President Obama has adopted a bizarre and convoluted legal explanation for violating the War Powers Act.  He cannot be held responsible, as Commander-in-Chief, for leading us into war because he isn’t leading.  He feels he doesn’t need authority from our congress, because he isn’t the one who made the decision to intervene in Libya; that was NATO.  He also believes that he has avoided legal responsibility for sending our troops into combat because he also yielded command and control to NATO.  Since NATO, not the U.S., is in charge, he isn’t responsible because our troops are only working in a “support” role.  It’s bad enough that he blames Bush for everything, now he’s blaming NATO!

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/166771-war-powers-standoff-escalates-over-libya

The White House leaked its report to the New York Times before it bothered to send it to congress.   Speaker Boehner is not amused:

“If the White House intends to assuage Congress’s concerns, they might want to share the report with Congress before leaking it to The New York Times,” the aide said

Obama is openly defying congress, yet I will be very surprised if they press the issue.  They should be outraged.  How much damage are they willing to accept before they stop this man from shredding our constitution?  One Senator who gets it is Rand Paul:  Following are his comments on this subject:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/15/obamas-unconstitutional-libyan-war/

Rand Paul shreds Obama’s primary argument that this isn’t a military action by the United States because we are only acting in a support rule:

Thus far, the United States has provided 93 percent of the cruise missiles, 66 percent of the personnel, 50 percent of the ships and 50 percent of the planes in this Libyan mission.

It looks like the only thing we aren’t providing is leadership!  Obama is pretending this isn’t war, so he can justify ignoring our own congress while our military is literally taking orders from a French Canadian Admiral.  As soon as Admiral Bouchard took command he explained that NATO wasn’t taking sides it was just trying to protect civilians: 

http://www.breakingnews.ie/world/nato-commander-denies-taking-sides-in-libya-conflict-498996.html

(This sounds more French than Canadian to me!) 

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems like a lot more civilians have been killed as a result of this military action than would have been killed if we had not intervened.  Obama is claiming that our intervention saved “thousands of lives.”  This is remarkably similar to the claim that his fiscal policy has saved millions of jobs and is equally lacking in credibility.

If we going to do this kind of stuff can we at least man up and admit it.  Our military is caught between a Barack and a hard place.  We have no mission.  We have no goal.  We have no exit strategy and our Commander in Chief is primarily concerned about avoiding being confused with a leader.  That is one thing he got right.  No intelligent person would confuse Barack Obama with a leader.  Folks, it just doesn’t get any worse than this.

 TDM