Bill Clinton once lost the nuclear codes for months, and a 'comedy of errors' kept anyone from finding out

... around 2000, according to Shelton [Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry "Hugh" Shelton], a member of the department within the Pentagon that is responsible for all pieces of the nuclear process was dispatched to the White House to physically look at the codes and ensure they were correct — a procedure required to happen every 30 days. (The set of codes was to be replaced entirely every four months.)

That official was told by a presidential aide that President Bill Clinton did have the codes, but was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed.

The aide assured the official that Clinton took the codes seriously and had them close by. The official was dismayed, but he accepted the excuse and left.

When the next inspection took place the following month, that official was on vacation, according to Shelton, and another official was dispatched to the White House. The new official was met with the same excuse — the president is very busy, but takes the codes very seriously and has them on hand.

"This comedy of errors went on, without President Clinton's knowledge I'm sure, until it was finally time to collect the current set and replace them with the new edition," Shelton writes.

"At this point we learned that the aide had no idea where the old ones were, because they had been missing for months," he added. "The President never did have them, but he assumed, I'm sure, that the aide had them like he was supposed to."

North Korea Claims Test of Hydrogen Bomb for Long-Range Missile a ‘Success’

This can can't be kicked down the road any farther.

Trump: Iran deal was so bad it’s suspicious

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump says the nuclear deal with Iran is so bad, he is close to wondering whether it was done poorly on purpose.

“It’s almost like there has to be something else going on,” he said Saturday night at a rally in Biloxi, Miss. “I don’t think there is, I just don’t think they’re competent.”

What's really going on?

The Latest Defense of That Awful, Awful Deal

Bud Norman:

Our favorite conspiracy theory is that everything that has happened throughout history has been the according to the nefarious design of a secret cabal of Jews and Masons, and that Jackie Mason is the diabolical mastermind of it all, but even this attempt at satire cannot compare to the Obama administration’s defense of its awful, awful nuclear deal with the Iranian government....

Secretary of State John Kerry has granted an interview to the ever-faithful interviewer Jeffrey Goldberg over at the once-venerable Atlantic Monthly, a few Hollywood types have weighed in with a video saying the only alternative to the administration’s Iran deal is melted Frisbees and dead children and global Armageddon, the president himself has addressed a friendly audience at American University and gotten laughs with his ridicule of the deal’s opponent, and one of our crazier Facebook friends has posted a video purporting to prove that a millennial Christianist worldview is the other element in the only opposition to this awful, awful deal. In every case, we noticed, there was an implication that the only alternative to this awful, awful deal is an even more awful war with Iran, that such a conflict should properly be put off until Iran acquires the nuclear weapons that can be easily acquired under this deal and acquire the inter-continental ballistic delivery systems that are explicitly allow, which will surely be after the present administration has passed, and that anyone who disagrees is probably one of those people who belong to a certain unnamed ethnic group that is currently a beleaguered minority in the Middle East, or one of those other demographically significant yet unfashionable religious categories that retain their belief in the wisdom of the earlier three-fourths of the Christian bible as well as the later fourth and stand steadfast on religious ground in support of Israel, where even the left-wing crazies understand how very, very awful this deal is.

Deadlines

Bud Norman wonders where the nuclear negotiations with the apocalyptic Mullahs of Iran will end.  What will Obama give them? keeping in mind that some State Department official said that we don't allow foreign inspections of our military sites, it follows that demanding to see Iran's to check on their nukes - which they say they say they are not developing and if they are they're for peaceful purposes - is obviously bad.

Our guess is that the Iranians are holding out for a deal that will require America to provide them with a sizable nuclear arsenal, along with the needed inter-continental ballistic missiles that can deliver them to Tel Aviv and Riyadh and Paris and any other locales that offend their religious sensibilities, along with the global positioning system coordinates needed to land them there, and that the final sticking point that requires yet another deadline will be whether New York City and Los Angeles and Wichita are also included in the bargain. New York City and Los Angeles are full of reliably Democratic voters, so that would be the sort of sticking point that would require a couple more deadlines to be set, but we expect that some unnamed senior U.S. official or another will find something in America’s sinful past and current policies that makes it unfair to object to the nuclear annihilation of such as reliably Republican town as Wichita.

The president’s foreign policy legacy is at stake, after all, and almost any deal that’s cooked up can somehow been portrayed by the obeisant press as some sort of triumph, so surely that’s worth another two or three or four or however many deadlines are required to get there.

The Iranian Nuclear Deal in One Picture

The Historic, Greatest of All Time Iranian Nuke Deal

The Obama administration, practitioners of SMART DIPLOMACY™ see a possible deal in the making. In return for Iran’s agreement not to invade the US for the next 10 years with nothing larger than platoon-sized Jihadi fighters dressed as women, the US agreed to give up its nuclear weapons, accede to the Iranian demand that “the destruction of Israel is non-negotiatiable,” and the Kardashian sister of their choice, perhaps all three, Allah willing.

Taking a victory lap in the Rose Garden, President Obama proclaiming it the biggest foreign policy victory of all time stated that "Today, the United States, together with our allies and partners, has reached an historic understanding with Iran.” Few noticed the figure next to him, Uncle Sam, dressed in a tasteful barrel replacing the suit that had been lost during the negotiations.

News agency Reuters noted that “Many details still need to be worked out and diplomats close to the negotiations said the deal was fragile.” While the Washington Free Beacon said that “Iran Accuses U.S. of Lying About New Nuke Agreement, Says White House misleading Congress, American people with fact sheet.” 

Speaking on background, a horse-faced “senior State Department spokesman” who looked remarkably like John Kerry (who served in Viet Nam) admitted that there were some details that needed to be worked out depending on which of the Kardashian sisters was married at the moment, but that need not impede progress since Islam allows both polygamy and polyandry.

Despite the historic nature of this breakthrough for peace in our time, Saudi Arabia was busy buying up Russia’s second-hand nukes and ordering brand new, gold plated ones from Pakistan. Israel was looking up the precise location of Armageddon on old maps, while Christians in America were shutting down pizza shops after being threatened with death for refusing to hypothetically cater gay weddings, even though gays would rather be celibate than eat pizza at their weddings.

Right Wing Rags like the Washington Post complained that “Obama’s Iran deal falls far short of his own goals” and that: 

“The proposed accord will provide Iran a huge economic boost that will allow it to wage more aggressively the wars it is already fighting or sponsoring across the region.” 

But such sniping from the fever swamps of the paranoid Bible thumping, gay hating Right was to be expected and was quickly dismissed with a sniff by the NY Times Editorial Board who labelled the deal “Promising.”  

Well, that settles it; I hope Kim gets a good looking prince.  

So Yeah, Israel Has Nuclear Weapons

Israel has nuclear weapons. Unlike the United States, which has had nuclear weapons for more than 70 years and betrayed our trust by releasing documents that confirm this, we've never used nuclear weapons to kill anyone. Unlike Iran, which doesn't have nuclear weapons (yet), Israel has never threatened to blow a nation off the face of the map.

For the past 24 hours, after hearing that the United States, under the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama, deliberately stabbed Israel in the back by releasing documents that confirm what most of the world has known or suspected for decades, I was rendered mute with anger. Every post I thought of making usually included at least one four letter word and often many of them.

And so I waited and thought and then I remembered my mother speaking before the Austrian kids who then decided rather than visit Italy, they would take their senior class trip to Israel.

When the world is a bit condescending, antagonistic and certainly against Israel in so many ways, perhaps the United States unwittingly did us a favor. The word is out. Israel has nuclear weapons.

Does that scare you?

Good.