It’s not easy declaring that someone told the truth when you don’t actually quote anything they said, but Mychal Massie has accomplished that feat in his July 6 WorldNetDaily column. It’s headlined “Michael Steele told the truth,” but nowhere does Massie directly quote Steele telling said truth. Instead, Massie writes around it:
This is Obama’s war now, and he’s doing a lousy job of instilling confidence in his leadership as commander in chief. Did officers and troops refuse to obey direct orders of President George W. Bush by refusing deployment?
Michael may not have spoken eloquently, but what he said doesn’t rise to the level of his stepping down. This is “gotcha” politics – Republican-style. If it weren’t, those criticizing him would be making the points I’m making.
But Steele came nowhere near to saying that Afghanistan “is Obama’s war now.” What he actually said was that Afghanistan is a “war of Obama’s choosing” and that it is “not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” Not the same thing.
Massie then went on to attack Obama’s prosecution of the war:
First of all, there is no one more pro-military than I – no one. But unless Obama, the leftover Clinton Pentagon pansies and all of the pusillanimous Harvard/Yale theorists get out of the way – the war in Afghanistan will be reduced to a Vietnam. I’m more interested in killing all the enemy radical Muslims I can, more than I am in getting more homosexuals and lesbians into the Marine Corps. I’m pro-military, and I’m pro–crush and thoroughly demoralize the enemy at every opportunity.
[…]And, let me repeat myself, this is Obama’s war. He’s the president – he owns it. And not until he and the politically correct get out of the way and let our great military do what they do better than any other military in the world will we have victory – because you can’t win a war with one hand tied behind your back.
At no point does Massie offer any evidence that the military’s prosecution of the war is being overly restrained in any way.