[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe Obama was afraid of being booed by the Scouts. The Secret Service could intimidate the crowd at David Letterman's show when Hillary was running for Senator, so that they wouldn't do anything to embarrass her, but thousands of Scouts might be harder to control.

If Obama did think that Gates was going to run in 2012, that would give him a reason to see to it that the surge in Afghanistan did fail...but I really doubt Gates has a 2012 run in mind.

[Big Bureaucracy]

You may be right. The only thing: I don’t want to believe that somebody would cause the war to fail to hurt an opponent in elections.

[Big Bureaucracy]

By the way: if Obama is afraid from the Boy Scouts - he should be impeached - the US has real enemies. We don’t need a chicken-in-chief.