Congress, Constitutional Law, Military, Politics, Society

Once Upon A Time There Was An Imperial President. . . Pelosi Explains To Five-Year-Old Why We Are Again At War

220px-nancy_pelosiWe have been following the abandonment of virtually core liberal values by Rep. Nancy Pelosi in her adherence to the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama. From her attack on privacy to her new enthusiasm for war, Pelosi is the truest believer of the true believers surrounding Obama in the Democratic Party. Now she has been sharing a charming little story of how “Mimi” explained to their grandson how we are now at war. It turns out it is all about the children . . . not about the chemical weapons or reports that Obama is playing to turn the tide of the losing war for the rebels. Sort of like Save The Children . . . but with cruise missiles.

Here is Pelosi’s story on how you convince a five year old that war is a good thing:

REP. NANCY PELOSI: I’ll tell you this story and then I really do have to go. My five-year-old grandson, as I was leaving San Francisco yesterday, he said to me, Mimi, my name, Mimi, war with Syria, are you yes war with Syria, no, war with Syria. And he’s five years old. We’re not talking about war; we’re talking about action. Yes war with Syria, no with war in Syria. I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ He said, ‘I think no war.’ I said, ‘Well, I generally agree with that but you know, they have killed hundreds of children, they’ve killed hundreds of children there. ‘ And he said, five years old, ‘Were these children in the United States?’ And I said, ‘No, but they’re children wherever they are.’

So I don’t know what news he’s listening to or — but even a five year old child has to — you know, with the wisdom of our interest has affected our interests or it affects our interests because, again, it was outside of the circle of civilized behavior. It was humanity drew a line decades ago that i think if we ignore, we do so to the peril of many other people who can suffer.

I love how she qualifies her remarks to the five year old that “we’re talking about action.” It is a point that would only be recognized by constitutional experts — and Pelosi grandchildren — as an excuse to relieve the President of securing an actual declaration from Congress. Pelosi wants to preserve the Imperial Presidency around Obama (and future presidents) by reminding her grandson that attacking another sovereign nation is no longer viewed as an act of war but just something relabeled as an “action” to maximize the unilateral authority of the President.

Of course, in her wartime story for toddlers, Pelosi does not mention the recent disclosure that it was the United States that gave Saddam Hussein intelligence used his widespread chemical attacks and then lied about knowledge and evidence of the attacks. She does not mention how the Syrian rebels include Al Qaeda allies and extremists who do such things as eat the hearts of the fallen and abuse their corpses in violation of international law. She does not mention how she has supported the continuation of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where hundreds of thousands, including thousands of children, have died. She does not mention the thousands of children who have lost their mothers or fathers in the service in Iraq where we started a war based on a false allegation of WMDs and then continued to wage the war even after acknowledging that our original claims were false.

Yet, the most interesting aspect of Pelosi’s story is that this is precisely the level of discussion seen on Capitol Hill — just slightly above that of a five year old children . . . except of course that five year olds do not play poker during the briefings.

Nevertheless, I still prefer bedtime stories like “Princess Bride” but in Pelosi’s version President Humperdinck gets his war with Guilder, which is then obliterated in a rain of tomahawk missiles.

Source: RCP

80 thoughts on “Once Upon A Time There Was An Imperial President. . . Pelosi Explains To Five-Year-Old Why We Are Again At War”

  1. Jim Jones is Alive & Well in Washington.

    (Pass me the Kool-Aide. The same one George w. Bush was drinking.)

  2. I read Barbara Boxer also voted for war. San Francisco is now where chicken hawks roost.

    1. Sorry Nick the term chickenhawk can only apply to men. Women were never subject to the draft. Even if she could have joined the military she was not eligible for joining combat units.

      The term chickenhawks is reserved for those who did everything in their power to get out of serving in the active duty military to avoid going to war.

  5. Tom Englehardt has an interesting piece (Alone and Delusional on Planet Earth — And Then There Was One — Delusional Thinking in the Age of the Single Superpower).

    It is about a macro-history of the U.S. after becoming the only superpower with no superpower enemy to face.

    Then going delusional with a fantasy of ruling the new world with an exceptional, pure, democratic heaven on Earth type thingy.

    In this context of power corrupts, a deluded mind is a mind that has been corrupted into delusion.

    It scares me in the sense that I believe “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

    You see where I am going with this: if that formula is true, then a superpower seeks absolute power as it corrupts itself into absolute delusion.

    Here are the final words in his post:

    Such a world should be fantastical enough for the wildest sort of dystopian fiction, for perhaps a novel titled 2014 [a la “1984”].

    What, after all, are we to make of a planet with a single superpower that lacks genuine enemies of any significance and that, to all appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war with… well, itself — and appears to be losing?

  6. 5-year-old-grandson: “Grandma, what did you do in the wars that you started?”

    Grandma Pelosi: “I watched as others died in them, silly. Then I counted up the Raytheon and Haliburton stock dividends. Where do you suppose Santa Claus got the money for all those presents you get every birthday and Christmas?”

  7. Jill,

    If they can’t talk to us, but can only talk to themselves and people we don’t know behind our backs, then we need not listen. I certainly won’t.

  9. Michael,

    Thank you, I had not read Wheeler’s perfectly reasonable construction of what those two are actually saying.

    I too would like to see what Kerry and Obama say privately. I am hoping someone will leak that because it needs to be in the public domain.

  11. Frank,

    Good for you, brother.

    By the time Nixon sent me to Vietnam in the summer of 1970, everyone with a brain had already given up on the originally “limited” war (begun with “advisers” a decade earlier). So the military rounded up all of us that they didn’t have a better use for — I had just graduated from the U.S. Navy’s nuclear power program — and gave us a year’s training in Vietnamese (Southern Dialect) before shipping us out to “train” the Vietnamese to fight our proxy war against Russia and China in their country, something the Vietnamese had absolutely no interest in doing. The French had another name for our “Vietnamization” policy. They called it “Yellowing the Corpses.”

    Needless to say, the training business did not go well. and I came home a year-and-a-half later convinced that the United States military could never train a foreigner to fight America’s proxy wars in the foreigner’s country so that Americans didn’t have to die doing that. Later in life, I read where an Israeli defense minister — Ehud Barak, I think — had said of America’s training of Iraqis: “The only thing the Americans can train the Iraqis to do is how to kill Americans.” I think that brutal observation has proven even more terribly true about the American military’s training of Afghans to fight a few hundred Al Qaeda mercenaries who have long since left Afghanistan for Libya and Syria where the U.S. now supports, funds, arms and trains them.

    From everything I’ve seen and experienced over the last forty years, the cycle of American military blundering abroad starts with “advisers,” then shifts to combat units when the “advising” doesn’t work, then shifts to “training” to cover the retreat ten years later. A little safe bombing from a distance occasionally seems to reinvigorate the “humanitarian” killers and war-profiteers back home, but then the Army and Marines start feeling left out and demand to get back in where “this time for sure” they’ll get it right. Which they don’t.

    I’d say that President Assad of Syria probably has heard no better news than that the U.S. Army plans to train the Al Qaeda terrorists that America’s own A.U.M.F. declares enemies of America. I mean, when the entire U.S. government openly commits treason against itself, things have deteriorated far beyond cruel irony into ugly farce. “We’ll show you, Osama bin Laden. We’ll invade Iraq and Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia where you come from.”

    Unfortunately, Frank, so few Americans have any experience with our disastrous military meddling abroad that they cannot in any way evaluate properly the insane actions and statements of their own government. Keep trying though. I will, too. Not so many of us left now. But we “must not go gentle into that good night.” We must “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

  12. “Limited military action.” Bay of Pigs. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. (The list spans the entire history of man on earth).

    I’ll stipulate to the U.S. steamrolling of Grenada. Those Cuban construction workers really didn’t stand much of a chance. And I think the U.S. Navy has successfully fought off some pirates at sea from time to time in recent years.

    Otherwise: End of ridiculous pseudo-argument by incantation of oxymoron

    And, of course, behind the scenes at the White House (unknown to me in the first semester of my senior year of high school):

    “[President Lyndon] Johnson subscribed to the adage that “wars are too serious to be entrusted to generals.” He knew, as he once put it, that armed forces “need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic,” and that they would drag him into a military conflict if they could. But he also knew that Pentagon lobbyists, among the best in the business, could persuade conservatives in Congress to sabotage his social legislation unless he satisfied their demands. As he girded himself for the 1964 presidential campaign, he was especially sensitive to the jingoists who might brand him “soft on communism” were he to back away from the challenge in Vietnam. So, politician that he was, he assuaged the brass and the braid with promises he may never have intended to keep. At a White House reception on Christmas Eve 1963, for example, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just let me get elected, and you can have your war.”

    — Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, a History: the First Complete Account of Vietnam at War (New York: Viking Press, 1983; Penguin Books, 1984)

    I don’t want to hear what Obama and Kerry say in public. I want to hear what they say to each other behind our backs. I have a pretty good idea of what they want to do in Syria — i.e., wage a proxy war against Iran, Russia, and China — but I feel absolutely certain that what they say in public has little, if anything, to do with their real goals and motives. Lying bastards.

  13. You all do realize the first woman Speaker of the House is dumber than a box of rocks, don’t you? So, any conversation w/ a 5 year old is her on equal footing. Actually, the kid might be slightly ahead verbally.

  14. Nancy Pelosi needs to sing the five year old kid the song:

    [music]
    For its one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
    Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn.
    Next stop is Viet Nam!

    And, its five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates!
    There aint no time to wonder why,
    WHOPPEE, we’re all gonna die.

    -Country Joe and The Fish.

  15. Anonymously Posted,

    I’ll see your oxymoron and raise you some verse on the subject:

    Boobie Humanitarian Intervention
    (from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-linguistic retreat to Plato’s Cave)

    In Boobie Red-state USA
    The patriots don’t roam.
    They egg on someone else to fight
    While they stay safe at home
    Attending tail-gate parties at
    The local Astrodome

    “My country right or wrong!” they chant
    Within an eyelash blink.
    “My mother drunk or sober,” say
    The ones who’ve stopped to think.
    “We don’t give Mom the car keys when
    She’s had too much to drink!”

    Yet power acts just like a drug
    Like whiskey at its worst
    Anesthetizing brain cells while
    Exacerbating thirst
    Till little drunken boys and girls
    Resort to warfare first

    When adolescents cannot get
    Whatever they want now
    They pout and stomp and throw a fit
    And wrinkle up the brow
    Which signals to their parents that
    They want it anyhow

    Like Secretary Albright fumed
    When Clinton told her “No,
    We cannot level Belgrade just
    To show your machismo.”
    “Why even have an Air Force, then?”
    The madam wished to know.

    So Bill relented, finally;
    He wished so much to please
    And sent a flight of bombers
    To enforce his stern decrees.
    He got the address wrong, of course,
    And blew up some Chinese

    Yet Boobie Bubba couldn’t get
    The Chinese point of view
    They had so many people and
    He’d only killed a few
    (So why, since he felt so much pain,
    Could he not cause some, too?)

    Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2006

  16. Jill,

    Did you see Marcy Wheeler’s deconstruction of the Senate hearing at her emptywheel blog “Lessons from Today’s Senate Hearing on Syria”?

    I’ll just list her “lessons”:

    Lesson #1: We’re going to war so we don’t lose some friends

    Lesson #2: The friends we do have don’t want anyone to know they are our friends

    Lesson #3: Bombing another country unilaterally is not war in the “classic sense”

    Lesson #4: The Administration promises no boots on the ground except insofar as it anticipates boots on the ground

    Lesson #5: Whatever comes out of this resolution is separate from effort to oust Assad

    Lesson # 6: A map showing alleged attacks is physical evidence

    Lesson #7: The Administration claims it has evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Assad

    Bonus observation:

    “[No one], of course, explained why we weren’t referring (or trying to — it would take a Security Council referral) Assad’s crimes to the International Criminal Court.”

    “But as they did with Anwar al-Awlaki, they believe that declaring something “beyond a reasonable doubt” (though honestly, they never voiced their case against Awlaki that strongly) is sufficient and they don’t need to wait for UN inspectors or real juries.”

    Justice takes too much time so we can just dispense with it. The convenience of the King now governs everything. Long live the former democratic republic.

  17. randy rooster,

    I must beg your forgiveness for misconstruing your “argument.” I didn’t realize until just now that you want the United Nations to authorize Vietnam to “go it alone” in straightening out Syria’s civil war. I mean, Vietnam has proven it can do that sort of thing in Cambodia — an especially impressive feat since Vietnam first had to boot France and the United States out of Vietnam before starting to fix all the wreckage in Vietnam and Cambodia that France and the United States caused. On the other hand, the United States has proven monumentally incompetent at military intervention in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and so forth. So who in their right mind would want the blundering U.S. military involved in “helping.” The U.S. military doesn’t do that. It only adds to the hurt.

    Personally, I do not think that Vietnam has any more right to intervene in another nation’s civil war than America does, but since your “argument” seems to rest on nations assaulting other nations if they think they can get away with it — i.e., “might makes right” — then perhaps you should contact your Congressman and Senators and suggest The Vietnam Option. Saudi Arabia can fund the operation and the Apartheid Zionist Entity can provide the “intelligence.” Nothing much for America to do but vote “yes” in the Security Council. Time to let someone else “lead from in front.”

    Thanks for the epiphany.

  18. randy rooster,

    You might want to check up on your English prefixes. The prefix “inter-” means “between,” so that “international” means “between nations.” The situation in Syria — a civil war — concerns the Syrian people and does not involve war between different nations. So in the present case — which does not involve nineteenth century pirates at sea — the international community has no legal or moral authority to intervene.

    I realize that you subscribe to the tortured invocation of prior crime as precedent school of chronic official lawlessness as the basis for even more lawlessness. However, I do not think that violating International as well as international law does anything but earn contempt for any “law” that condones its own violation. That said, I also do not think that acting stupidly and needlessly, just to save the face of a politician who stuffed both of his own feet in his own mouth, makes a convincing argument for killing foreigners who don’t care about the reckless politician’s mouth, feet, or face. One could, of course, offer the counter argument that one has the legal right to blow one’s own feet off, so that therefore one should do that whenever the thought suggests itself. Still, nothing excuses unforced stupidity — especially reckless stupidity — in national leaders. Nonetheless, America’s self-styled “leaders” now demand the right to act both illegally AND stupidly. They say they can if they want to. Because they want to. They really, really want to. And so they say they will. And they call that an “argument.”

    The United States lost all kinds of face in Southeast Asia forty years ago, just as it has lost enormous amounts of face in the Middle East over the past decade. But the loss of face — i.e., credibility — did not come from stopping these stupid and disastrous bungles, but from starting and continuing them. Once the United States returned to its senses and stopped acting so bloody stupid, U.S. credibility made a healthy comeback. So if President Obama and the U.S. Congress want to save American face, they can act responsibly, call off their own snarling dogs of war, and return to their proper business of getting a modern economy and health care system up and running — for Americans — again.

    Oh, yes. And you might have heard something about a really scary thing called a budget deficit which says that America has absolutely no money available to squander on more pointless needless military adventurism. Nothing more pathetic than a deadbeat nation that cannot pay its bills begging the Chinese for more loans so that it can blow up some more foreign peasants so the randy roosters can feel “all-tuff-and-stuff” on their way to Tehran (vicariously) with the “real men” leading the way.

    Now, back to James Madison and the Barbary Pirates with you — whatever in the hell you think that has to do with the two-year-old civil war in Syria today ….

  19. Just waiting for Obama to bring in the horse as a Senator:

    “Two amendments presented by John McCain to the Syrian war resolution have just passed the committee by voice vote, Dan Roberts reports.

    The senators voted to accept these two amendments into the proposed draft legislation, but they have not voted on the resolution overall yet, Dan says.

    The changes would seem to expand – perhaps significantly – the scope of the prospective American military campaign. In particular the second amendment flatly states “It is the policy of the United States to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria.”

    That doesn’t sound like “limited,” “tailored” strikes.” (Guardian)

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