First Condoleeza Rice issues a memo to Foreign Service workers and diplomats abroad stating that they are banned from attending Obama’s speech given in Berlin yesterday because they are not allowed to show favoritism for a specific candidate.  Rice issued the memo, all of a sudden, just before Sen. Obama’s arrival in Berlin. 

Now the Pentagon tells Obama that he is not allowed to visit the military hospital as part of a political trip (Pentagon policy) and the McCain campaign (with full knowledge of the Pentagon policy) criticizes Sen. Obama for not visiting the hospital.  Unbelievable!!  Andrea Mitchell from MSNBC explained the situation this morning.

Mitchell:The background on the military flap is that they [Obama campaign] had clearly planned a trip to Ramstein [AFB].  They were planning to visit the injured troops. And then the Pentagon explained that they couldn’t go as part of a political trip.  The Obama campaign thought that they could go, leave the press corps on the tarmac, and then take off with military escort and make this one last visit.  As he did in Iraq, by the way.  He visited a casualty unit in the Green Zone, without photographers, as part of the congressional delegation. But the military said that the rules are that he could only go as part of a previously-arranged congressional delegation, to Ramstein

Clearly, people in the campaign are really angry. They had wanted this to be the final stop on the trip here in Germany, and to do it without the press corps, just to do it on his own.  But the objections of the military are that he is now being staffed by campaign aides, not by his Senate staff, who are the people of course with him when he went with Hagel and Jack Reed in Iraq. So, you know, the anger here in the campaign is pretty intense at the Pentagon. They feel that the military are drawing some lines–they’re not saying this publicly of course–but drawing lines that they might have drawn for other people.  He was planning to just go by himself, not with cameras, not with any entourage, as he had done in Walter Reed in the past in Washington, as he did in Iraq. Joe

JOE SCARBOROUGH: It’s curious, if that’s the case, why the campaign didn’t make that announcement yesterday, and allowed stories to go like this.  I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of he said/she said in the days to come about this.

MITCHELL: But they thought that they couldn’t win. Yeah. They thought that they were, you know, you know, no-win situation, that the Pentagon, perhaps the military with cooperation from some Republican operatives and, that’s the sort of scuttlebutt, that there have been some foreign policy advisers of John McCain with connections in the Pentagon who had something to do with this. But that is, perhaps, just the normal political paranoia of the season

It appears that the McCain campaign may have played a part in this sabotage as well. It is also apparent that the White House has become an inside McCain campaign operative….with our tax dollars by the way.