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.

 

YCMTSU – Open Thread Version

Cluster11 Comments

I think it’s time that we just lay out on the table all of the garbage this administration has brought upon this country. The soiled debris of progressivism is getting knee deep, the stench is over whelming, and it’s time for us to itemize the unimaginable incompetence in a way that we can keep an inventory on what is currently rotting, so that we can properly process the new sewage that is surely headed our way over last two and half years.  I will start with:

1. The CFPB – the progressive instituted, feel good, Dudley Do Right government bureaucracy that is now embroiled in typical progressive incompetence and over spending. Reminiscent of the GSA excess’s – remember that? Good thing this administration learned their lesson there.

2. Obamacare – I know it’s kind of hard to keep up on all the refuse that is rotting all over this country, but Obamacare is one big pile of rubbish that continues to infect many peoples lives. Thankfully, a federal judge in Colorado has applied some common American sense and stopped  the Progressive Intolerant Fascist Machine from mandating the availability of abortifacients.

3. Washington Redskins – Evidently there is nothing of real importance facing this country which has allowed Harry Reid to stop all other matters in the Senate, and focus solely on the manufactured issue of a corporations name and his fascist desire to ruin it. Because of this, I will be purchasing a couple of Washington Redskin T Shirts, will wear them regularly, and encourage all of you to do the same. Honestly, I seriously think Harry Reid has lost his mind, but with a progressive, it’s really hard to determine how much brain he started with in the first place.

I encourage all of you to contribute to this list, so as we go in to the 2014 and 2016 elections, we will be sure to have a long detailed list of progressive failures, lies, and corruption which we can use as a club to repeatedly beat them over the head with – preferably until they bleed.

Finished? I Don’t Think So.

Leo Pusateri5 Comments

As Rush Limbaugh asserted on his radio show Wednesday, the Obama presidency is far from over.

The events to which we are witness presently– world unrest, trampling on personal property rights and State sovereignty, assault on affordable energy–continuous assaults on our ability to grow our economy– is all part of Obama’s original campaign promise to “..fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s an important phrase to ponder. “FUNDAMENTALLY” TRANSFORM THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” Think about that. Let that short, simple, yet all-encompassing phrase sink in. First focus on the word “TRANSFORM” and then the root word of “FUNDAMENTALLY.”

To “transform” something, by definition, is to make something evolve into something radically different from what it has traditionally been. “Fundamental” by definition is a defining, basic characteristic. A building block–something foundational to its being.

Now, to “FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORM” means to radically transform the United States from what it has traditionally been– the “shining city on a hill”- the land of opportunity–based on the premise of individual liberty and the affordance of self-determination–yes–to transform that– into something *fundamentally different* and thus diametrically opposed to that foundation.

The Third World Despots, the Kruschevs, the Fidel Castros, the Kim Jong Ils and Uns of the world, have given hours-long speeches about their hopes for the destruction of the Free World, but never have they been able to put it so succinctly and eloquently as has Obama in that one simple, yet profound phrase. “..We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Many people chalked that phrase to meaningless boilerplate rhetoric, as so much rhetorical fluff. But of all the promises Obama made that were broken, whether it was closing Guantanamo Bay, allowing people to ‘keep their doctors or their health plans–period,” or to decrease health insurance costs by $2500 per year, this– this seminal promise–(along with bankrupting the coal industry)–was the one he meant from the bottom of his joyless, cavernous heart.

No people. The Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is not ended. He still has a lot of ‘fundamental transformations’ to perform.

Barack Obama’s “scorched earth” policy against America and its people has only just begun.

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.

The Progressive Clerisy

Cluster28 Comments

I wrote about this issue a while back, and just recently read this excellent article by Joel Kotkin speaking to the same, very real and very disturbing phenomenon which is hurting our country. First, a brief history:

“The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers of society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge to the less enlightened orders”.  

We see this phenomenon every day in print, on TV, in entertainment, in the digital media, and on the progressive blogs and certainly with the progressives that frequent B4V. Group think rules their world and if you stray from the orthodoxy, there are consequences. One small, but very revealing example was when one of the progressives over at AllPolytics misunderstood a post by a fellow progressive, he responded in a condescending, corrective tone. A response of which led the original poster to quickly clarify his comments. The subsequent response by the “correcting” commentator was priceless – he said, “you’re forgiven”. I had never seen anything quite like it, but it is a real and disconcerting phenomenon that this country must overcome. Joel provides another great example of this phenomenon including the cancellation of recent commence speeches by Condi Rice and Ayaan Ali Hirsi, to name a few.

The concentration of wealth and power is what fuels the Clerisy, and that also is a very real trend despite the flowery rhetoric of Obama’s endless speeches. Joel mentions that the number of federal workers earning more than $150,000/yr has more than doubled since 2007, and since 1990, the number of government workers has grown from approx. 5 million to approx. 20 million, “a growth rate roughly twice the population as a whole”. And while stock values and real estate holdings continue to increase in value and the portfolios of the rich, the country is realizing an historically low labor participation rate and a record number of people on welfare. And what is the response by the ruling elite to the current plight of the proletariat? Is it to tap into the vast reserves of domestic energy resources and ignite a boom of good paying jobs as seen in North Dakota? Is it to build the Keystone pipeline and create many well paying union jobs dotted throughout the interior of the US, and to keep that oil from going to China? Is it to reform the tax code and repatriate trillions of corporate dollars in an effort to encourage domestic corporate expansion and employment? NO! The ruling class answer to what ails the millions of people still looking for work, or of whom have simply given up is to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hr. That’s what the progressive elite feel that they are worth, and if you oppose this effort, well then there will be consequences. A recent quote by Obama re: the Bergdahl release pretty much sums up the thinking of the ruling elite:

“It was a unanimous decision among my principals in my government and a view that was shared by my– the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And this is something that I would do again and I will continue to do wherever I have an opportunity,”

This current societal phenomenon won’t be easy to defeat, but it must be defeated if we are to ever get back to sensible healthy debates that move our country forward. And this means that we must do everything we can to defeat Hillary Clinton – she is the Queen of the Clerisy.

 

 

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.

 

The Summer of Discontent

Cluster11 Comments

On the heels of the VA scandal and the recent downward revision of first quarter GDP growth, or lack thereof as it was revised into negative territory, this summer does not bode well for the Obama administration. And it shouldn’t.  The accountability of Obama on every issue is woefully absent, the incompetence is palpable and even the lap dog progressive media is having a hard time covering it up. Jay Carney’s press conferences are more and more contentious and growing more bizarre by the day. The administrations reluctance, if not down right refusal to answer direct questions, and make tough decisions is harming this country, and the VA scandal is the prime example. This is not a new problem. Obama knew of this problem in 2009. Spoke about this problem. Promised to resolve the problem and offer vets the “21st century care they deserved”, yet once again, we can chalk that up to just another empty promise. Should we be surprised? After all this was a guy who promised to heal the planet and cause the oceans to recede.

The VA scandal is just another addition to the myriad of real concerning issues that must be dealt with this summer leading up to the November election. Insurance companies are scheduled to announce their 2015 rates, and expectations are that those revised rates may financially shock some people. The federal government is also expected to have to bail out the insurance companies this summer, a provision written into the ACA and conveniently ignored by the media. Remember, we have to pass it to find out what’s in it. The Benghazi hearings will commence this summer and that promises to be contentious and interesting, and I expect many Democrats are a little worried about that discovery process. The IRS issue continues to unfold with recently divulged emails ensnaring Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, and it was announced today that Judicial Watch has sued the DOJ over Fast and Furious, an issue of which Obama became so concerned about that he closed down the investigation claiming executive privilege. Add to all of this, the anticipated beginning of the “Ready for Hillary” side show campaign with her trying to convince everyone – “what difference does it make?”.

It proves to be an important and interesting summer. So much so, that I have sent in yet another contribution to the RNC this last week, hoping that they take the Senate this fall and at least put the brakes on this madness for the next two years. I encourage everyone to do the same.