Newt Gingrich On General McChrystal And Obama

Short and to the point:


Commentary below the fold.

In my view, Obama, in order to appear as commander-in-chief, had to relieve General McChrystal from command. A commander-in-chief cannot allow a general to openly ridicule a President and his administration, even if the administration deserves ridicule.

But something bigger is going on here, as Mr. Gingrich points out: the incompetence of the Obama administration.

Furthermore, Obama's sycophants in the media, like Obama himself, are more worried about Obama's image than anything else, let alone the war in Afghanistan:

ABC, CBS and NBC all led Tuesday night with multiple stories on the “firestorm” over disrespectful coments by General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about President Obama and other administration officials, but ABC's Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos particularly despaired over the position in which McChrystal has put Obama.

Sawyer fretted that Obama “now faces a mind-boggling choice,” before Stephanopoulos kvetched “the President has really been put in a real political box” and “a very painful political position,” forcing him to choose between “looking thin-skinned and petulant” or “looking weak.”

CBS's Katie Couric didn't go that far, but she was disturbed by the burden on Obama: “This controversy is about the last thing the President needed on his plate as he deals with two wars overseas and another against an invasion of oil off the gulf coast.”

You see, what we've got sitting in the Oval Office is a man who is all about himself and the narrative, as admitted by David Alexrod himself:

"So much of the coverage and commentary has to do with the narrative, stagecraft, the political implications of what he is doing," said David Axelrod, Obama's special adviser for narrative, stagecraft and the political implications of what the president is doing.