Jack Kelly Sunday

Amazing. A mea culpa (of sorts) in this week's column.

In a follow up to last week's column.

First let me clear up some relatively minor spin on Jack's part. In setting some chronological context to last week's events taking place off the coast of Somalia, Jack quotes this column by Gerald Warner at the Telegraph in the UK:

Mr. Warner was particularly scornful of the president's tepid response to North Korea's provocative launch of a Taepodong 2 rocket, which conceivably could deliver a nuclear warhead to targets in Alaska:

"America had Aegis destroyers tracking the missile and could have shot it down," Mr. Warner wrote. "But Uncle Sam had a sterner reprisal in store for lil ole Kim (Jong Il, North Korea's dictator). A multi-megaton strike of Obama hot air ... Watch out, France and Co., there is a new surrender monkey on the block."

Others, perturbed by the administration's announcement of proposed cuts in ballistic missile defense in the immediate aftermath of the North Korean provocation, expressed the same sentiment in gentler terms.

Actually Warner put it this way:

President Pantywaist is hopping mad and he has a strategy to cut Kim down to size: he is going to slice $1.4bn off America's missile defence programme, presumably on the calculation that Kim would feel it unsporting to hit a sitting duck, so that will spoil his fun.

Except that both Jack and Gerald have it wrong. From Secretary Gates' press conference discussing his budgetary recommendations:

Fourth, in the area of missile defense, we will restructure the program to focus on the rogue state and theater missile threat. We will not increase the number of current ground-based interceptors in Alaska, as had been planned, but we will continue to robustly fund continued research and development to improve the capability we already have to defend against long-range rogue missile threats, a threat North Korea's missile launch this past weekend reminds us is real.

So while the budget for overall missile defense is set to decrease by $1.4 billion, they're continuing the funding R&D to improve current capabilities defending against...which rogue state?

North Korea.

Huh. Well that's more or less the exact opposite of what Jack and Gerald wanted you to think isn't it?

Now on to the kinda sorta mea culpa. Jack writes:

As the crisis dragged on and the lifeboat containing the pirates and their hostage drew ever closer to the Somali shore, many -- myself among them -- feared the president's reluctance to use force would result in another humiliation for the United States, akin to that we suffered when Iranian Islamists seized our embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration. But the president had authorized the use of deadly force if the on-scene commander should determine that Capt. Phillips' life was in "imminent" danger. [emphasis added]

That's about as close as you're gonna get to Jack saying he got something wrong. But then he steps in it again:

After the fact, some Obama aides and his sycophants in the news media are pretending the president was more actively involved in the rescue than in fact he was. All Mr. Obama did was to assent to standard operating procedure that every American president save Jimmy Carter and perhaps Bill Clinton would have followed.

So how involved WAS the Obama White House (if not Obama himself) with the standoff? Here's the AP:

A timeline provided by the White House showed he issued the orders to use force at 8 p.m. Friday, and again at 9:20 a.m. Saturday, after new Navy forces moved on to the scene. In both cases, he was first briefed by the National Security Council for an update on the situation.

The timeline suggests that planning for the rescue mission intensified Saturday evening, as the National Security Council updated Obama on “planning for hostage contingencies” at 6:30 p.m. At 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Obama received an update on “action leading to the rescue of Captain Phillips.” He called Phillips about 4 p.m. Sunday.

And something from the "sycophants" at the Washington Post:

Throughout the past four days, White House officials played down Obama's role in the hostage drama. Until yesterday, he made no public statements about the pirates.

In fact, aides said yesterday, Obama had been briefed 17 times since he returned from his trip abroad, including several times from the White House Situation Room. And without giving too many details, senior White House officials made it clear that Obama had provided the authority for the rescue.

Then Jack goes and says something like this:

The praise should be given to the on-scene commander, Frank Castellano, skipper of the USS Bainbridge, who determined that the hostage's life was in "imminent" danger -- a determination which coincided with the first time the Navy SEAL snipers on the fantail had clear shots at all three pirates -- and authorized the use of deadly force. Praise, too, of course, to the SEALs who made those remarkable shots.

Though President Obama was the beneficiary, not the instigator, of Cmdr. Castellano's decisiveness, many conservatives are unwilling to give him any credit at all. This is unfair and untrue. Mr. Obama did not stand in the way of the use of deadly force, as Jimmy Carter might have. And Mr. Obama's behavior throughout was presidential. He was right not to make public statements about the crisis while negotiations were ongoing. And the statement he issued after the successful rescue gave proper credit to the Navy personnel who were responsible.

But what's this about "As Jimmy Carter might have"? Granted Operation Eagle Claw failed (miserably) and that failure tainted Carter's reputation, but didn't Carter order it?

So what's all this about how Carter "might have" stood in the way of the use of deadly force?