If You Are Are Not in Favor of BHO or His Policies, You Are Not Qualified to Render an Opinion

I'll be honest with you, Diane, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies the former Vice President to render an opinion on Afghanistan

is how the White House press secretary answered Diane Sawyer's question on Dick Cheney's criticism of the Apologizer-in-Chief's war policies (thanks to Scott Whitlock via Larwyn).

Hello-oooo! Are you kidding, Robert Gibbs?! The man was in the vice-president's chair when 9-11 happened, for Christ's sakes, and when the decision to send troops to Afghanistan was made and he was at the helm of power for more than seven years after that!

Can you imagine the — rightful — outrage, not least from the TV interviewer, if, say, Dick Cheney himself had said that he was "not entirely sure what qualifies Al Gore to render an opinion" on Afghanistan, on global warming, on whatever subject? (Well, come to think of it, Al Gore on global warming…)

That was the specifics. More generally, the comment shows the left's tendency to think that no opponent of the White House (or simply a skeptical person) is qualified — remember Obama's admonition that conservatives should shut up and let him do the ruling and make the decisions? — to render an opinion on leftist policies…

In other matters, Maggie's Farm quotes two veterans regarding Obama's West Point speech (you know, the one without the words "win" or "victory" in it):

Obama graduated from Columbia and he knows absolutely nothing about US and World history. Nothing! Listening to him reminds me being in a coffee shop in the late 60s, trying to make my move on a beautiful girl, but as the 4th international idiocies tumbled out of her mouth, the beauty slowly vanished, and chastity became easy--at least with her. Four things can kill sexual desire: hunger, exhaustion, fear, and listening to an idiot.

The previous person quoted is "a combat veteran, a journalist, a frontline refugee aid worker, a man of the cloth, a professor, major scholar, a mentor and example to generations":

Obama says Afghanistan is different from Vietnam because in Afghanistan we are not facing "a broad-based popular insurgency." So it was the "broad-based insurgency" that finally won in Vietnam? Why are there so many Vietnamese in this country? Why did South Vietnam become a gulag for twenty years after 1975? (I went back for the first time in 1995, and it was one of the most oppressive societies I have ever experienced.) Where did the soldiers in the South Vietnamese army come from? If North Korea were to overtake South Korea tomorrow, would it be the result of a broad-based insurgency? The entire North Vietnamese army--after we had withdrawn all support from the South--overran the country. Not the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army. Some South Vietnamese units fought to the last man. Some were still fighting a rear guard action in the central highlands for five years after the fall of Saigon.

…Obama doesn't believe that any war can ever be legitimate. Read his speeches from Cairo, Normandy, or Berlin. He has talked about the progress of American blacks from slavery to his presidency, without ever mentioning the civil war. It just didn't happen. It was like the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was no military involved, no "cold war," people just "came together" and the wall fell.