My take on Bergdahl

Many people are asking if the trade of Bowe Bergdahl for 5 members of the Taliban was worth it. The polls I've seen say more say no than yes but it's not a majority. Here's what I think.

John McCain has referred to these guys are "the hardest of the hard-core." Each of these guys has there own wikipedia page and their descriptions show that they are pretty high ranking. If these guys were five henchmen who threw their hands up in the air when a black ops team invaded and took over the compound of their big bad boss it would be very questionable if the trade was worth it. But these are not henchmen, these guys are the big bad bosses.

To me this trade seems like a game of chess where you gain a pawn or bishop at the expense of your opponent getting 5 queens. It is worth it if your a move away from being able to use that piece for a checkmate. Maybe that's the case but public doesn't have a way of knowing so. I'm a big fan of 24 so I'm inclined to speculate that there's more to this trade than what meets the eye and that perhaps what the United States has really gained is much more than one Sergeant. From what I understand it's been said that he was a deserter and sort of went AWOL. I kind of wonder if he was doing some top secret mission. Who knows. But in my opinion, there is no way that trade was worth it based off of the information available on the surface.

Elections have consequences

Today I saw a program on MSNBC talking about Eric Cantor's loss in the primary election. It showed footage of a meeting only a few days after the inauguration in 2009 between President Obama, Eric Cantor, and others. The meeting was about passing and economic stimulus bill. In this meeting Congressmen Cantor made his pitch as party leaders do somewhere in this meeting President Obama says "elections have consequences," and he tells them that he won.

Depending on who you ask, someone might say that the President was unwilling to listen to modest proposals. Someone else might say that Eric Cantor was unwilling to accept the reality that Americans had just voted for the Democrats and their agenda and that even from Day 1, if President Obama was for something, than Eric Cantor and the republicans were against it. The later, I thought was the tone of the program I saw on MSNBC. But that's the point of my post.

Just a few minutes later I was riding my bike and thinking about the president's statement and I thought to myself, "He's totally a hypocrite for saying that."

The 2008 election was about many different issues but the outcome was pretty definitive. But I feel there was another election where the president didn't adhere to the spirit of the quote I mentioned. That was the Massachusetts senate special election where republican Scott Brown was elected to the Senate by a pretty comfortable margin. But in my view it seemed the president decided that this didn't matter and that he could ignore it and do what he wanted. In other words it seems to me that he thinks he can set the rules of what is kosher in politics and fold them so that they work only to his advantage. I said something similar in the bottom paragraph from a post I made earlier this year.