Author: Mark Noonan

In Congress, July 4th, 1776

Mark Noonan4 Comments

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

…We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

World War One

Mark Noonan24 Comments

On June 28th it will be 100 years since the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – Franz Ferdinand – was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering the First World War. While I have over my life studied much history of war, I believe I have spent more time on the First World War than any other.  This is because there is something horrendously tragic about the whole thing – thought not, in my view, for the reasons most often given.

For most people with a cursory knowledge of the war, it is just a bloody, miserable waste.  Four years in the trenches with men being sent senselessly to their deaths by insensate commanders.  There is a bit of truth in that, but it does really get to the bottom of the matter.  In my view, our civilization committed mass suicide during that war – over a long period of time prior to the war, starting really in the 16th century but getting rolling in the 18th, we had stripped ourselves of that patina of Judeo-Christian morality which prevented us from doing really horrible things, while at the same time a false sense of security was created by the rising, capitalist prosperity (for some, not all).  We thought in 1914 that we had thrown off the shackles of a dead past and were moving inexorably into a bright future.  What we found is that we had lost our moral compass and were descending into a nightmare.

The men of 1914 went off to war singing.  In all the belligerent powers there was a sense of destiny and awe – we were going to have this thing out and then build a new world of peace, justice and prosperity. Listen to Rupert Brooke:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Brooke ended up dying in the war – sadly, not in a heroic battle, but of blood poisoning.  But that doesn’t take away from the reality of what he did, and what he believed in. In his poems we see the whole spirit which animated all those caught up in the cataclysm. A few years on, Siegfried Sassoon wrote this:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

That is quite a change.  One can put it down to the sheer horror of war, but it is more than that, it is the betrayal of an ideal.  It was an ideal of patriotism, of manly courage, of the surety that your nation was glorious and deserved dominion unchecked because of the good that was in it. That it proved a false ideal doesn’t make the betrayal of it any less an affront.  Indeed, it might make it worse.  Marching off to war the men thought one thing and found something very different.  What the found was that ideal was non-existent.  What they didn’t know – and most people still have discovered to this day – is that the ideal was wrong because it wasn’t founded upon a firm understanding of God.  To be manly and patriotic is a grand thing, as long as one firmly recognizes that God is Sovereign.  Solzhenitsyn said that the problem of the 20th century was that Man had forgotten about God.  Indeed – and in the searing abyss of World War One, men found that as they had not God, they had nothing and all the patriotism and manly courage in the world could not redeem the fact that 9 million men had died in battle, and victory had been bought so dear by the victors that it was indistinguishable from defeat.  The real pity of it was that people did not, on the whole, turn back to God.

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Is the Solution to Obama a Parliamentary Government?

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Part of the genius of our Founders was the really clever way they blended three forms of government into one.  We are part monarchy, part Republic, part democracy.  The Democracy, of course, is the House – one man, one vote and everyone counts.  The Republic is the Senate – each constituent State has equal representation regardless of population.  The monarch, of course, is the President.  Most people don’t fully realize this aspect of our government – but the President is as much a king as anyone who ever sat a throne except for one thing:  his term of office is limited by years rather than by his life span.

It is interesting that in Churchill’s history of the First World War – The World Crisis – the description he gives of the American government observes that in practical terms, in 1917, the American President held more power than any other single individual on earth.  That was written before the enormities of Stalin and Hitler, but by Churchill’s lights at the time, it was correct – even though Russia had a Czar and Germany and Austria-Hungary had Kaisers. The President is at once party leader, head of State and head of government.  A vigorous person in that office is able to impose his will upon Congress and the people and move policy in the way he desires, even without violating the Constitution. And the President can pretty much get America into war any time he wants by simple fact of moving military forces under his own authority anywhere he wants, and letting the resultant events almost compel a declaration from Congress.

I believe that our Founders set this up quite deliberately – that they wanted a system which embodies what they perceived as best in all forms of government, but with each side checked vigorously by other Powers in government. And it worked very well – we had our leader who could act decisively in an emergency while also ensuring that final power to actual change things was in the hands of elected officials, with a final referee, as it were, in the Supreme Court to ensure that neither President nor Congress strayed beyond the bounds of settled law.  There was, however, a weakness in the system and it is a weakness which cannot be avoided in any system: it is dependent for its operation upon the actions of human beings.  Human beings are Fallen and thus get things wrong; usually very often. But we had a great bit of good luck at our start in that our first President – our first King, as it were – was George Washington.  Here was a man who genuinely held himself to be no more than the first magistrate of a free people and while he could have stayed in office until he died – and, indeed, at one point could have gotten himself crowned as actual king – he voluntarily gave up office and retired to private life.

This example of humble Presidential leadership stood us in good stead for quite a long time, but by the time Theodore Roosevelt took office, it started to wear thin as he and most of his successors thought of themselves not as agents of an impartial government, but men of destiny who had to place their indelible imprint upon the nation and the world.  From Theodore Roosevelt to Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama is a pretty straight line, only slightly pushed off course by Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, who did have a much more Washingtonian ideal of the Presidency than most over the past century.  It was Theodore Roosevelt who first denied the limitations of power in the Founder’s system – saying that unless something was specifically forbidden a President in the Constitution, the President was free to do it.  This was a watershed event – and quite in contrast to Roosevelt’s recent predecessor Grover Cleveland who routinely vetoed legislation for the sole reason that he found no warrant for the law in the powers granted to the government by the Constitution. Now we’ve finished the task and in Obama, we’ve got a President who is essentially claiming that unless someone can actually stop him, he can do as he wishes – the pen and the phone are mightier than the Constitution.  And, so, how do we fix this?

The Founders thought they had provided sufficient safe guards against such things by inserting into the Constitution the power of the legislative to impeach the executive. It was thought that out of a jealous desire to preserve legislative power that the legislature would vigorously oppose the executive and be willing to use the extreme sanction of impeachment when a President started abusing his office.  It didn’t really work out like that – the first impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the merest bit of partisan hackery where the legislative majority simply  wanted to do away with an uncooperative executive; the second against Nixon was only successful because Nixon’s own allies abandoned him; the third against Clinton failed because Clinton’s allies refused to abandon him even though it was clear that Clinton has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”. And that was that – once it became clear that partisanship would rule the day in impeachment, then it became a requirement that the Senate have 67 firmly committed members to vote for conviction before impeachment would even be considered and given the partisan nature of things, this means a Senate wherein at least 67 members are from the opposition party.  You can look back in time and see how few and far between are the times when any party controlled 67% of the Senate seats.  This means that impeachment is functionally impossible. We need another means of controlling the executive.

We could decide to lower the bar on impeachment convictions, and that might be a sorta-good way to go.  Better than no restrictions, after all.  But if we made it so that only 55 Senators had to vote to convict, then we would see more partisan hackery in the matter of impeachment where the Senate majority just wants to get rid of a President who isn’t cooperative.  That is fatal to good government quite as much as an out of control executive.  Maybe, and this is just me starting to think it over, we should remove the President from day to day executive authority?  That would be to interpose a Prime Minister between the President and the operations of government on a day to day basis.  A Parliamentary regime.

We’d still want a Commander in Chief for war time and other such emergencies, but we also very much want a President who can’t use his pen and phone to alter law.  So, we amend the Constitution to command the President to nominate as Prime Minister the leader of the party holding the most seats in the House of Representatives, and that person – upon confirmation via the Senate – nominates the heads of the government Departments and monitors and controls their actions subject to approval or overthrow by the House. We would make it so that the President signs laws into approval, or vetoes them as he desires.  He would still command the armed forces, negotiate treaties (with the advice and consent of the Senate as now) and could recommend legislation – but in what the Departments would do, he would have no say. And the people who do have the say in the actions of the Department, they can be removed by a simple majority vote in the House – and if the people don’t like how government is going, then every two years they get a chance to change the composition of the House, and thus get a government hopefully more to their liking.

Yes, this could lead to a situation – as it does in France, from time to time – where the President and the Prime Minister are of different parties.  Would it really be that bad if they had to work together?  The PM can want this, that or the other thing, but he’s not going to get it into law unless the President agrees – ditto on the President’s side. Other changes can also be made (I’ve long been in favor of limit the President to one, six-year term, eg), but we do have to think seriously about how we are going to ensure the means of cutting off a President – like Obama, but also like Johnson and FDR and Wilson in the past – who doesn’t care what the law says and is just going to do what he wants, defying anyone to stop him, secure in the knowledge that his opponents won’t have those 67 Senators necessary to convict on impeachment. At any rate, if anyone has a better idea, I’m all ears.

 

After Iraq and Afghanistan, What Should Our Policy Be?

Mark Noonan47 Comments

There was just a small chance at the end of 2008 that our effort in Iraq would work.  By extreme exertions we had mostly pacified the nation and with a bit of luck and more hard work, Iraq might have slowly developed into a pluralist democracy, thus providing a both a bulwark against extremism and a model for the rest of the long-suffering people of the Middle East.  It did not, however, work out like that.  Rather than keep a presence in Iraq, we withdrew all our forces and essentially left Iraq to its own devices.  Power does abhor a vacuum and as we weren’t there and the Iraqis weren’t quite up to the task, other powers started flowing into Iraq.  Now we see the result of that – a clash which is now really more between some people who want to create a Caliphate without reference to the existence of Iraq as a nation, and the Iranians who are bound and determined to keep control of as much Iraqi territory as possible, also without reference to the existence of Iraq as a nation.  Those in Iraq who would prefer neither Iranian nor Caliphate domination are squeezed between the two and will simply have to choose which evil they think is lesser.

At the end of 2008, Afghanistan was seeing an upsurge in trouble as the Islamist effort in Iraq was beaten back and Afghanistan became the only place an Islamist could fight the United States.  In the 2008 campaign, Obama told the American people that Iraq was the distraction, but that Afghanistan was the war we had to fight.  This is why we cut out of Iraq and then surged into Afghanistan.  Not with the number of troops recommended by senior military leaders and while giving a time frame for our withdrawal, thus allowing the enemy to know how long they had to endure before we quit – but, still, the effort was made in accordance with Obama’s oft-stated premise that we had to fight the war in Afghanistan.  In Afghanistan, it also didn’t work out.  The enemy knew we weren’t there forever and continual restrictions upon the ability of our forces to conduct the sort of brutal war necessary to defeat the Islamist forces made certain that victory wasn’t possible.  Meanwhile, the Afghan government descended into ever worse corruption and clearly started making arrangements for what would happen after the United States departed – mostly in terms of giving power to those who were fighting against us.

After all is said and done, whatever we were hoping to accomplish by going into Afghanistan and Iraq has proven a failure.  For you liberals out there who are of the opinion that killing bin Laden was key and winning in Afghanistan was right because Obama said so: you were wrong.  For us conservatives who believed that we could build a democratic, Muslim nation:  we were wrong.  For those on the left who want to harp upon circa-2004 BUSH LIED!!!!1!! memes; just shut up and go away.  Seriously – no one wants to hear that nonsense any longer.  However one felt about the efforts, they have clearly failed and now it is time to re-assess our policies.

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The Un-Death of the TEA Party

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The obituary of the TEA Party has been a regular feature in the MSM since about 5 minutes after the movement started. A good deal of the motivation behind this is the ardent desire on the part of the Ruling Class – and thus 90% of the MSM – that the TEA Party be dead.  The TEA Party is very much not wanted for the simple reason that if Congress ever has a working majority of TEA Party politicians – or, my goodness!, a TEA Party orientated President – then the game is up.

It cannot be over emphasized just how much of America’s rich and powerful are rich and powerful simply because they are juiced-in to Washington, DC.  The life of Harry Reid is an excellent illustration of it.  Harry Reid really did come up from nothing.  His life story would be an inspiring rags-to-riches story except for one thing:  he got rich by the power of government.  He really was the son of a hard rock miner and a woman who took in laundry to make ends meet.  He really did walk miles to school (I’ve driven over the rout; it simply must have been a long, hard hike when Reid did it way back when).  From that background of grinding poverty, Reid is now fabulously wealthy – but he’s never actually done anything.  All he’s been is a government office-holder on one level or another since he graduated from law school (I’ve talked to some who do advise that for a short period Reid was in private law practice…but I don’t see much evidence of it, and it certainly wasn’t enough to build up Reid’s current level of wealth).  Using his connections and his political power, Reid has managed to engage in various financial schemes to get rich – some of which were clearly legal, others a lot more questionable, but in every case greased along by the fact of Reid’s membership in the Ruling Class; none of these deals, bottom line, are open to people who are not juiced-in with government.  And Reid is legion.  There are millions of people like him at the federal, State and local level, in and out of government, but all sharing one thing in common:  the ability to tap into government to get rich.

There are several rules regarding membership in this Ruling Class:

1.  Never attack the Ruling Class, as an entity (its ok to turn on individual members who get caught in a jam, but no attacks on individuals must be allowed to spread to an understanding that the problem is systemic).

2.  Never defend the traditional forces of the Republic.  You can make noises about supporting the troops and such – especially for the Rubes on the 4th of July, etc – but never defend that which actually made America great.  The reason for this is simple: defending what made America great means attacking what is now making American small – the Ruling Class. Stern, republican virtues and emulation of people like Washington and Madison are kryptonite.  This goes doubly so for the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of American morality – go ahead and be Catholic, Evangelical or Orthodox Jew all you want, but for crying out loud, when it is time to choose between defending that morality or destroying it, make some insipid statement about being opposed on moral grounds but not justified in defending it on legal grounds.  It is a requirement, you see, that the Ruling Class destroy traditional forces and the old morality – in their view, it is the only way they can guarantee their power indefinitely.  Demoralized people will submit to be ruled.

3.  Never, ever, ever, EVER agree to reduce the size of government.  Doesn’t matter if you ran as a small-government conservative.  That was just for the hill-apes back home.  Once in the Ruling Class, your job is to keep government large and growing larger.  How else are the new-comers to the Ruling Class to gain their wealth?  The Ruling Class must judiciously bribe and corrupt small sections of the people in order to ensure that things remain as they are, and this can only be done by an ever larger government. At best, you are permitted to pretend to slow the rate of increase in the size of government.

You do all that, and you’ll get along fine and the rest of the Ruling Class will defend you, even if they are allegedly in opposition to you.  They’ll be your buddies.  They’ll ensure that you, too, are given your opportunities to increase your wealth via government-greased deals. They’ll write laws so that you and they can pretty much be openly bribed (and they’ll call it “campaign finance reform”, into the bargain!). True, some of you might have to be thrown to the wolves from time to time, but most of you never will – and even if you do have to lose your particular office, there will be book deals, television shows, etc to keep you on the gravy train.  Just be true to the Ruling Class and all of this will be yours.

And then along comes the TEA Party.

Its not that TEA Party types are particular against any person – individual members of the Ruling Class do become lightening rods of TEA Party criticism, of course, but it really isn’t a personal thing.  TEA Party types are those people who hold to the old morality and the stern, republican virtues of our Founders.  And thus they see that, in a sense, it doesn’t matter if someone like Reid never broke a law – he simply should not be rich.  The fact that he is rich proves the system corrupt. And from there comes the requirement that the system be radically changed.  This is bull in a china shop kinda stuff…and it crosses party lines, which really irritates the Ruling Class because they hope to keep it a party vs party thing and thus have us divided….but if the people get united in a general desire to change the system, then everyone in the system is cooked.   And, so, the Ruling Class unites to destroy the TEA Party – and continually writes the TEA Party’s obituary, only to have it come surging up again like it did in the Virginia-07 House race on Tuesday.

And it will keep surging up – it won’t go away until the system is changed or the United States is destroyed as a nation by an unchanged system.  As long as there is any body of people in the United States who can bother to read what the Founders wrote, who heard stories about grandpa and great-grandpa or who just understands that only people who work hard at a productive trade should be rich, there will be a TEA Party.  And as the Ruling Class shoves America closer and closer to dissolution as a nation, the TEA Party will just get more vehement:  time is running out, after all.

Cantor’s defeat caught all of us by surprise – but it really, in a sense, shouldn’t have.  Cantor is a nice guy and he’s not some wild-eyed liberal.  He’s a rather conventional GOPer of the Ruling Class.  His opponent wasn’t and ran a campaign which spoke to the public desire for leadership which would challenge the Ruling Class, rather than make deals to increase the debt limit or an amnesty program without any realistic border security provisions. Most of the time, unknown and unfunded TEA Party candidates will fail – simply for not being able to get their message out there.  On the other hand, some times they will win – and so the GOPers who are part of the Ruling Class better take note: you have a decision to make.

You can either dig your heels in to defend the current system, or abandon it and thus, perhaps, become instrumental in the reform and revival of your nation.  True, if you turn against the Ruling Class, as an entity, you might lose – you might be tossed out on your ear.  The TEA Party impulse in the United States might not be victorious and America might be doomed.  On the other hand, if you join with the forces of reform, then they just might win…and while you’ll have no way to make any money off the deal and the Ruling Class will treat you with disdain, you might be able to save the United States and go into the history books with the fame of an honorable name.  You’ll also be able to look yourself in the mirror.  But come what may, what isn’t going to happen as long as the Republic endures is the death of the TEA Party.  It isn’t an aberration – it is America trying to save herself.

Update: Mickey Kaus notes Brat’s last-minute pitch for votes:

The entire amnesty and low-wage agenda collapses if Cantor loses — all the billions of special interests dollars, all the favors, all the insider dealing — all of it is stopped in its tracks tomorrow if the patriotic working families of Virginia send Eric Cantor back home tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, the middle class has its chance to fight back. 

Tomorrow, the people of Virginia can show up to the polls and defeat the entire crony corporate lobby. 

Tomorrow, we can restore our borders, rebuild our communities, and revitalize our middle class.

Yeah, that sort of thing is precisely what the TEA Party is all about.

D-Day, Bergdahl and the End of American Warfare

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Seventy years ago, today, of course. Allied forces landed at Normandy and after a hard fight, secured a lodgement upon the continent of Europe which ensured that, come what may, Hitler’s regime was doomed.  It was a bloody business, allied forces losing more than 4,000 dead on the first day, with the worst of it being a Omaha beach, which was a bloody shambles, redeemed only by the sublime courage of soldiers who even after everything went wrong, made the decision to press ahead against odds until the Germans were driven off the beach.

Many have made the observation that there does not seem to be that spirit alive in America any longer.  Our modern youth simply could not take on the sort of men who manned Hitler’s Atlantic Wall with any hope of success. There is a bit of truth in that – in the sense that some of America’s youth are so demoralized that they not only couldn’t wade under fire towards an enemy-held beach, but probably wouldn’t even be in the military, no matter what the stakes of the war were.  But there is also in America a large number of youth who would do it.  They are the men and women who are currently in our military today; and the several million who have passed through recently. We mobilized a bit more than 12 million personnel in World War Two and today, I think, even if we made it entirely voluntary, we could raise that amount for a putative World War Three – and keeping in mind that only about 10-20% of the WWII mobilized actually saw combat, that would be sufficient for us to crush any combination of enemies out there.

The big question becomes: would we actually desire to crush them?  That is where the Bergdahl case comes in.  We don’t know precisely what happened to him at this point – leave aside stories you might have heard, the bare-bones are that he was a US soldier who left his post.  Whether he left is post in a fit of pique, an abundance of folly or with malevolent design is entirely unknown. In brief, he is a deserter, but we don’t know much else about it.  But let us consider the war we had Bergdahl fight.  There is no demand for victory; no desire for victory; not much attention to the effort paid by the Commander in Chief; our enemies are free to use whatever tactics they think best while our troops are hemmed in by rules of engagement; and our enemies, if captured, are held in Gitmo – while our liberal friends paint that place as a house of horrors, it is really not all that bad a prison and it is absolutely clear that nothing bad will ever happen to the prisoners. Meanwhile, soldiers like Bergdahl can easily access websites which tell him – from American sources! – that our effort in Afghanistan is criminal and that we are the bad guys.  Small wonder that a soldier or two might get disillusioned and walk off.  The problem with Bergdahl is not that he deserted and its not even so much that five Taliban were released to get him back – the problem is that we aren’t fighting for victory and that there were five Taliban to be released.  Things used to be done a bit differently.

D Day was  pretty much a straight-up fight between professional armies – but even so many thousands of French civilians were killed.  By aerial bombardment, artillery, cross-fire – and I’ll bet because of horrific mistakes.  A squad of US soldiers hears a sound coming from a basement and tosses in a grenade or lights up the place with a flame thrower…only afterwards discovering that it was mom, dad and three kids hiding in there.  It happens.  It is horrible.  But these days it would be classed as a crime by our liberal elites, the MSM would go nuts and the soldiers would be lucky to get off with dishonorable discharges.  War is a nasty business.  It is best not to fight them – but once  you’re in a war then you are, indeed, in a war.  People will be killed.

But even in World War Two, there were irregular combats, and combatants. Later, after D-Day, a German mission was to put their troops in US uniforms and send them behind our lines to sow confusion and panic.  Some of these German troops were captured, in US uniform. Three of the German troops were captured on December 17th, 1944. They were given a court martial on December 21st, 1944.  They were sentenced to death.  The death sentence was carried out by firing squad on December 23rd, 1944. Six days from capture to firing squad, boys and girls.  That is war.  That is what you do with irregular forces who are captured.  The five Taliban we gave up for Bergdahl should have been dead years ago – and dead per the Geneva Convention, as those captured Germans were dead per the Geneva Convention (liberals love to throw the Geneva Convention out there – but I wonder if any of them have actually looked at the Convention in relation to irregular forces? I doubt it very much).

I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Breaker Morant – about a trio of Australian soldiers being tried for murder during the Boer War.  One of the accused explains how things work in this short scene:

The movie is great and I highly recommend it, because it points out the absurdity of trying to apply civil court procedures and rules of evidence to a war.  A war is by its nature an extraordinary thing.  It is bound by rules and some of these rules are iron-hard – but the purpose of your military in a war is to destroy the enemy.  Have many thought about that of late?  Destroy.  Wipe out.  Render incapable of any further resistance.  That is what is being sought – and you can’t do that by being gentle with terrorists, nor bringing your own soldiers up on charges because they did something in the heat of battle which you, safe and dry at home, feel was distasteful.

Soldiers are to be brave.  They are to defend the weak and oppose the strong. A good soldier will lay down his life for his comrades – and for women and children…but a good soldier might also shoot an enemy out of hand, or toss that grenade into the cellar, thinking it’s the enemy down there, when it later turns out it wasn’t.  Commanders in war are to seek victory – victory at all costs.  Since the end of World War Two, we haven’t sought victory at all costs…and over time we have told soldiers to be less and less like soldiers and act more and more like social workers with guns. But our enemies haven’t changed.  They want victory – and they are willing to give all they have to get it.  It is small wonder that we lost in Korea, lost in Vietnam…and will now lose in Afghanistan.  Small wonder, also, that some US soldiers get confused and walk off their posts.

We need a national debate about this – 2016 would be a good time for it.  The Presidential candidates should be asked just what does it mean to be at war.  They are seeking to be Commander in Chief, after all, so let us get some idea of what they think of the job.  Will they put on trial a soldier who urinates on a dead enemy?  Who kills civilians in a cross-fire?  Will they keep terrorists alive and well fed for years, or shoot them within 6 days of capture?  If we go to war, will it be for absolute victory, or just something to do to keep the poll numbers up until after the next election, and then flush the whole business down the toilet?  It is important to have this because it is important, also, that we, the people, consider what we want.  Do we even want to have an armed forces?  Do we understand what armed forces do?  Are we willing to send men and women into unimaginable horror with unclear orders and civilians second-guessing every move?  Or will we send them into that horror with orders to kill and to win?  The answers will go far to determine if, indeed, we could stomach another D-Day – whether we can ever win another war.

How Much Stupid is There?

Mark Noonan125 Comments

Well, let’s wander ’round the ‘net and see:

The mayor of Houston – a bit of a commie island in a sea of pure Texas, as it were – rammed through an ordinance essentially making Houston restrooms non-gender.  Anyone can wander into whatever room depending, I guess, on how they feel about their gender at any given time.  Everyone who thinks – which means ever non-liberal out there – knows what will happen: guys who want to ogle women while they are in the rest room will claim they “felt” rather female that day…and the result will be civil lawsuits by the ogled women.  Its just a monumental bit of liberal stupidity, and its now the law in Houston.

UPDATE: A bit more from Texas:

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of “irate homeowners”]. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore.”

And she can’t put two and two together, it would seem…

Coal-fired power plants came to the rescue of freezing Americans this past winter.  Naturally, Obama’s response to this is to cook up more EPA regulations which will close coal-fired power plants. Enjoy your igloo, fellow Americans in the north.  And please note that red-State Democrats pretty much have White House blessing to run against the President’s new rules.

Of late our liberals are fretful that a bit of ice appearing to melt in Antarctica will cause sea levels to rise by 3 feet by 2100.  Trouble is, none of them appear to have checked the math.  Someone did and found for this to happen, ice-melt would have to be nearly 7 times as rapid as the warmists claim.

Obama apparently thought that the most credible person he could put out there on the Sunday talk shows to explain the Bergdahl prisoner-swap was Susan Rice.  Well, nothing like a new foreign policy issue and possible Obama illegality to at least get the VA scandal off the front pages.

Pinkos in Seattle vote to jack up the minimum wage to $15 an hour.  Businesses start to close or seek means of using fewer employees.  Pinkos are stunned – they really couldn’t see this coming.  After all, every liberal economist they can find tells them that raising the minimum wage increases employment.

The UK will start counting the illegal drug trade and prostitution in its GDP numbers. You know, I’ve always thought that all GDP numbers are BS, anyways – so, adding ladies of the evening and your local crack dealer to the mix is really no more than doubling down on stupid. I don’t want to know a bunch of quack economic numbers – I want to know real things: how much steel did we produce?  How many transport-truck miles were driven? How many loaves of bread were sold?  You tell me that and if I can compare it to past activity, I’ll really know if the economy is up or down.

Democrats promise they’ll have to really good slogans for the 2014 election any day now.

Someone has noticed that all the health food trends have one thing in common – they are usually found to be wrong over time.

 

Hitler and Stalin

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The History Channel is about to premier a new documentary series about the World Wars and the hook seems to be how the one effected the other, especially the leaders.  The ad campaign is starting to cause some grief in how they portray Hitler and Stalin.  For Hitler, the tag lines are “World War 1: Made him a madman; World War 2; Made him a monster”, while for Stalin it is “World War 1: Made him a man; World War 2; Made him a tyrant”. People are correctly pointing out that Hitler was a monster – and Stalin a tyrant – long before World War Two came along.

I don’t want to pre-judge the History Channel show – it might be good; I was intrigued when I saw an ad for it tonight – but it is clear that, as per usual for documentaries, it won’t get it exactly right.  This is because film documentaries can’t get it right – time constraints prevent a full airing of all relevant facts, even when the documentary maker is determined to be as truthful as possible.  To really explain Stalin and Hitler would take many hundreds of pages of closely typed information and to fully understand, the reader would already have to be familiar with a great deal of history leading up to their era.  Most people simply lack this – and always will.  Except for people with a genuine love for history, it just gets tedious (after all, who is going to want to get into the life stories of Georg Ritter von Schonerer and Victor Adler? Well, if you want to understand Hitler fully, you kinda have to – and then understand the complete intellectual collapse which was represented by Schonerer and Adler – who got together at one point to hammer out a social reform program only to go their separate ways…Schonerer to be the grandfather of Nazi Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism, Adler to be the founder of the Austrian Social-Democrat Party…with the added kicker that Adler was Jewish). It is, in short, hard to nutshell people like Hitler and Stalin.  And just about impossible to do a proper study of the men in a television documentary.

And, so, if anyone is expecting the History Channel’s new show to really provide insight into such men, you are doing to be disappointed, even if the actual show itself is interesting and, at points, informative.  But there is a real danger in taking such people in a superficial manner as it can lead to gross misunderstanding of how they came about.  Remember, while people can look back in horror upon them, it must not be forgotten that at one point tens of millions of people followed them…and, especially in the case of Hitler, followed them with extreme devotion.  People really believed – and while we can comfort ourselves by asserting (correctly) that such people were tricked by scoundrels, we still have to think about just why they were tricked.

There are pat answers, of course – all of them sharing the basic fact that they are wrong. In the case of Stalin, the general line goes that he hijacked Leninism and fooled people into thinking he was the proper heir of the great man. For Hitler, it is asserted that he nursed German national pride which as bruised after the German defeat in World War Two – and both men selected enemies whom the people could hate with wild abandon (Hitler and the Jews, of course; but Stalin and the Kulaks, as well). There is some truth in that, but not even close to the actuality. The more important thing I’ve discovered, from my very extensive reading and long reflection, is that both men got on because the people they tricked had nothing else they actually believed in.

This, to me, is the key to understanding all the horrors we have subjected ourselves to this past 100 years.  Most of us believe nothing, and so believe anything that comes down the pike.  Solzhenitsyn put it neatly when he said the problem of the 20th century is that we had forgot about God.  Not having anything real to repose our trust in, we have given our trust to one charlatan after another.  Not all of us, of course – a few have had the saving grace of believing in something and thus keeping a clear eye.  Of course, a great deal of precisely such people were mown down in the death camps of Hitler and Stalin.

People like Hitler and Stalin, like all good con artists, insert into unbelief something to believe in.  Something which seems neat, logical and covering all bases.  These two men used terror as a means of reinforcing their deceptions, but terror wasn’t needed all the time – and in Hitler’s case, was hardly needed at all, in the sense that most Germans weren’t terrified by the Hitler regime, but delighted with it (unlike Stalin’s, Russia, in Hitler’s Germany people could come and go pretty much as they pleased – Stalin dared not let anyone out, while Hitler was certain that any Germans he allowed to travel out of Germany would come happily come back…in the end, Hitler was the more astute liar than Stalin). But Hitler and Stalin weren’t alone – and they have their legion of successors in the modern world.  People who give people lies to place where faith in God should be.

We can solemnly intone “never again” about the horrors of Stalin and Hitler, but unless we start to believe, in overwhelming majority, in something that is true, we’ll continue to be hoodwinked in large and small matters…and the rise of another megalomaniac mass-murderer is going to remain just around the corner.

 

Memorial Day

Mark Noonan12 Comments

It comes on Monday, of course.

At Nijmegen in Holland, during Operation Market-Garden in World War II, the US paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne had to take the bridge in that town – as the Germans held the bridge and capturing it was vital, the Americans were forced to cross the river so they could take it from both ends, thus preventing the Germans from blowing the bridge up. The trouble was that its not like Airborne units carry landing craft with them.  And so the men had to cross with what could be made available – collapsible canvas boats without even enough oars, so the men had to use their rifle butts to propel themselves across the river in the face of determined and well-sited enemy forces.

I’m sure all of us have heard descriptions of battle where it is said that the “fighting was fierce” or words to that effect.  That is how the fighting across the river was, once the men actually got across – made extra fierce because the paratroopers were pretty much massacred as they rowed across the river and this appeared to build a gigantic, towering rage in the men who made it across.  To put it into old, fashioned phrasing, they spared not, but slew.  Those paratroopers quite simply fell upon the German defenders like a thunderbolt and regardless of losses started to slaughter them.  At least for a while there, no prisoners were taken, even though it does appear that the apparition of these American killing machines quickly stunned and actually frightened the Germans, who were in superior numbers.

What does it all mean, this Memorial Day? That we are remembering our dead in war – but I don’t think that really does justice to what is being marked.  Men in war enter into unspeakable terrors and are cut down most horribly.  They may be good men or bad men; men who have lived lives of justice and mercy or men who lived lives of disgrace and perfidy – but when sent into battle, the men become heroes.  Something appears to click within them and all thought of self vanishes in a fierce desire to grapple with the enemy and emerge victorious.  Men who might not have been willing to lend a dollar to a friend will leap upon a live grenade, or distract and enemy machine-gunner, just so his comrades might live, even if only for a few minutes longer.

The soldiers who die in war have lives to live, just as all of us do.  The mere thought of ever being in a position where another man is around the corner, determined to kill me, strikes fear in my heart.  Some how, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines manage to get past that, and get around the corner – to kill, before they are killed.  To fight the enemy.  To put their valiant heart between the enemies of the United States and our people.  Maybe if I had ever been in that position, I would have passed the test.  I only know for certain that the men and women in the graves of our military cemeteries did pass the test; and because they did, very few of us are ever called on to do what they did.

Go on and have the barbecue.  Enjoy the time with family and friends.  That is ok.  It is good that the living go on living – but pause just for a moment some time this Monday and spare a thought for what it means for a soldier to die in battle, and how much you owe them.

 

More Guns, Less Boko Haram

Mark Noonan4 Comments

When the rest of the world is only offering you a Twitter hashtag in support, you some times have to take firm action to protect  yourself:

BAUCHI, Nigeria — Villagers in an area of Nigeria where Boko Haram operates have killed and detained scores of the extremist Islamic militants who were suspected of planning a fresh attack, the residents and a security official said.

Locals in Nigeria’s northern states have been forming vigilante groups in various areas to resist the militant group who have held more than 270 schoolgirls captive since last month.

In Kalabalge, a village about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the Borno state capital of Maiduguri, residents said they were taking matters into their own hands because the Nigerian military is not doing enough to stem Boko Haram attacks.

On Tuesday morning, after learning about an impending attack by militants, locals ambushed two trucks with a gunmen, a security official told The Associated Press. At least 10 militants were detained, and scores were killed, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give interviews to journalists. It was not immediately clear where the detainees were being held…

I have a friend who is from Nigeria and upon a time we were discussing his home country – which even though he has become an American, he still loves very much and he has a lot of family still living there. After a while, I asked him why the people of south Nigeria put up with it?  Why not just kick the mostly-Muslim north out of the country and have done with it? Nigeria is pretty evenly divided north and south, after all – and the guys who are causing all the ruckus are mostly from the north. Get rid of them, get rid of a large part of the problem.  My friend told me that after the Brits cleared out, the people of the south went to school and learned how to make and build – the people of the north joined the army and learned how to oppress and steal, and they won’t let the south out because the south has the oil.  If the south leaves, the north will have nothing to steal and no one to oppress.  And, so, rather stuck.

It occurred to me after that conversation that the solution, if we want to help Nigeria, is to figure out a way to arm Nigerian militias for local defense in the south. Help the people there just defend themselves and maybe either the north will go away, or will at least become a bit more respectful of the people of the south and won’t steal so often, nor kidnap little girls.  This action by the “vigilantes” (as they are described in the MSM article) is the way to go – and we should offer SEALs and other expert trainers to the Nigerian communities along with sufficient arms and ammunition.  Do that, and over a rather short period of time, the problem there will be resolved, one way or the other.