Impossible Scissors

When it comes to Afghanistan, our media tells us that we're in good hands. Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama had taken his time, carefully weighed his options, and came up with a really, really smart strategy that he's going to unveil to the nation on Tuesday. It will be one thousand times better than any dogmatic knee-jerk reaction we would have gotten from the old "Cowboy-in-Chief."

The simple portrait splashed across our televisions by Obama's media sycophants, yet again, is a romanticized view of a far grittier reality. The arguments about Obama's thoughtfulness are far weaker than the view that the president spent two months dithering on an issue that has broad repercussions for the security of our nation.

Does anybody remember General McChrystal's very public appeals for 40,000 more troops? That was back in September. Since then, the president has conducted (according to published accounts) ten very involved strategy sessions with his most trusted military and foreign affairs advisors. Holding the meetings may show thoughtfulness, but does it really take two months to hammer out the details of a new strategy? Time is an unaffordable luxury (much like ObamaCare) while our soldiers' lives are still in harm's way pursuing the stagnant old Afghanistan strategy.

During these past two months, President Obama has made his priorities known. ObamaCare is his most pressing priority. Steering the Olympics to his Chicago cronies even seemed like it obscured Afghanistan on Obama's radar screen. Our nation is at war with jihadists halfway across the globe, but our president is waging war against the health insurance companies at home. Does our commander-in-chief have his priorities straight?

All the criticism of George W. Bush as a dogmatic and reactionary decision-maker comes from people with partisan axes to grind. Members of his inner circle saw Bush as far more studious and open to opinion than his critics would ever concede. Problems occurred when Bush too often deferred to the paranoia-tinged judgments of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld rather than listening to the cooler heads in the room (Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, Richard Armitage and even Colin Powell before he turned into a mindless Obama-lover.)

A careful examination of counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq shows the futility of dithering during an active war. The Bush National Security Council spent much of 2005 and 2006 debating counterinsurgency options, using terms like "Clear Hold Build" to describe strategies whose application to the theater of operations was spotty, at best. In fairness to President Obama, President Bush also took roughly two months between the firing of Donald Rumsfeld and the public announcement of the "surge" strategy in January 2007. But the surge strategy had to be forced on a military establishment that was resistant to counterinsurgency. It originated on the outside, thanks to historian Fred Kagan and retired Army chief-of-staff Jack Keane. It also faced considerable resistance from the Washington establishment, which viewed the Iraq Study Group as official top-cover for abandoning Iraq to a future of anarchy.

It's said that if a frog is placed in a pot of water that's heated slowly, he'll be boiled so gradually that he won't know what's coming next until it's too late to fix it. With President Obama, the slow heat of Afghanistan is catching up to his presidency, and he seems oblivious to it. Unless he starts to realize that there are far greater dangers in this world than American health insurance companies, his presidency will be boiled to death.

As my longtime readers likely know, I'm a huge fan of "Room for Squares," John Mayer's debut album. It was pure heaven; thirteen folk-inspired pop songs dealing with an awkward young man's desire for acceptance. I also enjoyed his sophomore effort, "Heavier Things," which was more of a mainstream pop-rock album spanning the gap between songs of awkwardness and songs of love and heartbreak.

After two really great albums, "Continuum" really felt like a kick in the balls. Sure, John Mayer really developed as a great blues guitarist in the mold of Clapton or Hendrix. But a lot of the songs didn't resonate with me. And the mixture of heartbreak-themed pop ballads with bluesy songs just seemed incoherent.

It was with some hesitation that I bought "Battle Studies," John Mayer's fourth studio album. I was immediately relieved to find that the incoherence of "Continuum" has been remedied. Predictably, the constant theme of the songs on "Battle Studies" is that all's fair in love and war. If love is a battlefield, Pat Benatar has good rounds to sue John Mayer. It's impossible to listen to any of Mayer's original songs and think they weren't written about Mayer's on-and-off flame, Jennifer Aniston.

The first track, "Heartbreak Warfare," seems like it's influenced by Seal's "Crazy" more than anything else. "All We Ever Do is Say Goodbye" is a return to Mayer's folk-influenced roots.

My favorite song on the album is "Half of My Heart," a track that blends the folk and blues influences into a very catchy tune. Taylor Swift lends her vocals, but her contribution is so short that you wonder why they bothered flying her out to the studio. Had Mayer and Swift sang the song as a true duet, I think it would have been an instant classic.

"Who Says" is the first single, and it sounds too much like "The Heart of Life" from "Continuum." Maybe I'm not very keen on it because if its nonstop references to getting stoned.

There were plenty of other great songs on "Battle Studies." "Perfectly Lonely" hearkens back to the gems on "Room For Squares" like "Love Song for No One." "Assassin" is funky and fun; "Friends Lovers or Nothing" reminds me of the melodies from "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room" or "In Repair" from "Continuum," and that's not a bad thing.

Overall I really enjoyed "Battle Studies," and thought that it was a return to the coherent pop-rock of the "Heavier Things" period in John Mayer's career. It's not quite as good as "Heavier Things," and I doubt John Mayer will ever be able to top "Room for Squares." But it's a tall order to follow, and "Battle Studies" is a solid pop-rock album that will make a great stocking stuffer for all music lovers out there.

According to a recent interview with former president Jimmy Carter, the only reason why he didn't serve a second term as president was because he didn't launch a military mission to rescue American hostages trapped in Iran. But it was a wise and noble decision, because 20,000 Iranians would have been killed during the mission.

Jimmy Carter has been called "our greatest ex-president." I don't know if that's because of his legitimate humanitarian contributions after leaving office, or because so many people were glad to see him leave. But by this point it's clear that he's either losing his mind, or he's desperately trying to talk up an undeserved legacy to fit the Nobel Peace Prize he won several years ago.

For starters, there WAS a mission to end the Iranian Hostage Crisis, authorized by President Carter. It was called "Operation Eagle Claw." And it was aborted at an early phase after a fatal collision between two aircraft at a staging point. Reflecting upon the ill-fated rescue mission, it's probably for the best that the mission was aborted before progressing any further. It was a hopelessly complex plan that involved rendezvousing with a CIA team at the captured embassy, evacuating hostages with pre-positioned vehicles, and overtaking a soccer stadium as a staging point for flying the hostages to safety. The mission had the potential for even greater failure and loss of life had it gone any further. As to Jimmy Carter's figures of 20,000 fatalities, they don't appear to be substantiated with any expert's credible estimate of how violent a realistic hostage mission would be. If anything, Jimmy Carter is creating the strawman argument for a more comprehensive military mission that was never seriously considered.

Jimmy Carter's world view of 1980 is far rosier than anybody alive at the time would remember. It ignores the high unemployment rates, double-digit inflation, economic stagnation, price-caps and rationing on gasoline, the Moscow Olympic Boycott, and the Soviet War in Afghanistan. In short, 1980 was a pretty miserable period for America. President Carter admitted as much in July 1979 by declaring that America was at "a moral and spiritual crisis." Nothing he had done since the infamous "malaise speech" had given Americans any reason to think that this crisis would come to a close.

Ronald Reagan's candidacy in 1980 turned the nation upside-down. At first many Americans didn't know what to make of the actor-turned-Conservative-activist. He had served as governor of California. Then he shook things up within his own party by challenging the sitting president, Gerald Ford, who was largely overwhelmed by the highest office in the land. But near the end of the campaign, voters found in Reagan a voice that told them it was okay to be proud of the good America had accomplished and believe in the promise of tomorrow. It was time to abandon the past decade of self-flagellation and apologies that were exemplified when Jimmy Carter abandoned Iran's decrepit Shah in the face of the Ayatollah's fanaticism.

1980 was not a single-issue presidential race; it was a race built on vision. Ronald Reagan believed in projecting America's strength and rejecting the economic thinking that caused stagflation. Jimmy Carter kept telling us to give the old order more time to work. In the end, American voters turned a close race into a Reagan landslide and broke overwhelmingly for The Gipper.

We are learning more and more about Malik Nadal Hasan, the Army Major and psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood. There are two separate and conflicting portaits of the murderer: the first is the able psychiatrist who was described as "a loyal soldier" and wore his uniform to Friday prayers. The other is the angry opponent of US foreign policy who praised suicide bombers in internet postings, cleaned out his apartment in preparation for his suicide mission at Fort Hood, received reprimand for undisclosed problems dealing with patients, and shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire on his unarmed victims.

Even more shocking is the revelation that intelligence agencies had recorded Hassan attempting to contact known members of al Qaeda. If these reports are true, they're a repeat of the same bureaucratic paralysis that allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. The forces of political correctness, excessive concern for the privacy of potential terrorists, and dysfunctional relationships between intelligence and law enforcement agencies blocked any reports of Hassan's descent into radicalism from reaching his superiors before he could murder 13 people.

There have been far too many senseless deaths owing to post-traumatic stress disorder from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those cases, the emotional trauma on the shooters is justifiably called "tragedy." Some media commentators have claimed that Hasan suffered vicariously through the combat scars of his patients. While true to some degree, it's absolute rubbish for explaining why Hasan lashed out yesterday. While his imminent deplopyment to a war he opposed seems to have set off his rampage, it still doesn't explain why Hasan chose the path of murder as his means of lashing out.

The only explanation is that Hasan was waging a one-man jihad. Malik Nadal hasan is an American terrorist.

It's silly to think that the terrorist or jihadist labels should be reserved only for people who have sworn their allegiance to Osama bin Laden with a video crew present to record the moment. But a terrorist is anybody who initiates violence to achieve their political objectives. And a jihadist is anybody who invokes Allah to excuse their murderous misdeeds. Regardless of whether Malki Nadal Hasan is revealed to have ties with any known jihadists, he is the very definition of a homegrown terrorist. Perhaps the only silver lining in the story is that Hasan survived and will never achieve the martyrdom he so desperately craved.