underneath you undermining you and your decisions. If there had been any other outcome I think the president would have been the one that people were saying wtf…We wish the general the best and this too shall pass.

In closing I want to remind people that President Obama became president at one of the lowest times in our countries history and since then all the things that have happened it’s a wonder he can keep up with all of it. So on occasion he will make decisions that we don’t agree with but that doesn’t make the decision a wrong one (such as the moratorium on drilling off the Louisiana coastline). The same people that were pissed off so much about the oil leak are the same people that are pissed about the moratorium. You can’t have it both ways! …and he may even make actual mistakes from time to time. There was the disaster in Haiti which although not part of the US we played a big part in their recovery. There have been all the areas that have had horrible tornadoes and flooding. He worked on the credit card policy change which was a big help to the American people, the medical reform bill which doesn’t seem like much to most people but ask someone who has a pre-existing condition and could not get health insurance before because of it and then there was the automaker bailouts. So a lot has happened in his 2 years in office and everything he’s done or tried to do is more than Bush did in eight years…because all his attention was focused on weapons of mass destruction which if I recall…didn’t exist :(!