The GOP’s War on Women Continues!!!!

The pay gap between men and women continues without sign of closing – even after repeated speeches by the pResident.  The GOP still does not pay women equally to men!!!

The White House continues to pay women 88 cents for every dollar men earn….. oh wait!!!

http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/09/white-house-pay-gap-twice-as-large-as-pay-gap-in-district-of-columbia/

Another sign from the pregressives, do as I say! Not as I do!

Americans Spend More in Taxes Than Food, Clothing and Housing Combined

 

 

 

Chart_TFD_web_0

 

http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2014-april-21-three-days-later-last-year

Tell us something we didn’t already know. But we get the usual drivel, we don’t pay enough.  We are greedy when we say that we pay too much in taxes.  The Pregressives demand more and more and attack us when we ask “when will it be enough”.  After receiving over $3 Trillion in direct revenue per year, they demand more since they want to spend more in social spending.  All the while slashing the military budget to the point that aggressive world leaders take notice.

When will enough be enough for these moochers and thieves?

The Fascism of the Intolerant Left

One of the founders of Mozilla and developer of Java script language, Brandon Eich has been forced out of his CEO position by an unruly mob of the authoritarian progressives.  It seems he made a $1000 contribution supporting California’s Proposition 8, SIX YEARS AGO!

The progressives will not allow a view contrary to theirs. All opposing views must GO!

With that in mind, would these same fascist and mindless progressives demand that the current pResident resign his position for having the same views against gay marriage as did Eich.

Somehow, these fascists will make endless exceptions and excuses.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/04/03/mob-rule-mozilla-ceo-forced-out-over-1000-donation-made-six-years-ago/

UPDATE: The left is trying to disguise their tactics on this matter as that of “capitalism”.  People boycotting companies or individuals because they are antithesis of their “values”.  Capitalism, really?  Mozilla did not lose sales on Firefox – their product is FREE.  No capitalism there, perhaps they should look up the word “capitalism” in the dictionary, like they tried to do when the term “fascism” or “fascistic” was applied to this disgusting witch hunt.  As I said, they will find the justification to defend their practice of intolerance (a keyword in the definition of fascism).  But details, never got in their way before.  Besides, there are those who believe that the Eich incident should be just the start:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2014/04/brendan_eich_quits_mozilla_let_s_purge_all_the_antigay_donors_to_prop_8.html

Purge? Where have I heard that before.

Besides, if conservative companies decided to go after employees or management for having beliefs or actively supported ideas that went against the companies’ “values”, would the left be okay with that.  It is capitalism after all!

Quick, While the LIVs Are Distracted…..

While the LIV’s focus is on obamacare, Putin, Gwenyth Paltro’s split, the missing flight and other nonsense, CIA’s Libyan station chief put’s to rest that the Obama administration’s talking point that the whole thing started as a protest.

The chief stated at hearings there was no protest and a result of terrorist attacks on the embassy.

What difference does it make at this point in time? -thanks Hillary.

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/31/cia-ignored-station-chief-in-libya-when-creating-t/

UPDATE:

While the LIVs are distracted Democrats scramble for damage control. Pro Gun Control Democrat State Senator Leland Yee Arrested for GUN TRAFFICKING among other corrupt acts, for campaign contributions.

Charges include:

  • Clandestine meetings with an undercover agent to secure as much as $2 million in high-power weaponry in exchange for payments to Yee and his political campaign. In one of those meetings, Yee assures the agent, who holds himself out to be East Coast Mafia, “Do I think we can make some money? I think we can make some money.”
  • Deals with an agent posing as an Atlanta businessman backing a fictitious software company called Well-Tech, seeking Yee’s help, including an attempt to secure a contract with the state Department of Public Health in exchange for a $10,000 check for the secretary of state campaign,
  • Offering to help an agent posing as an Arizona medical marijuana industry insider looking to expand into California. Yee, again in exchange for campaign contributions, introduced the undercover agent to unidentified legislators and promised political support, particularly if elected to statewide office.
  • An agreement, at the urging of the undercover agent through Jackson, for Yee to honor the Ghee Kung Tong, the organization of suspected Chinese crime kingpin Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, with a proclamation, despite the senator’s worries about Chow being a “gangster.” Yee signed the proclamation in exchange for a campaign check from the agent.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25453464/leland-yee-corruption-case-state-senator-faces-uphill

Little mention in the media.  Meanwhile, HE STILL GETS PAID WHILE SUSPENDED.  It is interesting to note that his bail was HALF that of the so-called creator of the video that “caused the protests in Benghazi”…. only in California.

Regarding Cookin’ The Books…

In light of the news of the past 24-hours, it perhaps entirely fitting that a TV cook decided to promote Obamacare this past week.

A bit of history as a prelude to this post:
October 30, 2012: Obama can’t get re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8%.

November 4, 2012: 2 days before election–SHAZAMM!!! Books are cooked, unemployment rate at 7.9% (ignoring, of course, those who gave up looking for jobs).

March 30, 2014: Obama woefully in danger of not meeting targeted goal of 7 million subscribers by March 31st. 2014 deadline– another postponement of the deadline would give anti-Obamacare elements endless fodder for Obamacare’s further de-legitimization.

Now, enter March 31, 2014–Zero Hour to deadline: SHAZAM!! Five million people miraculously sign their lives away on the Obamacare website, two million more flood the phone lines.

Does anybody REALLY believe this crap?

First–OK– I’ll give it that yesterday was the deadline–but even if their numbers are true, it doesn’t really portray that people so loved Obamacare that they just couldn’t wait to sign up.
It was either sign up, or get fined. It was coercion, at best.

Second: Obamacare was sold (read: shoved down our throats in the dead of night) as something that was needed because there were, at the time, 30,000,000 uninsured Americans out of a nation of 310,000,000 (9.6%). Which necessarily meant that nine out of ten people were inconvenienced at best and/or lost THEIR coverage at worst so that one out of the ten who weren’t covered in the first place could supposedly get covered.

The last estimates placed over 40,000,000 people who are currently uninsured; with 5-6 million of those uninsured as a DIRECT RESULT of their policies being cancelled under Obamacare. (As a matter of fact, companies offering insurance to males that didn’t cover pregnancy were fined over 2000 percent more per employee than companies who chose not to offer any insurance plan at all–but I digress).

SO– if their numbers are correct (and again–a bit too convenient, if you ask me, to be correct) we haven’t even gotten back to Square One in terms of Obamacare’s stated goals (to insure the 30,000,000 uninsured).

Yet, despite this, despite the perpetually-broken $600 MILLION website paid for with our taxpayer dollars, and most importantly, despite the broken promises made to the American people on so many fronts that you need a scorecard to keep track of them, his royal eminence, wannabe emperor and Grand Poobah of his own reality, Barack Hussein Obama (pbuh) is going to strut to the podium this afternoon and crow to the great unwashed masses that he’s single-handedly saved the nation’s health care system, and there will be more of that where it came from.

And, perhaps most pitiful of all, his dutiful. star-struck, sycophantic stenographer-media sheep, those supposedly charged with being a check and balance against our government, will happily and dutifully re-bleat his maniacal, delusional rantings.

Putin Lives in the Real World

By the time Japan ran up the white flag in August of 1945, the United States had produced nearly 61,000 tanks, 285,000 air craft, 147 capital ships, 41,000 cannon and more than 12 million rifles.  Using this material, we had killed or captured more than a million enemy soldiers and dropped well more than two million tons of explosives on Germany and Japan (not counting the atomic bombs) and killed somewhere in the range of two million German and Japanese civilians.  Our enemies were cratered wastelands entirely at our mercy.  Peering up from the rubble, the world drew a very vital lesson:  you don’t want to fight the United States of America.

This lesson was tested, of course.  First in Korea – where potential enemies learned that you could draw the United States into a war and not suffer complete destruction – but you had to be willing to absorb immense casualties at the hands of American forces disposing of more firepower than anyone could possibly imagine (in return for the privilege of killing at bit more than 33,000 Americans, the North Koreans and Chinese exchanged at least 400,000 military deaths and 1.5 million civilian deaths).  It was re-tested in Vietnam and finally confirmed – as long as you were willing to lose your people at a fantastic rate, eventually the Americans will get tired and leave, as long as the United States, itself, wasn’t at risk.  But, still,  those piles of smoking rubble in Germany and Japan kept the world entirely unwilling to tangle with the United States in a fight to the death.  And, so, no general wars since 1945.

But such a state of affairs only lasts as long as the world is convinced that fighting the United States is something to take into consideration.  Small scale = can be done, at enormous cost.  Large scale = national suicide.  But what if it comes to pass that you don’t have to worry either about large scale or small scale war with the United States?  Then you get the invasion of Crimea.

The problem Obama has – and its common throughout the leadership elite  of the Western World – is that they have convinced themselves that it wasn’t American power which kept the peace.  Indeed, they have convinced themselves that more than anything else, American power has been the threat to peace (and they use things like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq as proof – never mind that in none of these cases did the United States just blindly go in for aggressive action…right or wrong, in all of these cases a threat was perceived prior to American action). To an Obama, the world is kept at peace by international law; by the United Nations; by NGO’s; by conferences at swank, European resorts.  Everyone agrees to be nice – and see how well it works!  But, here’s the thing, it only worked because at the back of it all were the smoking piles of rubble in Germany and Japan circa 1945 and a worry that really challenging the post-war settlement would mean a new World War with the United States.  But Obama and his like don’t see it like that.  Putin, however, does.

With the decline of American power and the global perception that the United States simply lacks the grit to carry out a long, grinding fight to a victorious finish we have returned to the world of 1938 – precisely when the world held American power at a discount figuring that we probably wouldn’t fight, to begin with, and that if we did, we wouldn’t stick it out (it really cannot be stressed enough that the leaders of both Germany and Japan figured the American people simply lacked guts…that we were too soft to fight it out like men in desperate battle).  Putin isn’t doing anything but living in the real world – and the real world of 2014 is the international anarchy of 1914, prior to the application of overwhelming American power to the globe 1941-45.  In this real world, you grab what you think you can get away with – you know you won’t have to fight even a small, expensive (but ultimately victorious) war against an America which just gets tired and neither will you risk a World War which would bring all of America’s might to bear until your country is reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.

It is an open question as to whether this will work out badly for the world – we simply don’t know.  Perhaps if we hadn’t intervened in World War One things would have been better in the long run?  Maybe if we had dodged the World War Two bullet then having the Japanese Empire run Asia would not be as bad as China attempting to run Asia?  A revived Russian Empire might put a definite check on Turkish and Iranian ambitions, after all.  But while we don’t know how this will come out, there’s no sense getting mad a Putin or acting like he’s not behaving rationally.  He’s doing what he thinks is best – that we think it wrong is immaterial.  Unless we want to declare war on Russia, there’s not much we can do, after all.

But here is the risk – without fear of America’s overwhelming power (and it still is overwhelming – it still could take on, for instance, Russia and China at the same time and beat them into the ground), things could get a bit dangerous out in the world.  It could be that as nations take the lid off and start competing for territory, resources and prestige that one or more of them decides to challenge us directly, thinking that we can be cowed – or, if not cowed, then easily beaten.  It would be much better, I think, that once having won overwhelming global dominance that we had maintained it – we have let the scepter slip from our hands, however, and there’s no getting it back without war.  The world is now at genuine risk of World War Three.

This is not just Obama’s fault – though he has put the final touches on it.  This stretches back to the immediate post-WWII era, when we didn’t firmly put Russia in her place…and when we failed to pick up the real challenge in Korea and take out China and Russia.  It is the result of thinking that the world is governed by something other than force; that sweet reasonableness and treaties make the world safe.  They don’t.  Power and the willingness to apply it is what makes the world safe – or, as safe as it can be.  Putin is living in the real world.  So is China.  So is Iran.  The sooner we join them there the sooner we can start to rationally think about what we want – and where we’ll draw a line and tell them, “thus far and no further”.

The Death of Civilization

Here’s how they die, at least in the modern, internet era:  pitching romantic vacations in the hopes that someone might wind up pregnant:

Denmark has a lot of things going for it. Last year, the UN’s World Happiness Report crowned it the globe’s happiest country, citing the nation’s commitment to maternity leave, gender equality, biking, and drinking lots of wine when it’s cold outside.

Its economy is also tops, chugging out $211 billion in annual GDP despite its relatively small population of 5.6 million. Economic inequality? Not a problem. Income distributes more evenly there than most places.

But Denmark has a sex problem. (Re-evaluating that happiness ranking already?)

Well, it’s not exactly a sex problem, per se. It’s more like a baby problem. According to government statistics, Denmark posted a birth rate of 10 per 1,000 residents in 2013 — its lowest in decades. The nation’s birthrate was  9.9 in 1983…

And, so, a travel agency has worked a “Do It For Denmark” campaign – at the link you can view the mildly NSFW ad pitch.  Its all very cute and funny, but it also reveals the underlying problem.  For all our wealth and for all our civilizational obsession with sex, we ain’t having kids.  And here’s the problem – if a people doesn’t create new people, it dies.  Funny how that works, huh?

We have no stigma attached to shacking up without marriage.  No one would dare call a child born out of wedlock a bastard.  Our popular culture is saturated with sexual references.  We have a “hook up” culture among our young which appears to hold that sexual activity is just part of a movie/dinner date night.  Everyone is encouraged to have as much sex as possible…and yet birth rates around the world have cratered.  Often to the point where some nations are already losing population year by year.  What gives?

For most people it would all be a great mystery.  It won’t be for some – those of us who either back when already knew or who have discovered the truth: when you separate sex out from its marital and procreative functions (via pre-marital sex and various forms of birth control, plus abortion) you will get lots more sex, but you won’t get sex which has any actual purpose in life…and you’ll also get people who have grown to believe that sex is just a thing of itself, having no purpose beyond the actual sex act.  And then you’ll get cratering birth rates, welfare States in trouble (all welfare States are built upon the requirement of a steadily increasing population) and absurd ad campaigns to convince people to have sex with a purpose.

As I’ve said elsewhere, this is just the end of a civilization – a dying, liberal civilization which proposed to make everything just great for everyone as soon as we cast off all the burdens of the old, Judeo-Christian civilization.  Well, with abortion on demand, same-sex marriage and, now, human bodies being burned for fuel, I think we can say that the very last shreds of the old civilization have been cast off.  This is now the liberal civilization long dreamed of.  Here it is.  Do you like it?  Well, don’t get too used to it – its already dead.  It’ll be replaced – by a Judeo-Christian civilization…where people will not only know how to have sex, but will know what it’s for without having to be prompted by a slick ad campaign.

 

Liberals are, Bottom Line, Idiots

Charles Blow, who writes for the New York Times, pounds out the stupid regarding Paul Ryan’s recent comments about poverty in the inner city:

…But instead of cushioning his comments, Ryan shot back, “There was nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all — it had nothing to do with race.”

That would have been more believable if Ryan hadn’t prefaced his original comments by citing Charles Murray, who has essentially argued that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and whom the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “white nationalist.” (The center’s definition: “White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites.”)…

Because Blow expects (correctly) that those who provide his paycheck at the Times as well as most of those who bother to read the Times on a regular basis are even bigger idiots than he is, Blow just goes off and says that Ryan – the racist – is proved to be a racist because he, Ryan, quotes a well known racist (Charles Murray).  Blow won’t tell you precisely why Murray is a racist – expecting, in the end, that most of his readers are too lazy and/or stupid to just look Murray up and see who he is (or, alternately, they are simply afraid – fearful that if they look up Murray they’ll find that maybe a liberal is lying and that can lead to all sorts of horrors).  Murray, of course, is tagged by drooling mouth-breathers (ie, liberals) as a racist because 20 years ago he wrote a book (The Bell Curve) which discussed quite a lot of things, but also noted – in passing, really – that differences in intelligence might partially be determined by genetics.  This was deemed racist by liberal dimwits because the only reason any ethnic group can possibly have a different outcome overall from American whites is because American whites are racist (it was also, at this time, forbidden for anyone to ever point out that Japanese and Chinese Americans appear smarter and more successful – on average – than the racist white Americans who work day in and day out to keep all non-white people down).  And, so, Murray is a racist, forever.  Anyone who quote Murray is also a racist – ergo, Ryan is a racist. Its proved, you see?  Heck, its in the New York Times, right?  What more do you want?

Now that Ryan is a racist, forever, it is time to make certain that no one pays the least attention to what Ryan says (boiled down – in some areas of the country, the culture is pretty much against hard work and, so, a lot of people don’t work).  You see, we can’t risk having an idiot start to think.  That starts happening and the Times will be hurt, Blow will be out of a job and Democrats will be defeated at election time.  So, we have to get some stupid in here which sounds like it means something.  On we go:

…His research, he noted, indicates that “40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period” and “54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty.” Rank concluded, “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”…

Which has, of course, precisely nothing to do with what Ryan said. But your basic liberal, reading the Times, will nod his or her head like the brainless twits they are and never go further.  Ryan is a racist and other people besides inner-city people are poor, so can we just get back to fighting racism so that black people can get ahead?  That, seriously, is how liberals view this.  The fact that plenty of Americans experience poverty is immaterial to what Ryan was saying.  I’m pretty sure that out of every 100 people who read this, 50 will be able to remember a time they lived in poverty (full disclosure: when I was a child, my father had to go on food stamps for a while.  Additionally, there have been times in my life when I didn’t have $20 to my name).  But that doesn’t matter – what matters is that in certain areas of the country, poverty is endemic and goes on for generation after generation.  This is especially true in inner cities where the culture is against work (against education, too – we all know the term “acting white” to describe a certain subset of African-Americans who view being educated and working hard as being “white” and thus some sort of race-traitor).

Blow’s work is now done.  Liberals are now free to ignore Ryan (or, better, hate him and do Twitter flame wars claiming he’s a racist).  The idiocy of liberalism can continue undisturbed.  Its all so nuanced and hard to define.  All we need is more money from government on “poverty programs”.  We don’t need to think.  We don’t need to consider that we’ve had the poverty programs for decades and yet poverty still exists. And just what are “results”, anyways?  Are we sure that a demand for positive results is not a racial code word?  We don’t need to look at pesky things like third and fourth generation poverty among inner-city people…and we’d best not contrast that with non-white immigrants who arrived 20 years ago but are now middle or upper class.  All is well.  Remain calm – and keep reading the Times!

Idiots, all of them.  Preventing thought, preventing reform, preventing people from rising out of poverty.  But, hey, why should Blow worry?  He’s got the sweet gig at the Times…and most of his readers are well off, too…

A Corruption Case in Pennsylvania

This is quite the scandal.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office ran an undercover sting operation over three years that captured leading Philadelphia Democrats, including four members of the city’s state House delegation, on tape accepting money, The Inquirer has learned.

Yet no one was charged with a crime.

Prosecutors began the sting in 2010 when Republican Tom Corbett was attorney general. After Democrat Kathleen G. Kane took office in 2013, she shut it down.

In a statement to The Inquirer on Friday, Kane called the investigation poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism, saying it had targeted African Americans.

Those who favored the sting believe Kane killed a solid investigation, led by experienced prosecutor Frank G. Fina, that had ensnared several public officials and had the potential to capture more. They said they were outraged at Kane’s allegation that race had played a role in the case…

The real reason for shutting it down wasn’t that it was tainted with racism, of course – it was because that while operatives attempted to bribe both Republicans and Democrats, it appears that only Democrats took the bribes.  Had there been even one Republican involved, they probably would have allowed it to continue – because then it is a bi-partisan scandal.  The investigation was likely shut down because this is precisely the sort of scandal, when it involves only members of one party, which the other party can then use to utterly crush the offending party at the polls.  The Democrat Party wanted this to go away – and go away, it has.  No matter how much pressure is now brought to bear on Kane, she will not re-open the case and you can rest assured that Holder’s Justice Department won’t so much as take a glance at it.

This is also a look in to just how things operate in the heavily blue areas of the country – payoffs and kickbacks are the normal course of business, especially in the deep-blue city.  As it turns out, this scandal was nabbing mostly African-American politicians – but that is just happenstance.  Any heavily Democrat city has the same sort of things going on. It is how things are done in the Democrat party.  You think they’re in this for their health?  Or for the people?  Heck no – Democrats get into politics to help themselves…and even with all the perks they vote themselves in office, it is never quite enough, now is it?

But here’s the real reason I bring this up – as all deep blue areas are like this and in all of them the poor who routinely vote Democrat are getting screwed as their bosses rake it in, it is high time the GOP went into these areas and started to campaign.  Tell the poor folks that they are being screwed; point out who is having a rake-off; ask them, “do you think voting for these people, again, is going to help you?”.  And then present plans to improve their lives.  We can do this – we can make Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Los Angeles if not red, then at least purple…and that just hands just Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California on a silver platter for Presidential elections.

Hopefully someone at the RNC is starting to think like this.

What is Diplomacy?

There have been several attempts at defining this.  Webster has it as “the work of maintaining good relations between the governments of different countries”, but that is a lot of nonsense.  You don’t need good relations between governments – in fact, good relations can some times hamper diplomacy (ties of sentiment are deadly when dealing with intra-governmental issues).  Will Rogers came closer when he said, “diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggy’ until you can find a rock”.  But that isn’t quite right, either – because the purpose of diplomacy is to not have to use the rock.  But, make no mistake about it, the rock must be part of the equation.

I’ll say that diplomacy is the art of adjusting competing claims between actors of relatively equal power with war as the punishment for diplomatic failure.

It has to be between entities of roughly equal power or it isn’t diplomacy – it is either the stronger imposing its will on the weaker, or the stronger being generous to the weaker for whatever reason.  Only between equals can there be diplomacy – two equals (or two groups who are roughly equal) can sit down at the table and try to adjust their differences, all the while with the knowledge that failure to come to agreement means war – and being as it would be a war between roughly equal powers, no one on either side could be entirely sure of the result, and so the incentive is strongly in favor of coming to a deal.  Unless, that is, one side is determined upon war no matter what.  In such a case, diplomacy also cannot happen – because if one side is determined upon war no matter what and the other side is determined on peace no matter what, then the aggressive side is the stronger and will impose its will on the weaker…and, once again, you don’t have diplomacy.  Let’s look at some examples to illustrate my definition:

1.  It is said that we negotiated a treaty with Panama in 1903 in order to build the canal.  We did nothing of the kind.  We told Panama what we wanted and bade them sign on the dotted line or we wouldn’t build the canal, which is the only reason for Panama to exist.  This was the stronger imposing its will on the weaker.  Not diplomacy.

2.  It is said we negotiated a security treaty with Japan in 1951.  We did nothing of the kind.  Because Japan occupies a strategically vital area in the Asia-Pacific, we promised to protect Japan in return for obtaining certain privileges for our military forces in Japan.  It was a good move by us because Japan is a useful ally to have – but the security of the United States does not in any way depend upon the existence of Japan, and its not like a Japanese army would ever arrive in the United States to help defend us against foreign aggression. This was the stronger being generous to the weaker. Not diplomacy.

3.  When Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini gathered in Munich in 1938, three of the four were determined to have peace at any price, one of them was determined upon war no matter what.  That it wound up with an agreement rather than war was because of the rather startling amount of surrender that Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to – they eventually decided that Hitler should get the spoils of war without war (keep in mind, that if they hadn’t agreed, Hitler would have gone to war in 1938 rather than waiting until 1939).  This was rather unique in human history (to that point, at least) but it still illustrates the point:  with one side willing war no matter what and the other willing peace no matter what, the warlike side becomes immediately the stronger and imposes its will upon the weaker.  Not diplomacy.

4.  When the USSR challenged the United States by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, both affected parties were roughly equal in power and both sides were equally determined to avoid war.  Negotiations were tense and many fears were raised, but the fact of the matter is that as both were equally strong and no one was willing war, a deal was bound to happen unless some horrific accident took place.  The basics of the deal eventually agreed to were Russian nukes out of Cuba, American nukes out of Turkey.  That is diplomacy.

Now, why bring all this up?  Because as we have gone through the Ukraine crisis, no one is understanding that among all the varied things going on, diplomacy isn’t one of them.  Diplomacy will never be one of them – it can’t be as there aren’t two equal sides involved her.  Oh, to be sure, the power of the United States, alone, is enough to fight and defeat Russia…and the combined power of just Germany and France could probably make short work of Putin’s burgeoning empire.  But no one who dislikes Putin’s actions is putting on the table anything like the force necessary to give Putin pause and make him want to turn to diplomacy…which would, once again, be an adjustment of interests between equal powers and war as the price of failure.  It is my belief that Putin does not desire war – not with us, not with the European Union, not with anyone.  If there were power to match his power, he would climb down and negotiate a diplomatic settlement.  Such a settlement would, of course, have to grant Russia some of her desires – that is the thing about diplomacy: it is never a matter of anyone getting all they want.  It is a deal between equals and each gives a bit, because they don’t want a war which would be more costly than whatever it is they have to surrender to reach a deal.  But with a complete vacuum of power opposite Russia, there is no need for Russia to fear war, and thus no reason to use diplomacy.  Might as well grab all you can while the getting is good.

All the huffing and puffing of Obama, Kerry and the collective world won’t do anything.  To be sure, Putin might graciously agree to eventually sign something which will be hailed as a diplomatic settlement, but you can rest assured – unless there comes along a credible threat of war against Russia – that whatever settlement is agreed to will be entirely in accordance with Putin’s view of Russia’s interests.  In other words, he’ll merely take what he wants at the moment, leave an option to grab what he hasn’t got and attend an international conference to ratify what he’s done.  It’ll be a nice meal and pictures taken and his own press back home will laud him (or else!) as the greatest Russian in a century, etc.

Now that I’ve said all that, what do I think we should do?  Normally, I would advocate a vigorous American response to this but given our current condition and our current President, I’m saying that surrender isn’t so bad.  To be sure, its bad for the people who will come under Putin’s embrace, but I’m not so sure how a half-hearted and incompetently conducted military campaign leading to eventual American failure would help – and, of course, such a thing would actually harm.  As under Obama we are bound to have nothing but the aforementioned half-hearted, etc, I figure we just cut to the chase and make the best of a bad situation.  We can start to repair this in 2017 – hopefully under leadership which isn’t quite as bad as Obama’s.  It is a sad and distressing position for America to be in, but we have no one to blame but ourselves – we might be able to assign our 2008 vote to well-intentioned folly, but our 2012 vote was a gigantic mistake with sufficient facts clearly known.  Now we just have to pay the price for it.