Posts Tagged ‘Defense’

Going to War With the President We’ve Got

Friday, February 25th, 2022

Shall we go to War with the President we’ve got?

Donald Rumsfeld once [in]famously remarked that “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” This remark was accurate, even though it was widely and wildly criticized by leftists who have no understanding of national defense. The sentiment is easy enough to understand: You do not always get the luxury of preparing endlessly for war. Sometimes, the need to go to war supersedes your ability to abstain from or delay it for more ideal conditions or state of readiness.  Sadly, this is sometimes true of presidents as well. If the United States were to be attacked suddenly by nuclear strikes originating in Russia, for instance, it really wouldn’t matter who the president at the time might be.  That president would be expected to respond with equal or greater ferocity, irrespective of party or politics.  The problem we now face as a country borders on the galactically absurd.  We have in the Oval office a foolish, apparently dementia-addled old man, who is apparently not in good control of his bowel, never mind his mouth or intellectual capacity. He ought to be removed under the 25th amendment, come what may, but the people who’ve been using him as their meat-mask have no intention of seeing that happen.  We are in mortal danger, but under this President, Joe Biden, we cannot risk any unnecessary wars.  It is the height of unconscionable madness to permit it. I realize that sometimes, a country must go to war with the president in charge at the time, but this is not that situation, and I condemn any who would suggest otherwise.  No, we must not now go to war with the president we’ve got.

Ukraine is under attack by a hostile, monstrous actor.  Vladimir Putin is despicable, but he also has the advantage of owning the superior forces over the terrain in question.  It’s not a matter of caring, because any person can look in horror at the Hell Putin now imposes on the people of that stricken nation and understand the misery they now suffer.  It’s a matter of practical reality.  We are in no position to do anything unless our answer is a nuclear first strike against Russia, but that’s an intolerably bad option for all of the obvious reasons.  We have no significant bases nearby from which we could operate the number of air sorties needed to put up any sort of sustained defense of Ukrainian airspace, though it is possible we could park an aircraft carrier battle group in the Black Sea.  That’s an extraordinarily risky proposition when you intend to poke the Russian bear within easy reach of their air assets.  We are poorly positioned, and Putin knows it. He’s been watching and assessing NATO for decades.  He knows our NATO allies have barely maintained their responsibilities in the alliance.  He knows they’ve all been cheating.  He knows they are all incredibly weak, and weakened more by their oppressions of their own populations as part of their COVID responses.  He knows they’ve repressed their own dissidents, and he can legitimately throw the political dagger of “hypocrisy” at them with no trouble.

He also knows that America is now weak, with obviously weak and ineffectual leadership that is more concerned with punishing their own countrymen than in prosecuting a war in a country most of the corrupt US leaders would sooner see destroyed, in part to hide their corruption over decades. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Mitt Romney along with their adult children and many others in the DC cocktail-party circuit would be only too happy if Ukraine’s current leadership came to an obscure and quiet end.  Between 1999-2014, the Clinton foundation carted over $10 million dollars from the oligarchs there.  They’ve used it as their personal piggy-bank for more than two decades, laundering money in and out of that small and easily corrupted country.  Their current president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is apparently an actual reformer, and none of them can tolerate that, particularly Putin, who has used it as the base from which to compromise Western politicians, particularly Americans, none of whose names are Trump.

The only question in Washington DC is how to play it for maximum waggage. (As in wag-the-dog.) None of the people now in charge in DC have any intention of rescuing Zelenskiy.  The truth is that they want him gone for all the same reasons Putin does. He can’t have Zelenskiy or his reformer government burning his purchased assets in Washington. It’s better to make it all just go away, and to bury any evidence or witnesses with it.  Others had suggested that the Russian “Invasion of Ukraine” narrative had been an entirely invented story line to give Biden a moment to talk and act tough to distract from the massive failures of his administration, but as facts on the ground now demonstrate, the threat was always very real.  Maintaining an Army in the field is expensive, and the larger the force, the more expensive and difficult it becomes. When it was clear that Putin had more than one-hundred-thousand troops deployed along the borders of Ukraine, it became clear to me that this was more than idle bluffing.

It could be observed that the pronouncements from both the White House and the State Department seemed almost to goad Putin into attacking.  On the one hand, they made threats that all parties knew were idle, while on the other, they openly admitted their inability and unwillingness to do much to stop it. “You’d better not, or we’ll kick your ass, even though we’re in no position to do so, and really don’t have the resolve to do so,” they effectively blustered and admitted at once.

There’s one other issue I’d like to tackle, and it’s with those who seem to be insisting “we MUST do something.” This element doesn’t seem to like that the vast bulk of the American people seem understandably to have no interest in doing much about the situation in Ukraine.  Polls seem to suggest that something like thirty percent of Democrats and twenty percent of Republicans believe the US should have any significant role in Ukraine.  To this element in our country, I suggest they take a look around and smell the crap they’re shoveling.  One, a radio host I have always liked, pointed out for the second consecutive day that after all, ours is a volunteer military, as if that means something to the argument for going to war, and he’s right, it does: A volunteer military requires the people to follow orders just like a conscripted military, with the difference that what makes that volunteer force viable is their understanding that their chain of command will not make frivolous or futile use of them. It’s one of only a couple of times in my history of listening to Mark Levin that I very nearly turned him off. I know there are dolts who have come to believe, inexplicably, that the killer Putin is some sort of good guy in disguise, but I’m not one of those, and Mr. Levin ought to be more careful before he begins to conflate America First patriots with these.

I don’t know what’s in Mr. Levin’s head when he says a thing like that.  I was a volunteer too, when I was fortunate enough to have a great commander-in-chief in President Ronald Reagan.  Neither was he without flaws.  Eight days before I reported for Basic Training, 241 servicemembers – Marines(220), Sailors(18) and Soldiers(3) – were slaughtered in Beirut.  When I went through boot camp, the mostly Vietnam combat veteran drill instructors all believed we were inevitably going to war.  We believed it too.  They drilled us like it, and they trained us with a vigor and intensity prior classes that year probably hadn’t experienced.  They were tough as nails, maybe more than usual, because they believed we trainees would be called upon to go to Lebanon.  That call never came, but I believe to this day that every one of us who graduated that training cycle were beneficiaries, because they more scrupulously got rid of the duds, pushed us to the physical, emotional, and intellectual limits, making us better soldiers.  The point is that President Ronald Reagan did not send in more Marines, Sailors, or Soldiers.  In point of fact, he pulled them out.  When that was the result, I remember that the sentiment in the military community was not all that happy about it.  Nobody wants to see their fellow servicemembers slaughtered, particularly to no purpose, and definitely without punitive response.  At the time, it didn’t sit well, even though it was potentially our necks on the line had Reagan sent more troops instead of withdrawing them.

In the longer run, however, I came to take a more mature view of what Reagan did, or more properly, didn’t do.  He evaluated the terrain, he looked at who we faced, and what the probability would be that more troops would merely make for more concentrated targets, far from home, to be attacked by small groups or individual suicide bombers where the mission was already murky and hadn’t borne the expected fruit. He looked at our allies in the region, and how he might augment and support the mission, and finally decided there wasn’t an attainable military objective that could be reasonably achieved without unreasonable losses.  In short, President Reagan made an entirely rational choice.  He likely wanted retribution against them as much as any of us. He wrote the hundreds of letters to wives and mothers and fathers and children.  He knew the unambiguous costs. Strangely, I would later intersect with Reagan’s foreign policy again, in April 1986, when a Berlin discotheque was bombed, killing US Servicemembers.  It was a strange turn of events that led my unit to serve briefly as replacements in Berlin in September of that year. Reagan did exact a punishment on the bad guys in this case, being Ghaddafi and his ring of terrorist henchmen, within ten days sending a bombing raid to Tripoli that nearly got the “Colonel.”

My point in all of this is that it’s very easy to look at the situation in Ukraine and desire to be able to put a stop to it. The sickening truth is that when we pretended, starting with President George HW Bush, that there was some “peace dividend” to be obtained from the end of the Cold War, it was foolishness, and an instance of utter stupidity that only anti-military pukes like the Clintons could love.  They exploited it, too.  Rather than realizing that the “peace dividend” from the ending of the Cold War was peace itself, we pretended that we could reduce our defense spending.  Adjusting for inflation, to spend at our Cold War defense-spending peak in 1986, a year in which we spent an astounding $295 billion, in today’s dollars, we should be spending roughly $1.2 trillion.  Instead, in 2019, we were spending roughly $740 billion.  At the turn of the century, after two terms of Clinton, we had fallen to $320 billion when we ought to have been closer to $500 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the percentage of GDP expended on our military had fallen from 6.63% in 1986 to 3.11% in 2000.  Even now, we’re only slightly better, at 3.41% of GDP, as of 2019, so that we’re at slightly more than half as much military spending as a percentage of our GDP than we had been in 1986, a time when many, myself included, believe the US Army was at or near its peak in training and morale. (See stats here.)

Europe is far worse. Trump was not only right about European nations’ contributions to NATO, but their underlying defense expenditures are cratering. Since Trump left, they’ve fallen off a cliff, with reports that the German Army couldn’t deploy sufficient forces to repel successfully much of anything.  In short, Europe has left themselves virtually defenseless, with the brief exception of the period of Trump’s presidency, with only new NATO member Poland substantially upholding the promise of expending at least two percent of their national GDP on defense.  The United States has been bearing the burdens of defending Europe for most of a century now, yet we cannot get them to pay to defend themselves, and there is no will under the current administration in Washington DC to hold NATO’s feet to the fire. In 2020, Germany barely attained 1.57% of its GDP in defense spending, and that was after extensive prodding from President Trump. When he took office, the Germans were spending roughly 1.1% on defense.  In short, don’t look to Berlin for help.

This is the realistic assessment of the terrain in Europe: NATO has fallen into severe disrepair, from the end of the Cold War, until Trump came along to prod them beginning in 2017, but has since fallen back into the same rut, with the blame naturally being placed on CoVid19. At this point, the United States should be telling NATO: “That’s it. We’re cutting you off. We’re bringing home our troops unless you get to your spending goals AND make up for all the years of shortfalls within the decade.”

Of course, we’re no more likely to get that from this administration that we are to have a competent president, never mind commander-in-chief. More, this administration is incapable of waging an effective war of any kind, anywhere, at any time. They’ve diverted our military into concerns with all things “woke,” and if you think this is Ronald Reagan’s military of 1986, technology notwithstanding, you need your head examined.  Quickly.  Yes, of course we still have some good war-fighters in our military, but they’re now a pathetic minority within the ranks, and in the officer corps, they’re getting pretty thin as the service academies have been infiltrated by more and more social justice schlock, as modern “education” theories take precedence over what had traditionally worked.  I would like you to watch the first six and one-fourth minutes of this episode of Bannon’s War Room. In those first few minutes, he presents what he calls his “cold open,” and in it are various clips, including three recruiting ads, one for NATO, one for the Russian Army, and one for the US Army.  If you don’t see the problem, again, you need your head examined:


Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been reporting to you the state of our nation, and more generally, or our globe in one way or another for more than a decade at this web address. While my posts have been more infrequent in recent years, it’s not for a lack of concern.  People are foolishly insisting now that “we must do something,” but look at the state of our country.  I ask them: What would you have us do?  We have feckless leaders, corrupt and intransigent to the suffering and travails of the American people.  We have a military that, but for a brief reprieve under Trump, has been diminished and demolished, it’s morale wrecked along with its ethos.  We have a corrupted Justice Department that behaves as the hitmen for the government mafia.  We have an FBI that actively plots to entrap citizens, in shenanigans of that agency’s complete contrivance and invention.  We have a Department of State that openly plots against elected presidents it does not like, and we have an intelligence community that actively seeks to surveil and undermine a president it did not and would not obey.  We have an opposition party that barely musters any sort of fight against any of this, in large measure because they’re not really opposed.  We have public health officials who collude with big pharma to poison the American people and hide the data. We have whole segments of the population committed to destroying the country from within, including local officials, many bought-off by globalist pigs like Soros and Schwab.  You actually expect, in this condition, and in this state of being, that the remarkably few American people who realize what is going on, to volunteer their children into a war on behalf of this? Of this???

Do not tell me that we must go to war with the President we’ve got. I’m heartbroken at what I’ve seen thus far from Ukraine, like any other compassionate, thoughtful human must be.  I know that Putin’s mission is to exterminate Zelenskiy and his entire cabinet. His intention is to expunge them from the face of the globe.  Worse, the scumbags running Washington DC have every reason to help him do so.  There’s too much evidence of their corruption over in that tiny country.  There’s too much evidence of how they were controlled from the Kremlin. They don’t want to save Zelenskiy or Ukraine.  They want to bury Zelenskiy and his cabinet, they’re willing to burn Ukraine to the ground to do it, and they’re helping Putin carry it out.  Meanwhile, the American economy is spiraling into a stagflationary period that will make the Carter years look like a boom.  (It was once a joke that Jimmy Carter was thankful to Obama, and then Biden(but I repeat myself) for knocking him from the top of the “worst president’s ever” list, but nobody’s really laughing any longer. We’re in freefall, and every sensible person knows it.)

In the midst of all of this, those of you who wish to “do something” need to get a grip on your emotions, and understand what we’re really up against now.  We’re fighting for the survival of this country, right here, right now.  That great wealth or influence might offer insulation to some is no excuse for the indifference in the sentiment contained in the idea that Americans are somehow defective if they don’t wish to rush off to war against Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.  We know it’s another nasty set-up, just like all the ones deployed against us here at home.  We know the score.  We know, because every damned “conspiracy theory” (or most of them) of the last two decades have been proven mostly true.  We know Zelenskiy is the good guy.  We know.  Meanwhile, we listen to buffoons like Lindsey Graham, whose military experience consisted of walking papers around a Judge Advocate General’s office, pontificate about the privations we will suffer due to this crisis.  It’s not enough as it is, you see; Goober would have us suffer more.

Now I have to endure a berating monologue from a radio host I have long supported because I’m in no hurry to see my younger, ill-prepared brethren in uniform sent off to do something somewhere? For what purpose? To what end? For the sake of the need to “do something?” No sir.  I will not support going to war with this class of criminals who run our country. I will not support the spilling of so much as one drop of their blood on behalf of these cretins.  They’ve spent decades demolishing the country, and it’s not just the Democrats, though they’re today the mob bosses in charge.  When we had a president who was not part of their mob, they tried, like the gangsters they are, to take him out in any way that they could.  They used their vast criminal enterprise, posing as lawful suits at the bar of corrupt courts, undermining the integrity of our election, all because Trump had to go.

Years ago, I counseled young people to serve a term of enlistment in the military if their life plans were not firm after finishing high school. I told them it was the best thing they could do for themselves, while also serving their country.  It was true in my time, but it hasn’t been for most of a half-generation.  Even in Trump’s time, the military was already thoroughly undermined from the top, ever since Obama purged the Generals now more than a decade ago.

I truly do feel terribly for the Ukrainian people.  I know that like most ordinary people everywhere, they simply want to be left to live their lives, mostly in peace.  I know their current president is a reformer, and if it were possible, I would try to rescue he and his countrymen from the Russians.  The problem is that it is not currently possible.  More, the people running this country don’t actually want it saved.  I am as powerless to change that today, in the here and now, as any other American.  Shall we overthrow this government so that we can retroactively spend the defense dollars we should have spent, and undo all the stupidity and malfeasances of the last three decades? How will that help Zelenskiy?  More, we didn’t raise a credible effort to overthrow this government when it conspired against the President we elected. We didn’t raise a credible effort to overthrow this government when it obviously conspired with various state and local officials and NGOs to steal our presidential election and elections for lower offices.  It’s not merely Joe and Kamala who are illegitimate. Chuck Schumer is illegitimate in his leadership position, because neither Mark Kelly nor Rafael Warnock, among others, actually won their races.  Nancy Pelosi is illegitimate, because there were at least a half-dozen closely contested races that were likely impacted by the same cheating.  Do you really believe John James lost his Senate race in Michigan?  I don’t.

No, Mr. Levin, don’t tell me we should spill blood or treasure, no matter how strongly we might feel about it, for the sake of Ukraine or President Zelenskiy.  Until we spill all the blood and treasure needed to rescue our own fallen nation, don’t dare speak of it to me. You haven’t earned the right.  If you wish to characterize me as America First, as though it were a slur of some kind, so be it. I’ll stand by it. Don’t worry, I won’t burn any of the autographed books that fill half a shelf, in part not only because I hate book-burners and wanton, pointless destruction, but also because, with the way things are rapidly heading, I may need them soon for that purpose to cook my supper. Shall we go to war with the president we’ve got?  Respectfully, that depends on the contextual meaning of “with,” sir.  With him in Ukraine?

Hell no.

 

Editor’s Note: I’ve been a big fan of Mark Levin for a long time, and in the past, I’ve contributed to the Landmark Legal Foundation, of which he served as President for several years.  I don’t mean here to personally attack Mr. Levin, but I fail to understand his point of view on this particular issue. I always feel badly when I find myself at severe disagreement with the Great One, but on this point, I will not demur.  Our country cannot now defend itself, and its leaders prevent its agents and officers from defending even our Southern border.  They file suits at law against states, like my own, who attempt to enforce the laws of the United States, and even when ordered by courts to do so, effectively play a stalling game, and a game of “you can’t make me” with federal judges who dare to rule against them, up to and including the Supreme Court. So long as we have a lawless government, I support only wars of immediate existential circumstances for the United States. I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and it does not expire, no matter who now has claimed the authority to ignore it.

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Posted in Breaking, Donald Trump, Featured, Joe Biden, National Security, Obiden, video, War, War Room | Comments Closed

The Next School Shooter

Thursday, February 15th, 2018

parkland_florida_shooting_ft

It’s coming.  You know it, and I know it.  Every rational person knows it.  Somewhere in our nation, one or more people are preparing to go on a shooting rampage, and one of them may intend your child as a target.  That shooter-in-waiting is already armed, already possesses the means to carry out the intended attack.  It’s too late to talk about banning guns, bullets, gas masks or backpacks.  The thug is already primed, and all that is now needed is for the fuse to be lit.  Perhaps the death of a relative will be the trigger. Maybe it will be something in our highly polarized political environment that will ignite this rampage.  There’s no way to know where the shooter will appear, but there’s no doubt that the shooter is waiting, and while we bicker about banning guns or ammunition or anything else, and while we talk about “mental health issues,” we are failing our children in a sickeningly fundamental way:  We’ve shirked our first responsibility as parents to defend our children by leaving them defenseless in the face of monsters.  We cannot pretend that we can intercept these shooters by banning their implements, and we must face the fact that the only way to protect our children is to rise in their defense.

When you deliver your child to the school in the morning, or watch them load onto the school bus, you’ve effectively discharged your responsibility; everything the school does with your child is a matter of the authority with which you vested them when you placed the school in loco parentis.  You’ve effectively given the school temporary custody, presumably for the purposes of education.  At the same time, our federal government has so thoroughly nationalized our schools that we have largely prohibited the faculty and administration of our schools from participating in the defense of our children.  Except for licensed law enforcement officers, there’s nobody who can legally possess a gun on our schools’ grounds.  When it is suggested that we ought to increase security at our schools, and that the faculty and administration of our schools ought to be included in that defense, it is said that teachers cannot be armed because they cannot be trusted to refrain from a shooting rampage of their own should a child or children get out of hand.  In essence, we are told that teachers are a psychologically unbalanced lot, not to be trusted with guns.

This notion is always baffling to me, particularly when uttered by actual parents of minor children.  Are we to understand that teachers and coaches and principals may not be entrusted with a firearm, but that they are to be trusted to act in loco parentis? We trust them to shape the minds of our children, but we cannot trust them to defend our kids?  If an actual parent believes this, then there are only two rational options: 1.) Immediately withdraw your children from that dangerous school, or 2.) Reconsider your qualifications as a suitable parent for your children.  It is self-evident that if a teacher or administrator is insufficiently trustworthy to possess and carry a firearm, they have no business whatever acting in place of me with respect to my child(ren.)   If I can’t trust somebody with a gun, I certainly won’t trust them to instruct or oversee my kid(s.)

Bear all of this in mind when presented with the litany of excuses as to why we can’t or mustn’t arm non-police officers in our schools.  Remember that the thug is already out there, waiting for the timer to go off, or otherwise be “triggered” on his way.  The shooter is already armed.  The shooter already has ammunition.  You can ban guns and think you’ll discover him by psychological intervention, but you’re only kidding yourself, or permitting yourself to be misled.  The only place you can approximately guarantee the safety of your child(ren) is at home, but even there, it’s not guaranteed.  That said, you are in a position to defend your child(ren) in a way that is not possible in a conventional school environment.

It’s impossible to stress this point too thoroughly.  We must defend our children, but it must be an active defense, rather than an exercise in apprehension of villains and recovery of bodies.  Our teachers, administrators, coaches, and security must be armed and able to repel attackers.  They must be trained.  If we have teachers who cannot be trusted with a firearm, they should not be trusted with our children.  That next school shooter is out there.  It’s not possible to stop the shooter by banning anything.  The shooter is likely already armed.  The question parents must answer is this:  If you know the shooter is out there, though you can’t know his location, identity, or motive in advance, how do you defend your children?  Why are you sending your children to be safeguarded by people who are unable and/or unwilling to protect them?  Why are you putting your children in the midst of people with whom you would would not trust a gun?  The answer is an active defense.  It must be.

There will always be killers among us.  We can’t stop them all, and we can’t always intervene before they’re able to inflict casualties, but the only way we might is to present an unambiguous, active defensive curtain around our children, with trained, rational adults empowered to provide that defense.  Everything else is political cowardice.  It’s time, with all the evidence before us, for parents to insist that there be an active defense, or to withdraw their children from these schools.  What do you have that you value more?  On which political issue are your efforts better spent?  It’s simple: We must insist that our schools be empowered to mount an active defense against violent assailants.  If you sincerely wish to protect your children from the next school shooter, it’s too late to talk about bans.  That shooter is already armed, perhaps casing the target, or merely awaiting a psychological trigger; your child(ren.)  Only an active defense offers any hope.

 

Editor’s Note: It’s despicable that while the Parkland Florida shooter was preparing to commit his crime, the FBI, which had been notified of a youtuber of the same name threatening to be a professional school shooter, did only a cursory investigation, apparently too busy chasing phantom “Trump-Russian Collusion,” as directed by their senior leadership in Washington DC.  If only the FBI field agents had been able to conduct a more thorough investigation, perhaps the outcome would have been different.

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Posted in Activism, Education, Featured, Gun Rights, Law, News, Politics | 3 Comments »

The Change We Need Looks Nothing Like the Change We’ve Gotten

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

Change in Which Leftists Believe

Our Republic is suffering a slow death at the hands of statists of the left, but also the moderate Republicans.  We have a fiscal situation that most would label a crisis by any definition, in which the Federal government expends money fifty percent faster than it collects it, and it collects plenty.  Three years of Barack Obama’s reckless spending, and the willingness of Republican leadership to make deals has left us in a situation in which we are accruing debt faster than at any time in history.  Even if Barack Obama is defeated and sent packing in 2012, as he surely should be, we may not make it that far before the consequences explode in our faces.  The House of Representatives should not pass another bill that appropriates one dollar.   Yes, we need a government shutdown, but Barack Obama has other plans.  He intends to take over, and to ignore the Congress, and he intends to do so well in advance of the elections.  Obama is a man who has planned all his life for overthrowing the United States Constitution, and now, armed with the power of the executive branch, and with a supporting Senate, he is likely to make his play now while he still can.

Barack Obama isn’t a garden variety socialist.  He’s steeped in the tactics of Saul Alinsky, but more, he has an abiding desire to see the United States become a slave state.  People have wondered why he’s doing the things he is, but for many, the answer is clear: We may be on the verge of a second bloody revolution, and the proponents of this one are already in charge, and already using the levers of power to make ready for their moment.  I know this sounds so thoroughly outlandish to some people, that it’s difficult to say it seriously, except for the fact that it’s happening.

Consider Occupy Wall Street.  Here is an organization that exists to create unrest and violence in the streets, and in typical leftist fashion, it will be used to give government and excuse to step in.  Of course, it’s being directed by Obama friends and co-conspirators, including a healthy dose of funding from George Soros and his various affiliate pass-through organizations, but what make it more stunning than this is that Obama is putting in place the foundations for declaring vast new emergencies and taking on new Federal powers under the aegis of just such an emergency.  On Thursday, he signed a new executive order, that while updating older statutes, effectively gives the government the power to seize whatever it wants under whatever conditions it wants in response to a vague national emergency.  The Executive Order, titled: NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS, provides for adjustments to procedures to be carried out under 50 USC.

This order provides for the organization of the executive branch under such an emergency, and likewise provides directions on what may be delegated, to whom, and for what purposes.  It references a number of other executives orders, along with various sections of 50 USC.  The Obama administration will claim it is merely updating policies, but this is a bit more than that. We mustn’t be fooled into thinking this is all business-as-usual.  Nothing about the Obama administration is business-as-usual except for the outward appearance they wish to project.

Consider the implications of a President being tied to a civil unrest movement the likes of OWS, and then also setting up the legal basis for a government response to the sort of crisis OWS could be expected to generate, particularly if there is substantial financial difficulty arising out of the reckless policies of this administration.  On the one hand, he has OWS to terrorize you, and on the other, he is preparing to deal with them in response to your demands.  The truly stunning part is that the Occupiers don’t quite seem to grasp the danger, or that they’re being set up to take a mighty fall.

Now comes news that Obama has been groomed for this role for a long time, perhaps as far back as the mid-1980s, when it seems that Bill Ayers’ parents may have sponsored Obama or otherwise helped him through school, as WND reports.  A former mail carrier explained his contacts with the Ayers family and young black man he met who he now believes was Barack Obama.  WND interviewed him, and here is that video:


Whatever you may make of this, what’s certain is that Obama certainly had ties to some very radical people, and the problem with this man’s testimony is that he remembers Mrs. Ayers(Bill Ayers’ mother) saying that this was a foreign student.  What is certain is that the postal carrier remembers Obama’s features, his voice and manner of speaking.  He also had an interesting discussion with Ayers’ father, Tom, who seems to have been an ardent Marxist too.

I bring this to your attention because it’s an interesting aside to the general conversation about who Barack Obama really is, and what his intentions for this country really are.   I don’t believe he’s anything but a radical leftist, and as many now contend, he is not undertaking these policies lightly.  As Mark Levin mentioned on Monday evening, the Executive Order issued by Obama last week is bad in any president’s hands, but in the hands of this President particularly, that offers a potential prescription for the end of America as we have known it.

It reminds me of a famous piece of literature, Atlas Shrugged, wherein Ayn Rand constructs the devolution of the  United States, and one of the instruments the statists use is an analog to this latest executive order, called “Directive 10-289.”  It basically offered a takeover under the guise of an emergency in much the same form as this latest executive order would do:  Take over the means of production,distribution, transportation, and any and every other critical part of the American economy.  The longer the Obama administration goes on, the more I get the impression that we are living out the last chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

I think Obama is a good deal more malevolent than the shrinking coward who was the head of the country in that book.  I don’t believe any of this is or can be accidental.  He’s clearly intent upon changing America to his vision, whether or not Americans consent.   Any president who can so easily disregard the opinion of more than sixty percent of Americans in enacting a health-care reform bill isn’t acting in the best interests of the country.  Slowly but surely, he’s picking our constitution apart, and if he gets his way, it will be altogether meaningless as a restraint upon government.  2012 may be our last chance to stop the overthrow of our Republic by peaceful means. The fox is in the hen-house, and establishment Republicans still look at him expectantly, as though he ought to lay an egg.  If we do oust him, our next job will be to clean out that sorry gaggle of spur-less roosters who have been so ineffective at keeping the fox in check, in part because they golf with him and see him as one of their own.  He’s not, and the sooner our Republican leadership learns that, the sooner we can take back this country.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Congress, Defense, Economics, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, Video | 8 Comments »

Fox in the Henhouse: Obama’s Undermining of US Defenses Escalates

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

"I...Am So In Love With You..."

Barack Obama’s defense policies appear to be the most foolish, irresponsible, and negligent in modern American history.  This president is cutting our defenses to the bone, and he knows it.  Not satisfied with wreaking havoc with our conventional forces, he’s now examining the elimination of our strategic nuclear arsenal to as few as three hundred warheads.  That’s fewer than China, and many fewer than Russia.  If the United States gives up this deterrence to attack, we are effectively naked to such designs as other nations may have on our country.  Three hundred nuclear warheads?  While it sounds like tremendous destructive capacity, and it is, it does not offer the sort of strategic deterrent that our current nuclear arsenal comprises, and against a nuclear giant like Russia, it’s wholly insufficient to prohibit them from nuclear blackmail or outright nuclear attack if the relationship with them sours further.  This policy proposal is a national suicide pact, and Barack Obama knows it.  Let it be stated forthrightly: He is destroying the United States.

We are already at our lowest levels in decades, and the problem is that while most of us think of nuclear weapons and warfare in a global apocalyptic vision, the facts are much different.  A nuclear warhead in the range of one megaton is a terribly destructive device, but it is enough to wipe out one large city.  Across the vastness of the Russia, or China, it is a small impact.  More, since priority targets are generally opposing nuclear weapons sites, it is impossible to cover all targets even at our current level if it came to that.  I am not here making light of nuclear weaponry, except to say that such diminished levels as three hundred warheads means we would then have a force insufficient to deter a nuclear-armed Iran, if they can be deterred at all.  From the article linked above:

John Bolton, former U.N. ambassador and undersecretary of state for international security during the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview that the administration’s plan to cut nuclear force to as low as 300 “alone is sufficient to vote against Obama in November.”

“Congress should urgently adopt a resolution rejecting the idea that any of these levels is consistent with American national security,” Bolton said. “Let’s just see who is prepared to support Obama.”

This is only the start. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney went even further:

“No sane military leader would condone 300 to 400 warheads for an effective nuclear deterrent strategy,” McInerney told the Washington Free Beacon.

“Going down to 1000 to 1,100 is risky enough and frankly in today’s world, very risky. The purpose of our nuclear force structure is to deter any adversary from even thinking that they could minimize our attack options. Such thinking is very dangerous and will only encourage our adversaries to make bold decisions.”

This is an intentional attack on our strategic defense infrastructure, and President Obama must be held accountable even for suggesting it.  I am much beyond the polite discussions of policy in bureaucratic terminology here.  These cuts are a disaster that may ultimately cost millions upon millions of Americans their lives, never mind the future of the Republic itself, as a viable political body.  The fox is in the hen-house, and many Americans still see him as an off-kilter hen.  Let us not pretend that Barack Obama is here exercising the best interests of the United States, or the oath of his office to defend and protect the constitution.  Recent actions by this president demonstrate he has no love of our constitutional system, and this is an egregious abandonment of his duties as commander in chief. Also from the article:

Kenneth deGraffenreid, a former Reagan administration National Security Council official, said in an interview that the plans for sharp nuclear cuts are “part of the administration’s purposeful decline of American military power.”(emphasis added)

Some people wonder why I become frustrated as they watch their football games, or their reality TV shows, but otherwise check out on the whole question of our nation’s affairs.  Ladies and gentlemen, this cannot be permitted, and John Boehner had better get off of his whining duff, and step up to the plate.  Mitch McConnell had better be all over the TV, and he’d better stop using weasel-words, if he remembers how to speak plainly any longer, because our nation is under attack from within.  It’s time we stop mincing words to disguise this fact from our people and from ourselves.  President Obama is no friend to this country, never mind its allies, and this strategic proposal for what is essentially unilateral nuclear disarmament makes of our nation a sitting duck.  This is not simple incompetence.  This is not mistaken thinking.  This is not a case of good intentions leading to unintended consequences.  This is a monstrous betrayal of the American people by a leftist ideologue who hates the country he is sworn to lead, defend, and protect.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Budget, Defense, Foreign Policy, Law, Military Affairs, News, Politics, Veterans, War | 13 Comments »

Dereliction or Treason?

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

What's He Doing?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to offer you a number of facts to consider and then I’m going to ask you to consider them as a complete set.  At present, our military is falling into a disgraceful condition under the maladministration of Barack Obama. In fact, the condition of the country at large is one of unsustainable weakness, but every day, Obama undertakes more bad ideas that hamper or harm our nation.  Most assign this to a reckless incompetence, and while I can understand the desire to not think the worse of a US President for his intentions, I am questioning them now as far too many things seem to be aligning disturbing synchronicity.  It seems as though something is wrong with this President, and it may be far worse than misguided intentions. His actions as President have severely undermined our defenses, and may make us essentially naked to aggressors. When one observes such a trend, it must be called to the attention of his fellows, because if this is intentional, then the only name for this is not “dereliction” but instead “treason.”

We are now slashing the defense budget to make room in the Federal budget for entitlements, including Obamacare’s implementation, and all those other programs previously in existence.  We are now grounding our Air Force’s fighters at a phenomenal rate.  We are nearly 20% weaker in this vital area than we had been a short decade ago, and cancellations of projects like the F-35 guarantee this will only become worse.

We have handicapped our naval capacity by insisting they use a certain percentage of bio-fuels in their combat aircraft at an outrageous expense to tax-payers, and an as-yet unknown cost to the defense of the nation.  We are nearing the point where we will effectively scrap two entire aircraft carrier battle groups, further limiting our ability to respond to threats around the globe, or protect our own air-space here at home.

We have given most of our critical missile defense secrets to the Russians, allegedly to ease their worries about them, but in truth, what we’ve done is to give them to a potential adversary that has contractual relationships with Iran and other nations with which conflicts may be inevitable.  At the same time, Iran continues to threaten us and our allies with missiles against which these systems were designed to act.

Iran now flagrantly sails its fleets not merely through the Suez Canal, but also threatens to shut down shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, and between these two passages, nearly 50% of the world’s oil supply is transported.  We do not challenge them there, except to waggle our finger, but it’s worse because their ships now sail openly along the edge of our territorial waters in an intentionally provocative way.

Petroleum and its distillates are soaring in price, even though President Obama has killed off the Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought fuel to our energy-starved nation within a short time.  Our current oil production is dipping, but more than this, the taps at the Strategic Petroleum Reserves remain open, as Obama uses this to hold down the price of oil only slightly.

The Iranians are developing nuclear weapons and they already have mid-range missiles on which to deliver them, but more than this, they are developing long range rocketry that will reach to the North American continent.  Iran continues to fund terrorists who attack us globally, and yet, when there was an uprising in Iran, Obama did not back it until well after it had been quelled, but he did so only half-heartedly.

Soros is raising an army of rabble that you know as the Occupiers.  What these will be are the useful idiots to be led into slaughter when the time comes, and Obama needs an excuse to clamp down. At the same time, Obama’s department of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement(ICE) is being directed to permit illegals to go without arrest whenever possible.

Our financial system has been directly tied to the banking systems of the failing Euro currency, and it’s no secret that if they collapse, as seems likely, we will almost surely accompany them over the precipice and into the abyss.  Your purchasing power is being eroded away, and soon you will begin to see a more distinctly inflationary trend that they will not be able to mostly hide from you as has been true over the last few months.  Instead, we’re going like gang-busters to worsen our troubles.  The government rigs the unemployment statistics, and we’re told “things are improving.”

None of these things are likely to have been unknown to you,  because as readers of this site, you’ve seen most of them covered here.  You might look at any of these in isolation, and conclude that they are the results of colossal incompetence or even dereliction, but as yet, you may not have noticed the common thread running through them.  You might be satisfied with that notion, but for the fact that you know nothing exists in a vacuum, and that you cannot separate the out from the whole if you’re to understand them in context.

What all of these things have in common is that each of them substantially harms America’s economic and physical security.  Each and every one of these things also have in common is the fact that they are directed by a single authority, and the person who wields it is none other than Barack Obama.

Barack Obama maintains two separate cabinets, one consisting of his official cabinet secretaries, and the other composed of his shadowy system of czars and advisers.  The latter group wins every argument, and it shows in the decisions this president takes.

If not dereliction, could this really be treason?  If we didn’t suspect otherwise, I’d think he was getting us ready for a take-down on all fronts.  What’s worse is that his chief opponent in November is likely to be the candidate of his preference.  Still, one can hardly miss the fact that what all of these things leave in play is the fact that we are being set up, and it is we Americans who stand to lose everything.  His sympathies for Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are telling relations, and the fact that his favorite pen-pal is the radical, Islamist President of Turkey, and what you realize that there’s almost no hope.

Is Barack Obama intentionally leading us to the banquet of the enemies at which we are to be the main course?  Consider what might happen if an electromagnetic pulse(EMP)  bomb was detonated by Iran over US territory:  You will not see television again, perhaps for a generation. Your vehicles will not function.  Every electronic device, and indeed the whole electrical grid may be down for years.  You will have no oil with which even to do battle to reopen the Straits of Hormuz or the Suez Canal, because we have been bleeding our Strategic Petroleum Reserves into the ground at their behest.  No oil?  No Navy or Air Force, meaning no response from us.  At that point, fuel-less, and with nothing in which to place it  if we had it, the country would almost immediately grind to a stop.

Spend a little time to think about everything Barack Obama is doing, and ask yourself if these are the actions of an honest man concerned with his country but inept in application, or instead the mere organizing of a man who is committed to its destruction.  The worst-case scenarios are too awful to imagine, but that we must stop him is also clear.  If it isn’t treason, it sure looks like it, and if the net effect is the same, it won’t make a difference either way.  Does it matter?  In this context, is negligence distinguishable from treason?  I don’t think so, but we must begin to assess the threats against our country, and if we should survive through election 2012, we must unseat this president, though I do not know now how we can beat him.

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Posted in Arab Spring, Barack Obama, Defense, European Union, Federal Budget, Global Revolution, Military Affairs, News, Politics, War | 16 Comments »

Hooah: Allen West Responds to Marine Urination Incident: War is Hell

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Allen West (R-FL)

The Weekly Standard is reporting on a statement via email from Congressman Allen West(R-FL) on the incident involving Marines who urinated on three Taliban Corpses.  West is known particularly for his own service, having retired from the Army  as a Lt. Colonel.  His statement reflects the view of a military realist, who understands the real nature of war, and the things that sometimes happen on the battlefield.  I think the hand-wringers would do well to listen to West on this one, as his statement comports well with my own statement on the matter.   I wish all of our veterans in government were willing to be this blunt:

“I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

“All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

“The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

“As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”

I have but one thing to say to this: “Hooah!“

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Posted in Defense, Military Affairs, News, Politics, Update, Veterans, War | 43 Comments »

Allen West Says Election 2012 Will Be “Bloodbath”

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

 

Congressman Allen West

NewsMax.TV conducted an interview with Allen West(R-FL) in which West questions Mitt Romney’s credentials as a true conservative, and he points out several of Newt Gingrich’s best accomplishments, referring to Gingrich as “the smartest person” among those now in the contest.   West wasn’t willing to endorse any candidate yet, but he sees the race coming down to Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich.  He also described at length why it remains important for the GOP to battle against Obama’s illegal “recess appointments” that weren’t, but he wouldn’t commit to the notion of impeachment.  Representative West also pointed out the need to take great care in any cuts to our national defense.

While he said he likes Ron Paul’s views on economic liberty, he expressed serious concerns about Paul’s foreign policy positions.  He went on to severely criticize Barack Obama’s lack of leadership, and he made several excellent observations about the reckless behavior of the Obama administration.  West remains a very popular Congressman nationally.  You can watch the entire video at NewsMax.

 

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Posted in Budget, Congress, Defense, Election 2012, Media, News, Politics | 7 Comments »

National Defense Faces Severe Cuts

Monday, November 7th, 2011

A Scalpel or a Sword?

As you will may remember from the Debt Ceiling debacle in early August, the deal then worked out has some automatic triggers.  If the Super Committee created by the legislation fails to produce sufficient spending cuts, those triggers will kick in and cuts will be forced upon Congress.  The biggest target of these cuts is the defense budget, and as the New York Times is reporting,  it’s Leon Panetta who is now considering what those cuts will be.  This is one of the most despicable parts of our current budget morass, and it’s astonishing that nobody much seems to notice:  One of the few legitimate functions of government is the national defense, and yet among all the things to be cut, defense will be hit the most deeply.  I have no problem with an examination of the necessities of our defense spending, but I’m also aware that while government spends money on all sorts of things for which it has no actual constitutional authority, defense is clearly one of the budget categories for which the federal government exists.  In part, this is the result of the can-kicking in which Boehner and House Republicans joined by making their deal with the devil in August, but it’s also the built-in result of generations of governmental growth in other areas of expenditure.

Defense spending now stands at approximately $700 billion.   That’s an astonishing number that is as large as the entire federal budget just thirty years ago.  Part of that number owes to our engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the actual baseline spending for defense being $530 billion.  That’s still an incredible amount of money, but it is only $130 billion(yes, “only”) more than the defense budget at the height of the Reagan administration, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, it’s actually less.  Defense constitutes the largest single line-item in the discretionary portion of the budget, but the entitlements, in the non-discretionary budget, have begun to dwarf the spending on defense.  Social Security is a larger program, and Medicare and Medicaid together exceed the total defense spending.  It should seem odd to Americans that programs for which there is no clear constitutional authorization are considered “non-discretionary,” while programs that are most definitely among the legitimate roles of our federal government are considered “discretionary.”

What this means is that we don’t have a choice on a year-to-year basis about those items in the non-discretionary budget.  We are going to spend to support them, because previous legislation has mandated it.  Discretionary budget items are those that are adjusted on an annual basis, and not necessarily tied to previous legislation.  You can look at it this way for simplicity’s sake:  Non-discretionary spending is comprised of entitlement programs.  Discretionary spending is comprised of everything else.  In our federal budget, non-discretionary spending is roughly twice the size of discretionary spending.

I am certain defense can be trimmed without hampering the nation’s immediate defenses, but I am less certain that over the long run, we can maintain a force capable of deterring and repelling enemies around the globe.  Even in the midst of a deep recession, we are having difficulties with recruiting and retention of military personnel.  This is because just like any other large organization, most of the defense budget is actually spent on salaries and benefits for our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. In precisely the same way that the CEO of a large corporation will make cuts to employees first, mainly because it’s the biggest single operational cost, the Defense Department suffers from the same basic problem: Service-members cost a great deal, and a good deal more than their already pathetic pay and benefits represent.  Training costs are phenomenal, and the costs of supporting units in the field are huge.

Many will suggest, naively, that we simply “buy a few less $400 toilet seats.”  While that makes for a good laugh line, the reality is that the defense budget has finally managed to clean up most of those sorts of egregious expenditures over the last decade or so, largely because the Defense Department has had no choice.  Still, there are matters that should be examined, like the billions of dollars simply missing, and other problems with big-ticket line items.  Nevertheless, in our dangerous world, there is an ever-escalating competition between us and our would-be and real enemies, where high technology will be contribute directly to reducing the number of flag-draped caskets that arrive at Andrews AFB during each future engagement.  This sobering recognition is among the reasons that any such spending cuts in the military budget must be accomplished as some might say, “not with a machete, but with a scalpel.”  We must be certain that whatever cuts we make do not leave us naked to attacks, and that when we do engage in warfare,  our troops are given every advantage we can provide to win with minimal losses.

One of the areas in which Secretary Panetta is looking for cuts to defense is in the area of medical and other benefits, in addition to gross payroll.   That’s a mistake.  We already have difficulties attracting people to serve in the military, and this too can have a dramatic affect on morale, and readiness.  In truth, to make the level of cuts they’re intending, nearly $200 billion annually, we’re going to be forced to withdraw from virtually all overseas engagements and forward locations.  This poses another danger, inasmuch as we may be slower to respond to crises around the globe, and we may be less able to react when things go awry in one theater of operations or another.  We can ill-afford to be caught short again, because the direction of global terrorism is marching toward weapons of mass destruction.  The 9/11 attacks of 2001 were just a sample of the sort of mayhem the terrorists around the globe are going to be able to create, and this says nothing of our strategic adversaries such as Russia, China, and several others.

This impending doom for the DoD makes plain the problem with our current budgetary priorities.  We are spending far too heavily on entitlement programs of every description, and it will no begin to affect our nation’s defenses.  There are those who argue that the military should be cut, but they don’t think in terms of scalpels or even machetes, but guillotines.  This short-sighted approach is surely destined to create a situation in which we will face increased vulnerabilities on some fronts, and escalating troubles with recruitment and retention.  Our fighting forces deserve the best equipment and training we can afford, but now the question is:  What can we afford?  The answer to this question is likely to be unsatisfactory, because too many politicians derive too much support by virtue of entitlement spending, and while the argument could be made that there is a certain element of the same thing with the defense budget where it comes down to large bases and projects, it’s also true that they aren’t so concerned about the costs in morale and readiness for ordinary soldiers.  What the American people must begin to recognize is that we’ve blown our budget not so much by virtue of military spending, but because we’ve over-extended our social spending to such a degree that it is now squeezing out defense.  There’s something terribly wrong in our thinking when we look at military spending as “discretionary” but Medicaid as “non-discretionary.”  What is our government here to do, after all?  Now we’ve been reduced to the near inevitability that a big-government liberal, Leon Panetta, is going to be hacking away at our nation’s defenses.  We should all be worried at this prospect.

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Posted in Business, Defense, Economics, Federal Budget, News, Politics, War | 3 Comments »