Shire Network News #163 – Closing Gitmo, or Not

Shire Network News #163 has been released. Instead of an interview this week, "Tom Paine" in Australia joins Meryl Yourish in Richmond Virginia, and "Brian of London" in Tel Aviv for a three-way discussion about life, politics, Jihadi’s attacking on every front while Obama sits back, peers hawkishly in the opposite direction and says "War? What war?", how to get one’s political comedy mojo back and the vitally important topic of moat-dredging. It’s a LOT more relevant than you might think.  Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News, asking you to "Consider This!"

That scourge of the world, that Auschwitz of the West, the human rights debacle commonly known as "Gitmo", the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, is going to be closed, much to the relief of anti-war activists everywhere.  It was on January 22nd of this year, 2 days after taking office, that President Barack Obama signed an order to shut it down within the year.  With 9 months left on the clock, how’s that going?

This past week, the fiscal year 2009 spending bill included Obama’s request for money to handle this.  However, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, a Democrat, stripped the $80 million from the bill because the administration had not actually presented a "concrete program" to close it.  In short, Obey … didn’t.  So it seems that Barack Obama doesn’t really have an "exit strategy" for dealing with this problem; he’s just throwing money at it, something the Left is exemplary at.  And while cooler heads in the Democratic party are prevailing, one would think, one would hope, that the coolest head ought to be at the top.  Well, just keep hoping.

At the same time he signed the order to close Gitmo, Obama also suspended the proceedings of the Guantanamo military commission for 120 days.  He’s said during the campaign that, “by any measure our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” and declaring that as president he would “reject the Military Commissions Act.”  So how’s that going?

Well, now the administration is becoming more open to using tribunals because of the difficulty in trying these cases in the federal court system.  Some may still be, but one administration official said that the more they looked at it, the more the tribunals didn’t look as bad as they did on January 20th.  Apparently, he was the spokesman for other officials who were busy putting out the fires they’d set on their bridges behind them.  If things look much different "the more you look at it", that sounds like you should have been looking at it a bit more in the first place, before shooting your mouth off and throwing red meat to your supporters.  You’re the President, or you were running for it then, and cooler heads ought to have … well, you know the drill.

No, what we have is a pandering President proclaiming pompously panaceas promoted primarily by pernicious panels of people.  Pathetic.  We can only hope that, going forward, the leader of the free world will take just a little more time to consider this.

Filed under: Humor • Podcasts • Shire Network News • Terrorism

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!