Bergdahl sentencing trial begins Monday

Daily Mail reports,

The wounds sustained by three veterans are expected to be considered by the judge who will determine Bowe Bergdahl's punishment at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Bergdahl (inset left), pleaded guilty to misbehavior before the enemy and desertion after he endangered his comrades by walking off his post in Afghanistan in 2009. Army National Guard Master Sgt. Mark Allen, (center), uses a wheelchair now and is unable to speak because of a head wound. Army Corporal Jonathan Morita (left) still can't fully use his right hand after it was shattered by a grenade. Senior Chief Petty Officer James Hatch's (right) career as a Navy SEAL ended when he was shot on a search and rescue mission. The sentencing hearing opens Monday for Bergdahl, who pleaded guilty to misbehavior before the enemy and desertion.

Some bargain, Mr. President

elizabeth Price Foley links to an editorial in the New York Post:

Come Monday, the five senior Taliban officials sprung from Guantanamo in the trade for accused Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, could all be walking free.

Free to rejoin their terrorist comrades in jihad against America — as at least three of them reportedly have already tried to do.

It’s a reminder of just how bad a deal President Obama struck to free Bergdahl, the man the White House then hailed as a hero but who now faces criminal charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy — charges that could keep him behind bars for life.

Indeed, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal revealed last week for the first time that he’d been informed almost immediately after Bergdahl’s 2009 capture that the soldier “walked off [his base] intentionally.”

Yet years later, in the runup to Obama’s trade, National Security Adviser Susan Rice claimed Berghdal had been “captured on the battlefield” after serving “with honor and distinction.” The State Department dismissed claims he’d deserted as “rumors.”

Under the terms of the deal, the five were shipped to Qatar, where they were banned from travel and subjected to monitoring. That arrangement expires today.

Privately, Obama officials say they’ve been trying to extend the original arrangement or possibly return them to Afghanistan, whose government would decide what — if anything — to do with them. Week’s end, though, brought no new deal.

The danger can’t be overemphasized: These were all senior commanders — one a deputy defense minister, another head of intelligence. At least one has been in touch with the Taliban and two others have met with the al Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network in the past year.

Now these five terrorists, let go to bring an accused deserter home, may be free to once again target American soldiers. Some bargain, Mr. President.

Not just hard, but impossible

The New York Times wants leniency for Bowe Bergdahl. James Taranto comments at The Wall Street Journal,

The paper concludes that “trying him . . . stands to accomplish little at this point.” Further: “A conviction would most likely deprive a traumatized veteran of benefits, including medical care, which he will probably need for years. A dishonorable discharge would make it harder to rebuild his life as a civilian.” Time noted last year, but the Times editorial omits, that “six soldiers . . . died hunting for him after he went missing.” Rebuilding their lives isn’t just hard but impossible.

Read more here.

Deserting

The Wall Street Journal also weighs in on the Bergdahl fiasco:

At the time of the release, Mr. Obama said he had a sacred obligation as Commander in Chief to do everything possible to bring the sergeant home. Maybe so, but the President made his real motives clear when he noted that the transfer was part of “the transition process of ending a war” and that he wanted to “whittle away” the number of Gitmo detainees. That, he told NBC, “is going to involve, on occasion, releasing folks who we may not trust but we can’t convict.”

This is the language of a President more concerned with pursuing his ideological fixations, and fulfilling a misbegotten campaign pledge, than winning a war or securing the country....

Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan shows no sign of ending, while an emboldened Taliban can look forward to getting their old commanders back after their obligatory year in Qatar ends in June. Sgt. Bergdahl will now face a court martial, but we already know that the White House is guilty of deserting its obligations to U.S. security.

Fairy tale

Tom Bevan comments on the Bergdahl fairy tale:

far from the fairy tale of a hero’s homecoming that President Obama tried to spin for the American people that Saturday morning 10 months ago, this story doesn’t have a happy ending for America. In his effort to empty the Gitmo detainee facility, the president traded five hard-core terrorists for a man who now stands officially accused of abandoning his fellow soldiers. He very may well be court-martialed and spend a good deal of his life behind bars. It’s the Taliban 5 who, beginning in just a few short weeks, get to live happily ever after.

Read more here.

Value

Is he one of us?

Thanks again to Adrienne for posting this video.

Scandals, or fundamental transformations of the United States government?

Victor Davis Hanson asks the question: was Benghazi a scandal?

Obama had gone to bed early the night of Benghazi and washed his hands of the inconvenience, and for the last two years the military, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the media have been blame-gaming one another.

On another front, a majority of Americans are furious about the partisan corruption of the IRS, and the fact that Lois Lerner took the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about why her department focused inordinately on conservative groups. In the initial, but transitory, media furor, Barack Obama called the corruption of the IRS “outrageous.” After the buzz quieted, Lerner et al. rated from the president the assertion that there was not “a smidgen of corruption.”

So was the IRS abuse a scandal or an act of fundamentally transforming America?

In other words, the IRS mess successfully sent out a signal that progressive politicians will alert the IRS to monitor their opponents, their opponents will be monitored, and, if the agency is caught, not much will happen to it. Like it or not, the Obama administration has created a sort of deterrence by fundamentally transforming the IRS into an agency of progressive change. The result is to discourage high-profile donors from giving to conservative causes — or, conversely, to buy exemption by giving generously to liberal causes.

Was the Bowe Bergdahl mess a scandal? Ostensibly, no president in his right mind would trade five high-profile Taliban operatives, with ties to al-Qaeda, for an American deserter. What president would ignore the judgment of the intelligence community and the military, mock the law mandating consultation with Congress about such releases, and then conduct the most bizarre PR stunt in recent political history by wheeling out Sergeant Bergdahl’s father, in Taliban-like beard, no less, reciting Islamic prayers in native tongues?

But was the Bergdahl scandal also an effort at fundamental transformation? The administration had ordered the military to “salute” and to get on board with the Bergdahl party line. Susan Rice, as is her wont, misled the country by claiming the deserter had served with “honor and distinction.”

The Bergdahl swap was just part and parcel of negotiations to get out of Afghanistan without fanfare before the Taliban retake Kabul.

If the virtual destruction of the VA system is a scandal that has come and gone in less than a week, was it a scandal at all? Or a transformation in the way we envision the VA?

How about all the non-enforcement of immigration laws? The surges across the borders of illegal aliens in anticipation of a border rendered irrelevant? The sort of executive-order amnesties that Obama warned before he was reelected that he simply had no legal authority to issue? The dumping of hundreds of immigrants in Arizona to punish the recalcitrant governor?

New influxes of illegal aliens represent a fundamental transformation of America. Many of them look to government for help; they will in time become proper Democratic households; and they are a club to hit conservatives with, as being insensitive to Latino needs.

Was the Associated Press monitoring a scandal or a warning of what Obama is willing to do to get the media to cool it? Were the lies that helped sell Obamacare a scandal or also the necessary means to reach the desired ends? What will history remember, Obama wonders: that the president of the United States lied about keeping your doctor and your insurance plan under Obamacare, or that the Affordable Care Act was finally enacted?

For the nobly progressive, the desired equality of result at home and greater fairness toward nations abroad require a sort of deconstruction of “settled law.” Liberal elites may be forced to emasculate their enemies, if need be, by politicizing the IRS, or by ignoring the law through executive orders, or by sending out officials to peddle untruths, or by doing almost anything necessary to enact social justice here and abroad. Some call it scandalous, but others see it as empowering and long overdue.

The more such scandals occur in the next two years, the more they will not be seen as scandals, but as mere bothersome hurdles to fundamentally changing America. In the age of Obama, you win the race not by playing by the fossilized rules of jumping over the track’s hurdles — but instead by running right through them to reach the finish line first.

Apparently you can do this job from anywhere

I recommend subscribing to Jonah Goldberg's free newsletter, which he sends out on Fridays. I recently subscribed, and have been delighted to find that he has quite a sense of humor. For example, today he makes the point that President Obama's staff is reminiscent of Ron Bergundy's staff in the Anchorman movies:



Back to Goldberg:

This president, we are constantly told, gets his information about scandals in his own administration the same way we do: from the newspapers. This raises an interesting question: Why have an office in the White House? Apparently you can do this job from anywhere.

Maybe Obama needs to get a subscription to Rolling Stone? If he'd read this story from two years ago, he'd at least know that Bergdahl's case was like Norwegian weather in September: a lot of gray. In fairness, I don't want the president of the United States wasting his time reading that rag. But in the old days, someone in the White House would have read up on the guy. A pro would have said, "Hey, let's type Bowe Bergdahl into the Google machine and hit the 'I'm feeling lucky' button!" If they'd done that, they would have at least known not to say Bergdahl was captured on the "battlefield" and that he had served "with honor and distinction." On why this was outrageous see Ralph Peters. On why this was politically stupid, see the entry in the dictionary for "Duh."

Peters writes:

The president and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class.

Read more here.