Still Freezing Here, But About To Warm Up---With A Heat Wave Expected In D.C. And Robert Gates At the Center of the 'Vortex'

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: OBAMACARE WORKPLACE TRAINWRECK AHEAD:  16 MILLION GAINING WHILE 30 MILLION LOSING COVERAGE

HILLARY---SCANDAL SURROUNDS HER
    

FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT GATES' NEW BOOK DUTY WILL SOON BRING SOME  UNSEASONABLE GLOBAL HEAT  TO WASHINGTON. 

MANY IMPLICATIONS FOR BENGHAZI 

The book will be released next week---January 14---and is already causing quite a stir. Gates has worked for several  administrations and surely has more-than-adequate reason to compare good leadership with bad.

For some of us, this could be a breath of fresh air. Several pieces out today give preliminary assessments---here,  and here. Can't wait to read more, but I'm betting this is going to be a major story over the next few weeks and may even affect the outcomes of the '14 and '16 elections.

The Obama White House will go into major disaster mode and attempt to discredit Gate's book, however, here are the top ten revelations of Gate's memoir.

Here's a dynamite excerpt and link to the WSJ piece  tonight by Gates himself:

All too often during my 4½ years as secretary of defense, when I found myself sitting yet again at that witness table at yet another congressional hearing, I was tempted to stand up, slam the briefing book shut and quit on the spot. The exit lines were on the tip of my tongue: I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit. Find somebody else. It was, I am confident, a fantasy widely shared throughout the executive branch. 

Much of my frustration came from the exceptional offense I took at the consistently adversarial, even inquisition-like treatment of executive-branch officials by too many members of Congress across the political spectrum—creating a kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when television cameras were present. But my frustration also came from the excruciating difficulty of serving as a wartime defense secretary in today's Washington. Throughout my tenure at the Pentagon, under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, I was, in personal terms, treated better by the White House, Congress and the press for longer than almost anyone I could remember in a senior U.S. government job. So why did I feel I was constantly at war with everybody? Why was I so often so angry? Why did I so dislike being back in government and in Washington? 

It was because, despite everyone being "nice" to me, getting anything consequential done was so damnably difficult—even in the midst of two wars. I did not just have to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and against al Qaeda; I also had to battle the bureaucratic inertia of the Pentagon, surmount internal conflicts within both administrations, avoid the partisan abyss in Congress, evade the single-minded parochial self-interest of so many members of Congress and resist the magnetic pull exercised by the White House, especially in the Obama administration, to bring everything under its control and micromanagement. Over time, the broad dysfunction of today's Washington wore me down, especially as I tried to maintain a public posture of nonpartisan calm, reason and conciliation.

Very honest. Here's a bit more on the Obama administration's micromanagement or meddling. Be sure to read the whole piece, linked above:

Most of my conflicts with the Obama administration during the first two years weren't over policy initiatives from the White House but rather the NSS's micromanagement and operational meddling, which I routinely resisted. For an NSS staff member to call a four-star combatant commander or field commander would have been unthinkable when I worked at the White House—and probably cause for dismissal. It became routine under Obama. I directed commanders to refer such calls to my office. The controlling nature of the Obama White House, and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me.