From G.I. in Afghanistan - "We got more thanks from the Dallas cowboy

[thedrifter]

From G.I. in Afghanistan - "We got more thanks from the Dallas cowboy Cheerleaders" than from Senator Obama
Posted By Blackfive

This is from a USAF friend in Afghanistan:

Hello everyone,

As you know I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to ' The War Zone ' . I wanted to share with you what happened.

He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle, got to the area to meet with the Major General (2 Star) who is the commander here at Bagram.

As the Soldiers where lined up to shake his hand, he blew them off and didn't say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General. As he finished, the vehicles took him to the ClamShell (pretty much a big top tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out in with weights) so he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to Soldiers to thank them for their service.

So really he was just here to make a showing for the Americans back home that he is their candidate for President. I think that if you are going to make an effort to come all the way over here you would thank those that are providing the freedom that they are providing for you.

I swear we got more thanks from the NBA Basketball Players or the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders than from one of the Senators, who wants to be the President of the United States . I just don't understand how anyone would want him to be our Commander-and-Chief. It was almost that he was scared to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our great country.

If this is blunt and to the point I am sorry but I wanted you all to know what kind of caliber of person he really is. What you see in the news is all fake.

In service,

CPT J
Bagram, Afghanistan

[Note: There are some that are disputing the validity of this email. I am reasonably certain that it is legit. Further, while I have seen a few photos of Senator Obama visiting with troops at Camp Eggers in Kabul, I have not seen any DoD photos of the Senator at Bagram (with troops).]

Update: Below is a report from the PAO in Camp Eggers, Afghanistan, about the visit of Senator Barak Obama.


US Army Central Command Photo of Senator Obama meeting with troops at Camp Eggers, Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Camp Eggers service members enjoyed breakfast with a Congressional delegation including Senators Barack Obama, D-Ill., Jack Reed, D-R.I. and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. during their visit, July 20, to Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan headquarters.

The visit was part of the delegation’s trip to American forces commands in central and eastern Afghanistan. In Kabul the delegation was briefed by Gen. David McKiernan, International Security Assistance Force commanding general, and Gen. Maj. Gen. Robert Cone, CSTC-A commanding general.

Throughout their stops at Bagram and Jalalabad Air Fields and in Kabul, the senators met with service members from their respective states.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Obama Faking It
By Maggie Gallagher
RealClearPolitics.Com

Obama has a problem: What do you do when you're a lightly accomplished
one-term senator, a former state legislator from Illinois, a Harvard law
graduate who has no substantive record of accomplishments, and you are
running against a war hero whom polls show that Americans overwhelmingly
view as far more fit to be commander in chief?

Pose, of course.

What else can a guy like Obama do?

So the man who would be president of the United States of America flies
around the world in the middle of a political campaign, enlisting the
U.S. military and the Berlin Wall as free campaign commercial backdrops,
to lend him the emotional weight and substance -- the aura as a
commander -- that he hasn't yet earned on his own.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell was the one journalist with the courage to name
what she was actually seeing happen: Obama faking even being interviewed
by the press.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn't have
reporters with him, he didn't have a press pool, he didn't do a press
conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air.
Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call 'fake interviews,'
because they are not interviews from a journalist," Mitchell went on.

Mitchell understands very well that this contrived image management is
powerfully all to Obama's political advantage. He's shameless when it
comes to managing his own image. "Politically it's as smart as can be,"
she conceded before noting the big obvious truth nobody else in the
media was bothering to expose: "We've not seen a presidential candidate
do this, in my recollection, ever before."

The whole Obama campaign is something we've never seen before -- at
least not executed to this level of perfection with a media willing to
go along because, well, so many of them want it to succeed.

Poor John McCain. He's so last-century. Still living in a world in which
deeds matter, policies matter, what you would actually do with the power
entrusted to you matters.

In the op ed the New York Times refused to print (which appeared in the
New York Post this week instead), McCain lays out the facts in Iraq:

"Progress has been due mainly to an increase in the number of troops and
a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a
time when it had few supporters in Washington. Sen. Barack Obama was an
equally vocal opponent."

Obama, he points out, still claims no political progress is being made.
"Perhaps he's unaware that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad has recently
certified that, as one news article put it, 'Iraq has met all but three
of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security,
political and economic progress,'" McCain jabs.

He jabs at an opponent who melts away from his punch.

McCain's approach is all so, well, cognitive. McCain thinks that reality
is something that really exists, that has to be dealt with, instead of
recognizing that we live in a Brave New World where highly paid symbolic
analysts construct reality by manipulating symbols.

The left imagines they learned this from Ronald Reagan and the rise of
the right: big strong guy, genial, looks good on camera -- bingo! Maybe
you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool 51 percent
every time, with the right branding and the right kind of images.

God help us when the people who think like that actually run all three
branches of our government.

President Obama, if that's our future, and his team of symbolic analysts
will find out soon enough there are realities out there which none of
his contrivances are going to be able to help him handle.

More important, so will we.

MaggieBox2004@yahoo.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

More Witness Email - Senator Obama's PR Tour
Posted By Blackfive

Here's another email about Senator Obama's visit to a base in a combat zone from an impeccable source - the first to paragraphs are redacted to protect the author (a 23 year vet of more than one branch of the military):

MY MEETING (ALMOST) WITH OBAMA
<...>
I had a first hand view of Barrack Obama's "fact finding" mission, when he passed through this base.

While I can't name it, it's one of the largest air bases in the region, with up to 8000 troops (depending on influxes and transients in mobilization/demobilization status), mostly Airmen and Soldiers, but some Marines, Sailors, Koreans, Japanese, Aussies, Brits, US Civil Service, contractors including KBR, Blackwater and Halliburton, among others in the news. The overwhelming majority of all of these are professional, courteous and disciplined. Problems are rare.

Casualties are also rare. This base has a large hospital for evacuation—twenty plus beds. I have yet to see a casualty in one, though I am told there are about three evacuations a week through this region, of which two on average are things like sports injuries, vehicle accidents or duty related falls and such. You can tell from the news that the war is going well. The ghouls are now focusing on Afghanistan, since there is no blood to type with here.

This oped is of course subjective and limited, but I will try to present the facts as I saw them. I wasn't able to see much, which makes a point all by itself.

When his plane arrived (also containing Senators Reed and Hagel, but the news has hardly mentioned them), there was a "ramp freeze." This means if you are on the flight line, and not directly involved with the event in question, you stay where you are and don't move. For a combat flight arriving or departing, this takes about ten minutes, and involves the active runway and crossing taxiways only. For Obama's flight, this took 90 minutes, during which time a variety of military missions came grinding to a halt. Obviously, this visit was important, right?

95% of base wanted nothing to do with him. I have met three troops who support him, and literally hundreds who regard him as a buffoon, a charlatan, a hindrance to their mission or a flat out enemy of progress. Even when the rumors were publicly admitted, almost no one left their duty sections to try to see him, unless they were officers whose presence was officially required.

Mister Obama's motorcade drove up from the flight line and entered the dining hall toward the end of lunch time. Diners were chased out and told to make other arrangements for food, in the middle of the duty day.

Now, there are close to 8000 troops on the base and its nearby satellites. No one came up from the Army side (except perhaps a few ranking officers). The airbase resumed operation, once he cleared the flightline, as if nothing had happened. The dining hall holds about 300 people and was not full. The troops did not want to meet him and the feeling was apparently mutual. In attendance, besides the Official Entourage, were the base's senior officers, some support personnel, and a very few carefully vetted supporters who'd made special arrangements. No photos were allowed. No question and answer with the troops. No real acknowledgment that the troops existed.

Obama left around 1530, during the Muslim Call to Prayer, so he's not a practicing Muslim. He was in a convoy guarded by (so I'm told) both State Department and Secret Service Personnel.

Less than three hours…

Within 48 hours he was in Afghanistan. It takes most troops longer than that to in-process and get cleared on safety, threats, policies and such. Yet he somehow made a strategic summary by not talking to anyone and not seeing anything.

Twenty-four hours after that, he was in Kuwait, back here, and then home, so fast we didn't even know he arrived the second time at this base.

I can't imagine any officer of the few he met told him anything other than what they tell the troops, and what their own leadership at the Pentagon tell them—we're winning. Our troops are stomping the guts out of the insurgency. The surge worked and is working. If the insurgents have to divert to Afghanistan, it means they can't fight in Iraq anymore. We should not change the rules and retreat with the enemy on the ropes as we did in Vietnam. We should finish kicking their teeth in. The Iraqi government now controls 10 of 18 provinces, with US assistance in the rest. Let us win the war. 90% of the troops I know, even those opposed to the war, say that is the way to win. Victory comes from winning, not from "change." In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is on record as opposing Obama's strategic theory.

Since he obviously knew in advance that's what they'd tell him, and since he didn't care to talk to the troops (we're told by the Left that the troops are horrified, shocked, forced to commit atrocities with tears in their eyes, distraught, burned out, fed up with losing, etc) and find out how they feel, and was barely in country long enough to need a shower and a change of clothes, we can only call this for what it is.

A disgraceful PR stunt, using the troops as a platform for his ego and campaign.

In comparison, I've seen four star generals and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this base. They each held an all ranks call, met with and briefed the personnel, and took questions on every subject from tour length to uniform design to rules of engagement to weapon choice to long term policy, from the newest airmen to the senior NCO with TEN 120-180 day tours since Sep 11. It's very clear they want to know what the troops think, and to keep them informed of events. It's equally clear mister Obama does not.

From here we must move to my op part of the oped.

Obama clearly doesn't care about the troops, doesn't care about America, doesn't care about anything except hearing his own voice and the chance to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…From where he'll bring us the proven Democratic wartime leadership of Bosnia and the Balkans (US forces still there), Somalia (US forces prevailed despite being ill equipped by executive order, and taking heavy casualties), Haiti (what were we doing there again?), Desert One (oops?), Vietnam (where we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory), Korea (still there), WWI, and the fluke success of WWII won by such wonderful liberal notions as concentration camps for Japanese Americans, nukes, FBI investigations of waitresses who dated soldiers in case they were "morally corrupt" and the (valid) occupation of and continued presence in Italy, Japan and Germany for 60 years, which they are conveniently pretending won't happen with Iraq.

That's not "change." That's "failure we can do without."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Obama's Reason for Snubbing Wounded Troops in Germany: Visit Would Be "Inappropriate"
Thursday, July 24, 2008 | Kristinn


After visiting GIs in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq as part the congressional delegation prelude to his campaign swing in the Middle East and Europe, Barack Obama canceled planned visits to the U.S. military bases at Ramsteina and Landstuhl.

Landstuhl is where wounded U.S. troops are taken from the battlefield to be stabalized before being flown to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C. and other military hospitals back home.

Jake Tapper of ABC News reports the Obama campaign issued a statement saying the planned visits with the troops were canceled because it was deemed by the campaign to be "inapprpopriate" because Obama's stop in Germany was part of his presidential campaign.

Curiously, Obama opened his speech in Berlin today by saying he was speaking not as a candidate but as a 'citizen of the United States and as a citizen of the world.'

Other news outlets have reported that Obama has taken time to work out at a gym in Berlin and kidded around with reporters about exploring the nightlife in Berlin.

Der Spiegel first reported that Obama canceled the visit to the troops. That story was picked up on Free Republic and then exploded on the blogosphere.

Text of Obama's statement from Robert Gibbs:

“During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops. For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign.”

Ellie