What's up with Jade Helm?

A lot of grinning, giggling and eye rolling in press rooms of late at the mention of upcoming military training exercise "Jade Helm 15".   Both Fox and CNN asked Sec Def Ash Carter about in his official Pentagon briefing yesterday, and others have brought it up in White House briefings.  The answer from Carter yesterday was so politically correct it was almost unintelligible.  Josh Earnest has been less charitable, evoking snickers, unmasking the press once again.  

This seems to be the trigger to the craziness....

As pointed out, the "hostile" and "permissive" areas tie directly to red and blue state maps of a political variety.  Was that intentional?  This map was developed by someone in the military, maybe at the Pentagon, and was subsequently leaked by someone in the military.  That alone says something about what some members of the services think about this exercise.

The main question is whether this map was an inside joke by some liberal in the DoD, a clueless coincidence, or a map of future takeover zones as the Alex Jones backyard bunker truther movement would have everyone believe.  Who created the map?  Was it ordered from above by civilians in the administration? 

When quizzed the military says it's just another training exercise using urban areas to simulate possible battlefield situations 'overseas'.  That's no doubt true--but one could also ask why such a massive scale and where are they preparing to fight?  Are they expecting a Biblical Middle East conflagration if the Iran nuke deal falls through and Israel launches a unilateral raid?   The paranoid nutcakes are not asking that question and the snickering media aren't either, but perhaps someone should ask the Obama folks after all the snickering dies down. 

After all, we were told the dumb Bush wars has been ended responsibly and AQ is apparently still on the run.  And the Iran nuke deal is not going to fall through and smash Obama's legacy--the proof of this is in the way the administration (and their media lap dogs) have ignored the war between Iran's proxy in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, along with the Iranians capturing a US-protected commercial vessel and holding it for ransom.  Heard much about those stories over and above Brady and Baltimore?     


So yeah, this Jade Helm thing is a little weird.  It's not a take-over of Texas, there won't be any FEMA trains sending Tea Partiers to martial law internment camps.   Life will go on.  But if this is just a trolling operation by the Obama administration, it needs to come out.  And if it's in prep for something big, that might be newsworthy, too.  Obviously somebody leaked the map/plans for a reason.