My article from Front Page Magazine on August 2, 2012:
Valerie Jarrett’s Bin Laden Raid Veto
By Matthew Vadum
Although taking out Public Enemy Number One would seem to be the easiest of calls, President Obama allowed key public relations adviser Valerie Jarrett to nix the military operation to kill arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions last year, according to an upcoming book.
Although President Obama’s reelection team is loudly trumpeting the dispatch of bin Laden in May 2011, saying it shows Obama’s decisiveness, author Richard Miniter suggests in Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him, that the president was anything but decisive.
Apparently Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into action against bin Laden. Miniter’s evidence suggests the president took a long time to steel his resolve, hemming and hawing over the life-and-death decision, putting it off repeatedly over a four-month period.
Miniter says Obama bowed to the wishes of his close friend Jarrett, a slick, well-connected political hack from Chicago whose White House title is Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. Obama has confirmed how much pull Jarrett has with him. “I trust her completely … She is family,” he said in 2009. Obama said he trusts Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.” Obama has acknowledged that he runs every decision by her.
The military excursion that targeted bin Laden was first scratched in January 2011, then in February, and again in March, according to a summary of the book in the Daily Caller. Each time Jarrett convinced Obama to abort the planned raid, Miniter says, citing an unidentified source within the Joint Special Operations Command. Of course this raises the question of who is actually running America’s Overseas Contingency Operations, i.e. the Obama’s administration politically correct euphemism for the Global War on Terror.
Even on the day before the mission was ultimately carried out, Obama reportedly vacillated. The White House said the mission was temporarily delayed because of inclement weather in the area of bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Miniter disputes the bad weather excuse. He says he examined the day’s weather reports from the U.S. Air Force Combat Meteorological Center and that they depicted picture-perfect conditions for the raid.
Miniter, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, has not yet explained to the media why Jarrett pushed for three separate stays of extrajudicial execution. Americans will have to wait until the book, published by St. Martin’s Press, is officially released on August 21 in order to find out.
Those who study American leftists know their ambivalence toward their country’s use of military power, even for indisputably worthwhile objectives.
One need only look at Obama’s schizophrenic attitude about the military’s use of force against bin Laden.
Last year after the raid, Obama inexplicably vowed not to gloat about sending bin Laden to his maker. This was an unusual promise for any politician to make. When asked why he refused to allow publication of photos showing the secret mission to Abbottabad, the president said, “We don’t need to spike the football.”
Fair enough perhaps. Maybe Obama thought he was being statesmanlike.
But that wasn’t the end of the matter. It wasn’t long before Obama began spiking the football up and down the end zones of the body politic, bragging to anyone who would listen about what in the opinion of many left-wingers and libertarians was a blatant example of an extra-judicial execution, the kind of thing they believe the U.S. government shouldn’t do.
Anyone who watched the stiff and robotic presidential candidate John Kerry on television saluting perfunctorily and saying he was “reporting for duty” at the Democratic Party’s 2004 national convention knows what I mean. Liberals’ hearts aren’t into it.
So-called progressives generally don’t care a whole heck of a lot about defending America; they would prefer to blow the nation’s defense budget on welfare. Leftists would rather send soldiers abroad as armed social workers bearing care packages instead of as warriors defending America’s freedoms.
And there’s no doubt that Jarrett, who seemed to function as de facto Secretary of Defense last year, is, like Obama, a hardcore leftist with radical roots.
Like Obama and Bill Ayers, Jarrett lived within the precincts of Hyde Park, Chicago, the home of many elite leftists. She worked for Chicago’s first black mayor, the radical Harold Washington, whose election was cheered by leftover 1960s radicals. After Washington died in 1987, she worked for the new mayor Richard Daley. Jarrett later landed a job at Habitat, which was headed by Daniel Levin, cousin of two left-wing politicians, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Congressman Sander Levin (D-Mich.).
In 1983 she was married to Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett. Her father-in-law wrote upbeat articles about communist members of the artistic community including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. DuBois. He also served on a union publicity committee alongside Frank Marshall Davis, an important early influence on the young Barack Obama. And as Paul Kengor notes in his new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, Vernon Jarrett was also a member of the Illinois Council of American Youth for Democracy, the youth wing of the Communist Party USA.
Jarrett is obsessed with racial issues. She has helped to promote Al Sharpton’s radical agenda, according to Obama administration staffers. She pushed Obama’s campaign staff in 2008 to be more aggressive on racial matters, telling them they needed to be less “gun-shy on race issues.” After that, according to a campaign source, moving forward Obama “made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn’t get it.”
Once ensconced in the Obama White House, Jarrett successfully lobbied to weaken rules preventing officials from meeting with lobbyists. The reason given for the flip-flop on lobbyist meetings was that the rule would prevent other “legitimate” issues raised by “civil rights organizations whose directors happen to be registered lobbyists – [from being] heard.” Of course, to Jarrett so-called civil rights organizations are groups like ACORN, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the radical Service Employees International Union.
Jarrett pressed Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the Federal Communications Commission. The post came to be occupied by Hugo Chavez admirer Mark Lloyd, a Saul Alinsky adherent and former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who wants to put conservative talk radio out of business.
Jarrett also helped bring in law professor Cass Sunstein as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. The fey legal theorist has said Americans should “celebrate tax day,” and that animals ought to be allowed to sue people.
Without Jarrett’s advocacy, it seems unlikely that the self-described “communist” revolutionary Van Jones would have become green jobs czar in the Obama White House in 2009. At a leftist confab Jarrett got positively goofy about Jones.
“We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House,” Jarrett said. “We were watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House.”
What exactly was Jones doing out in Oakland, California?
He was leading a Maoist group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM). The vehemently anti-American collective held a vigil in Oakland mourning the victims of U.S. imperialism around the world on the night after Sept. 11, 2001.
That’s what Jarrett, now arguably the most powerful woman in the world, holds in high regard.
Imagine what she’ll help Obama do to America if he wins a second term.