National Security

Dystopia–In His Own Words.

Leo Pusateri15 Comments

Just prior to the 2008 elections, Barack Obama boldly stated,

“We are 5 days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” (October 30, 2008)

Many among my conservative friends took that to be so much fluff; pretty much liberal boilerplate consistent with his whole “Hope and Change” campaign message.  Given, however, Obama’s background, cutting his teeth with the radical leftists/communists of his day (i.e., Frank Marshall Davis, Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright) I believe I was one of the relative few that took him at his word.  Unlike most of America, conservatives such as myself and others who actually took the time to vet Obama, knew that background and worldview mattered, and that Obama’s past gave more than a glimpse of how he intended to govern in the present.

When Obama uttered those words, “.. fundamentally transform America” I knew he meant it. It was Obama himself who stated (emphases added),

“As radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.  It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least, as it’s been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the States can’t do to you; says what the Federal Government can’t do to you, but doesn’t state what the Federal government or State Government must do on your behalf.”  (Barack Obama, June 18, 2001).

There is no question that Barack Obama was unhappy with his perception of unequal distribution of wealth that America so unfairly championed, and that he wanted to transform this nation into something more ‘equitable’ in his eyes.  The question was how, and to what extent.  Just how does one “fundamentally”  transform a nation whose very basis for existence is freedom, itself?  The only feasible answer is to transform that already-free nation, into a nation with fewer freedoms.  Given Dinesh D’Souza’s brilliant insights as to Obama’s worldview engendered by his past, one knew that Obama’s absolute contempt for what he saw as America’s unequal distribution of wealth would result in his promoting policies that would necessarily stifle economic growth.   Obama’s America would no longer be one of unbridled economic opportunity; rather, America would be a nation of egalitarian outcomes, regardless of effort; to coin a phrase, to each, according to his needs; from each, according to his means.  

As a means of bringing about this transformation, America could no longer be a free nation.  No where as free, at least, as it was at the time of he assumed his presidency.  Liberties would need to be forsaken to bring about his vision of utopia.  The free market system would need to be reined in, and done so in no small measure.   Obama would have four years, eight at most, to make this happen.  This transformation would need to be done quickly, and in a big way.

Enter Obamacare, America’s first stop on its train ride to Utopia. Against the wishes of 60-70 percent of Americans, and without the vetting of congressional legislators who rammed through the legislation, the United States Federal Government took control of a full one-seventh of the American economy, which had the net effect of driving up the cost of health care for all involved,  taking away freedom of choice, relegating freedom of conscience incompatible with the party line to irrelevancy, while at the same time having the no-doubt intended effect of casting a chilling pall on America’s ability to sustain economic growth and prosperity.  For those who wish to argue regarding this latter point, how better to right the wrongs of the perceived injustice of unequally-distributed wealth than to stifle the engine that creates such wealth?

As I’ve said, Obamacare is but stop one on America’s train ride to Obama’s Dystopia.  Obama’s seeming assault on everything traditional America has held dear for centuries appears to have taken on epidemic proportions.  Remember- Obama only has three and three-quarter years left.  Those who haven’t yet felt the pinch of his “transformations,” most likely have not yet realized that they, too, have been pinched.   Obama’s willing media accomplices can only cover for him for so long before a critical mass of Americans, admittedly as dull as many of them are, will start to put two-and-two together and finally determine that the hopey-changey unicorn jockey they voted for may actually have had something to do with the plight in which they suddenly find themselves.

Then what?

When the critical mass of Americans finally wake up one morning, to find that they have been played as chumps, they are liable to get a bit–shall we say, testy. When this inevitability finally does come home to roost, The TEA party protests that grew out of Rick Santelli’s historic February, 2009 rant will no doubt look like a series of school pep assemblies.   Such civil unrest would certainly be difficult to quell, and will no doubt be yet another bump in the tracks on the way to Obama’s Dystopian dream.

What to do, what do do? You can’t just sick the military after the troublemakers. Well, you could, I suppose, but then you risk pissing off your fellow travelers who have had a history of contempt for men and women in uniform.

What to do??

Since, at least philosophy- and policy-wise, one can take Obama at his word, one may get a clue as to Obama’s plans by again, studying his own non-TelePrompter inspired rhetoric:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set.  We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”   -Barack Obama, July, 2008.

Yeah- remember that phrase?  Neither did a lot of other people.  Like the rest of Obama’s sordid past and rhetoric that if brought to the light of day would have rendered his election impossible, The media (true to their sycophantic nature) pretty much glossed over that little tidbit.  A powerful Civilian security force. Remind you of anyone?

So when you see articles like this, or like this, or like this, and then think, aww–Leo–take off that tinfoil hat!  You’re just blowing smoke.  That would never really happen here.  There’s no way.

Just remember.  I didn’t put those words into Barack Obama’s mouth.

He did.

The GOP Establishment Fought Against Ted Cruz

Mark Noonan12 Comments

You can watch Cruz’ dismantling of Hagel over at The Right Scoop.   Hagel is ill-informed, often has strayed in to anti-Semitism and is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense.  Obama will probably still get him through as Democrats do hold the Senate majority, but it will be clear for all time that Obama picked an unfit man and Democrats approved an unfit man simply because they wanted someone who could twist the GOP…and, of course, be Obama’s willing tool in hollowing out our military and coddling our enemies.

In Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Pat Toomey (all of whom were unwanted by the GOP establishment) we have just the sort of Senators we need – leaders who are well informed, aggressive, capable and able to communicate the truth clearly to the American people.  They are revitalizing the GOP brand as we speak – as we sit here, still in the slough of despond over our loss last year, here is the future…here is where we pick ourselves up and get back in to the fight.

 

Women in Combat

Mark Noonan16 Comments

It was, perhaps, inevitable that women would be allowed in to combat roles – though as we’ve gone along this line of liberal nonsense, there still is the fact that women will only be in combat roles if they volunteer for them.  This is a secret acknowledgement that most women don’t want to and cannot perform the role of combat soldier.  Men in the military, of course, go where they are sent.

Any military force, if it is guided by anything akin to wisdom, seeks to be the most powerful it can be.  There is a reason for physical fitness requirements in soldiers – because while technology can do a lot, when it gets down to bullets flying and all is confusion, blood and fear, you need soldiers who have the physical strength to endure the strain.  It isn’t easy and even the strongest physical specimens can break down under the burden, even if not actually harmed by combat.  Right now, our army has done very well on this – you can see it in the soldiers:  they are often massive bruisers, far larger than, for instance, yours truly.  Even in my younger days, I probably couldn’t have measured up to the physical requirements of today’s troops.  Today’s soldiers are, in my view, better trained and more able than any soldiers we’ve ever placed in the field – and this is stated in knowledge that my Dad joined the Marines in 1944 while my uncle, when asked, stated he “earned” his VA benefits at a little ridge named “Heartbreak” in Korea.  And I like the fact that today’s soldiers outclass not only myself, but my Dad and my uncle…and, heck, even my grandfather and all his brothers (all of whom served in World War One and all of whom were wounded in action, some of them quite seriously).  My worry about this ruling is not so much that women will be in combat, but that the requirements for being a combat soldier in the United States Armed forces will be lowered so that women can participate.

In a population as large as ours, there will be some percentage of women who can actually meet the current physical requirements for being a combat soldier.  I can’t say what the percentage would be, but it would be fairly small – and out of that percentage of women who can do it, you would only get those who also wanted to do it, which would be the merest fraction of the total percentage who possibly could (in spite of intensive recruitment efforts among women, their percentage of the military has been stuck at 15% for ages; most women just don’t see the military as the place to be).  But what if there are women who want it – let’s face it, being in a combat role in the military is the path to advancement – but who can’t measure up?  Will standards be lowered so that they may participate?  We’ve already seen physical requirements lowered for police and firefighters in the United States so that women can participate – will that now become the rule for the military, as well?

If women are to serve in a combat role it must only be if the can meet the actual physical requirements currently in place.  Period.  If we do anything else – any mealy-mouthed, lying liberal excuses to lower standards – then we will be deliberately creating a weaker military just so we can make leftist feminists happy.  And that weaker military will pay in blood for being weaker when it could have been stronger.  I do not want Americans to wind up dead simply because we put in to combat roles people who can’t take the strain.

 

Intervention in Syria?

Mark Noonan24 Comments

According to the headline number in the Washington Post/ABC poll, the American people say “no”:

In general, 73 percent say the U.S. military should not get involved in the conflict.

But the bad news is in the details:

But almost exactly as many say they’d support U.S. military involvement if Syria were to lose control of its chemical weapons, as do 63 percent if the Assad regime used these banned weapons against its own people – an action that Barack Obama has warned would “cross a red line.”

Now, I agree with the 69% who, later in the poll, say that if the Assad regime were to attack an ally, we should intervene – but for me the word “ally” in that area of the world only means “Israel”.  You’ve got to be the most obtuse sort of State Department pinhead to actually see Turkey as an ally these days – they aren’t quite as far gone down the route of Islamism as Egypt, but they’re heading there quickly.

For the duration of the Obama Administration you are going to find me to be the most dovish of people – because Obama is a foreign and military policy idiot and I simply don’t trust him to run either thing…and as during wars blood gets shed, I’m even more wary of Obama as Commander in Chief than I am as him being director of our foreign policy.  Short of absolutely surrendering our national honor, I want peace at any price at least until January 20th, 2017.

But this poll shows that if Assad does what he may well do – ie, go nuts –  then Obama has a ready-made public support for military action.  At a time when our military is already strained and we’re absolutely bankrupt.  What we’re likely to get, if Assad does go nuts, is a half-assed intervention along the lines of the mess we’ve made out of Libya…at a time when the non-Islamists of Syria are already mistrustful of us because of our dithering with the UN over the Syrian Civil War…and, of course, at a time when the Islamists of Syria are moving from victory to victory and likely to take over as soon as the barbarians can settle which particular batch of savages will get to be in charge.  There is no good we can do in Syria other than providing some medical and food aid to alleviate some of the worst of the suffering – and even that should be done by third parties we supply so that we don’t have to put Americans (ie, “targets”) in to the area.

Obama’s foreign and military policies have made the United States weaker than at any time since 1940 – and all we can really do is hope the fool doesn’t lead us in to a major war before he gets out of office.  And even then the damage he’s done and doing might make war inevitable once he’s out of office.

Stay out of Syria.  Get out of Afghanistan.  Bring the boys and girls back home and let’s hunker down for the remaineder of the Error of Obama.  (As an aside to you pinhead liberals out there – if Obama does order intervention then you’re not going to see me out there holding anti-war demonstrations and slandering Obama about the conduct of the war – I’m not, in short, going to be like you:  when the guns go off and our boys and girls are in harms way, then Obama is my Commander in Chief and I back him 100% in the pursuit of victory…I just hope the dolt can deliver it; or that the military can carry it off in spite of him).

An Open Letter to NBC

Leo Pusateri35 Comments

I wrote this to NBC news earlier today, but it could be easily applied to any of the fellow-traveler networks:

Dear NBC News:

You no doubt have now heard the news that the Obama administration’s Situation Room had received word of the terrorist nature of the Benghazi attack no later than two hours after it began. They did NOTHING to protect the lives of those in the Embassy compound. President Obama went to sleep, then jetted off to Las Vegas to raise campaign cash, meanwhile, relying on a manufactured cover story of some locals being riled up over a YouTube video that wasn’t seen.

There wasn’t any report in the cables or emails about a protest preceding the attack. The attack lasted over 7 hours before the final two occupants of the compound were murdered. And the Obama administration did NOTHING to help. Instead, they continued their COVER-UP of the video story, for WEEKS afterward and they even got to the point where they buy youtube views to make the video popular.

I listened to the NBC news top of the hour radio broadcast. Not ONE WORD of the above. Just Obama giving his “Romnesia” line, and something about his jetting 5000 or so miles today campaigning.

What– somehow you don’t think that these developments in Benghazi are NEWSWORTHY? That the administration not only knew of the attack, but refused to take action to protect the embassy occupants? And then, COVERED IT UP, LYING about the nature of the attack, and making his underlings spread his propaganda, FOR WEEKS, until the cover story collapsed under the weight of contrary evidence?

Not to mention that there remains an INNOCENT man still sitting in jail! Los Angeles Bail Bond offices voiced their opinions over this injustice in a collective voice that had almost no ear from the government. (Don’t tell me it had nothing to do with Obama’s cover story!!))

WHERE ARE WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN????

Are you SO enamored, so infatuated with this president, that you, the press, are willing to be derelict to your Constitutional First Amendment duty and to cover up for his abject malfeasance? They did that with State-Controlled media in Soviet Russia. They do that in China. They have no choice. YOU HAVE A CHOICE!!

Are you that devoid of conscience???

DO YOUR JOURNALISTIC DUTY

******UPDATE******

It took long enough, but ABC News is finally beginning to grow a pair:

NBC still doesn’t have word one about this story on their website.

abcnews.go.com

Congressional Republicans ask why Obama described attacks as response to film.

In Regard to the Muslim World, What Do We Do Now?

Mark Noonan99 Comments

The key take-away of the recent events in the middle east, for me, is that whatever we were trying to do in the Muslim world, it is now in shambles.  Whether one wants to take the leftwing/Islamist view that Islam is angered by our wrongdoing or if one wishes to point out that Islam has been the aggressor for more than a thousand years is immaterial – whether it is war or the olive branch we were trying to bring to the Muslim world, both our war and peace policies have failed.  We have no victorious war while also having no peace.  However we go forward, we should go forward as a blank slate.  The first thing for us to do, then, is to figure out what we want.

The Muslim world is a billion people sitting on a strategic crossroads and also containing a very large amount of the exceptionally valuable substance, oil.  This reality is just there – it can’t be argued with.  Whatever we might want, our policy has to take in to consideration that it is there and has to be dealt with.  So, the first thing we can dispose of is any concept that we can just entirely walk away and pretend it doesn’t matter.  For good or ill, the United States will be involved in the affairs of the Muslim world.  That said, we still have to define what we want our involvement to be.

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More Wasted Money For The President’s “Green Energy”

tiredoflibbs5 Comments

A U.S. Navy oiler slipped away from a fuel depot on the Puget Sound in Washington state one recent day, headed toward the central Pacific and into the storm over the Pentagon’s controversial green fuels initiative.

In its tanks, the USNS Henry J. Kaiser carried nearly 900,000 gallons of biofuel blended with petroleum to power the cruisers, destroyers and fighter jets of what the Navy has taken to calling the “Great Green Fleet,” the first carrier strike group to be powered largely by alternative fuels.

However, the fuel’s $26-a-gallon price, compared to $3.60 for conventional fuel cannot come at a worst time when the U.S. government’s budget remains severely strained, the Pentagon is facing REAL budget cuts and energy companies are finding big quantities of oil and gas in the United States.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/02/us-usa-navy-greenfleet-idUSBRE86106X20120702

Other Green Energy initiatives in the military pushed by this administration:

The Pentagon paid Solazyme Inc $8.5 million in 2009 for 20,055 gallons of biofuel based on algae oil, or $424 a gallon.

For the Great Green Fleet demonstration, the Pentagon paid $12 million for 450,000 gallons of biofuel, nearly $27 a gallon. There were eight bidders for that contract, it said.

The technology is still not yet cost effective, but to hell with the costs (as long as you’re a Democrat).  Politics and giving in to the environmentalist lobby is more important than reliable fuel to our Navy.

 

Tuesday Open Thread

tiredoflibbs120 Comments

Have at it.

Primaries…. in 3 WEEKS!

POLL: PEOPLE FEAR BIG GOV’T MORE THAN BIG BUSINESS OR LABOR…

Yes, obAMATEUR is “serious” about border security….

FEDS PLAN UNMANNED CROSSING WITH MEX…

Obama to slash National Guard force on border…

I wonder if the cat had to pay the Death Taxes?

Woman Leaves $13M Fortune to Pet Cat…

The libs will cater to their special interests….

Congress considers bill to censor Internet… it doesn’t matter if it is unconstitutional…

…. and everybody’s favorite uninformed talking head liberal drone …. DNC chair denies unemployment up under Obama…

Update:

‘The Americans have perhaps decided to give us this spy plane’…

OBAMA: Can we have it back, please?

“Arab Spring”? Or Jihadi Stench?

Leo Pusateri68 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, freeze dried, or doing hard time for the past few hours, you know that Colonel Khaddafy Qaddafffy Kadafy Gaddhaffi err…the guy in Libya who perpetually dressed like the bellhop at the Ritz has assumed room temperature. The lamestream media are in the middle of falling all over themselves as if Barack Obama himself pulled the trigger.  Aside from that, it is these two paragraphs in the story that leaves me more than a bit wary (emphases mine):

“It is a historic moment. It is the end of tyranny and dictatorship. Gaddafi has met his fate,” Abdel Hafez Ghoga, a spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC), said. Celebratory gunfire and cries of “Allah-o-Akbar” rang out [does that phrase sound familiar to you?–ed] across Tripoli as the news of Gaddafi’s death spread.

Gun-totting rebel fighters went around the streets firing into the sky. Cars out on the roads honked horns and people hugged and kissed each other and sang national anthem. Gaddafi’s body was taken to a mosque in Misrata, a report said quoting an NTC official.

So what’s next?

It is (or should be) a well-known axiom by now that the road to hell is paved with the ‘good intentions’ of liberals, who excel at pie-in-the-sky thinking but have no cognitive connection nor grounding as to how the real world works.  Thus it is with the Obama administration, whose incoherent, unworkable domestic and foreign policies have been proverbial Forrest Gump boxes of chocolates.

The so-called, so-touted, Barack Hussein Obama-approved and supported “Arab Spring” has turned a relatively stabilized Arab world with whom the West could at least dialogue into contumacious, anarchical, “Lord of the Flies” hell holes, in which Sharia-loving, Jihadi-friendly Islamists could not only get a foothold in terms of power, but in the process get their flea-bitten fingers on some pretty sophisticated military technology, including biological weaponry.

At least former Egyptian president Mubarek had the sensibility to turn down the offer of nukes from a rogue state..could anyone be certain that the current regime (if one could call it that) would do the same?  Now in Egypt, instead of a regime that was relatively tolerant of other faiths,  relatively stable, and on co-existing terms with Israel, we now have an Islamo-fascist mob mentality that persecutes and murders Christians, and whose relationship with Israel is on what seems to be an irretrievably downward spiral.  Gaddafi, though a despot, via the school of hard knocks knew his place, and therefore knew not to push the envelope past the point where unmanageable retaliation would have taken place.

In Iraq, great care was taken by President George W. Bush to attempt to ensure that what replaced Saddam Hussein was a western-friendly government that would be an Arabic counter-balance to Iran, Syria and other un-friendly forces in the region; and, to a great extent, that was accomplished (Afghanistan is a different story, but for different reasons).   But to encourage and foment revolution in already western-tolerant Arab countries and hoping that the pieces fall in your favor is not a foreign policy.

It is, in fact, a suicide pact.