Obama Finds the Republican to Blame for Bergdahl Brouhaha

Chuck Hagel

Old Obama: "I Got 'im Out",  New Obama: "Chuck Hagel Did It" — Ace

I've gotten tired of stealing from Hot Air so I'm going to steal from the next post down. Nah, I'll steal from Hot Air. Obama is trying out his fourth story on why he didn't inform Congress. His third story -- "The Taliban told us to not tell Dianne Feinstein!" -- didn't go over so well.

So here's take four: See, we only made this decision hours before we executed it so there was no time to inform Congress, according to Senator "Dick" Durban.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2-ranked Democrat, presented the timeline as an explanation for why President Barack Obama didn't inform Congress 30 days before the deal. Republicans and some Democrats have sharply criticized the president for failing to notify them and claim he broke the law. Obama says he acted legally.
"They knew a day ahead of time the transfer was going to take place," Durbin told reporters in the Capitol, where military officials briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors. "They knew an hour ahead of time where it was going to take place."

In political terms, this is what you call "A Big Fat Lie." I might not "finalize" the exact flight I'm taking until days before I get on it, and sometimes I even change a flight day-of, but I sort of let people know I'll be traveling that day.

See, I know in advance that I'll be on a flight, even if I'm not exactly sure when it will be landing.

Durbin seems to be claiming that Obama has the right to withhold the swap from Congress because the exact time and place of the exchange are TBD.

No Obamacare Schadenfreude Today!

Obamacare had been largely replaced in the news by the VA Scandal, which has now been shoved to the back burner in favor of the "Unusual Case of Bowe Bergdahl."

The Obama administration is reported to be believers in "stray voltage", the idea that even bad coverage is better than continued hammering on the original issue:

. . .Officials in every White House crowbar the facts to make their cases. Administration officials over time have also learned how to turn lemons into lemonade, harnessing the frenzied news coverage from a perceived White House miscue to the president's advantage. Losing the news cycles between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. doesn't necessarily matter; if by the end of the saga you've got a coherent story to pitch, the frenzy has simply given you a larger audience who will listen to it. “Stray voltage,” the term Obama strategist David Plouffe used to describe this approach, is also a great buzzword that makes it look like you’ve got a theory for what might otherwise look like chaos. But this twist is a new, higher order of deception: creating the controversy for the purposes of milking it. . .

It sort of reminded me of an old childhood ditty: