Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his new memoir is said to have slammed Vice President Joe Biden for having been consistently “wrong” on foreign policy matters over the past four decades.
Gates’s petty gossip about his former colleagues should put an end to the pusillanimous Democratic Party tradition of appointing Republicans as secretaries of defense in Democratic administrations.
There is a lot to like about Gates. He over time became something like a defensive realist. He appears to have helped prevent Dick Cheney and the Neocons from attacking Iran. He warns against the seductive character of drone warfare, and wants a court to sign off on drone strikes. He said he thought any military commander who wanted to take US troops into another big ground war should have his head examined. He is scathing on the grandstanding and sadism of congressmen during hearings.
But lest it be forgotten, Gates’s career has been checkered and he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy himself. To wit:
1. Gates as a high official at the CIA was involved in the 1970s and 1980s invastly exaggerating the economic and military power of the Soviet Union...
2. When he was a high official at the CIA in the mid to late 1980s, Gates was involved in selling Pentagon weaponry to the Ayatollah Khomeini. ...
3. Not only did the Reagan administration in which Gates served as a loyal capo illegally steal weaponry from Pentagon warehouses...
4. Gates was, further, involved in further covert provision of weaponry, including chemicals and biological precursors to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. ...
5. Gates was among the architects of the US policy of giving billions to far right Muslim jihadis (Mujahideen) such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar in northern Pakistan...
6. The Afghanistan jihad waged by Gates and others at the CIA involved pressuring Saudi intelligence also to raise funds for it. The Saudis asked Osama Bin Laden to help as a fundraiser. ...
7. Gates and others in the Reagan administration appear to have downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program...
8. Gates thinks that the 2007 Bush troop escalation or “surge” was effective. ...
9. Gates was confident in 2008 that a troop escalation in Afghanistan could allow for free and fair elections and actually said that the Taliban held no territory and the security problems in that country were exaggerated.
10. Gates asserts that he believes that once the US winds down its military role in Afghanistan, that country will be on a fairly good track to success. ...
It's hard to imagine now, but before the birth of my first child, I had never held a baby. Not once, not in my entire life. No baby at home to tend, no niece or nephew to babysit. So you can imagine, the day my first boy was born I felt woefully unprepared.She tries to make it sound like she's some kinda "regular person". She isn't. She'd never held a baby? Seems odd 'til you take a quick little Google spin thru her old neighborhood, or do a bit of reading on Bloomfield Hills Michigan* where she grew up. She probably never did any laundry or cooked a meal for herself either. Not that any of that makes her a bad egg in any way - just that it doesn't make her any kind of kindred spirit with anybody who's ever struggled with any of life's little obstacles. It's hard to imagine Ann Romney ever being denied much of anything, or a time when somebody wasn't shinin' her ass over one thing or another.
*Bloomfield Hills ... consistently ranks as one of the top five wealthiest cities in the United States with population between 2,500 to 9,999 — it currently is listed at the number four position and in 1990 it was ranked number two,[6] and has the highest income of any city outside of California, Florida or Virginia. The median income for a family is over $200,000. In 2000, 49% of residential property in Bloomfield Hills had a value of over $1,000,000.[7]Generally, I don't mind when campaign consultants insist on trying to pull this kind of crap; I just wish they weren't always so fucking clumsy and obvious about it.
