Saturday.....War On Terror.....Bureaucrats & National Security

In a rare Saturday night vote, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Health Care Bill enabling it to move on to the Senate to be debated. The vote was 220 to 215 with 218 votes needed for passage. Thirty-nine Democratic Representatives voted against it. Today was arm-twisting time in Nancy's Pelosi's majority rule. This pressure has always gone on in Congress but this issue makes it particularly despicable. A couple of thoughts on this: If this bill eventually becomes law, Nancy Pelosi would be in retirement somewhere when the disaster is evident to everyone. Three more Democrat no votes would have defeated this bill, in fact had not the yes votes been certain, the vote would not have taken place today. We need term limits.. Unfortunately, there are problems even greater than the seniority power structure of Congress. I refer you to a 2008 book by Bill Gertz called The Failure Factory, How Unelected Bureaucrats are Undermining U. S. Security (isbn 978-0-307-33808 paperback $16.) The American public should be aware of the jealousies between the State Department and Department of Defense, and between the intelligence agencies, but what we need to know more of, and Gertz lays it out in the open, is the firmly entrenched bureaucrats who are relatively unknown to the public but influential enough to thwart the policies of the President of the United States, which was done time and again during the war in Iraq. The book was published before the elections of 2008 and Gertz' concern (one of them anyway) on Barack Obama was that he was a tabula rasa on foreign policy. Barack Obama has an agenda but he would be putty in the hands of these shadow powers that even George Bush was hurt by and a veteran in this arena, John McCain would have struggled with. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid look like Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney compared to some of these folks. Bill Gertz gives twelve pieces of advice on bureaucratic reform. Personally, I would like to see this become a campaign issue in coming elections. This is not a pretty picture but needs addressed for the sake of our national security.