A Few Thoughts on Syria

We are arming al Qaeda-aligned rebels in Syria.  We are doing this because Bashar al Assad is supposedly a bad guy and now we are told there is a cassus belli in that he may have used chemical weapons.

Was it OK, by contrast, when the rebels massacred a Shia village earlier this week or shot government soldiers in cold blood and posted it on youtube?  Under what principle is it worse for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons than it is for the rebels fighting that government to engage in numerous, intentional, very brutal violations of the law of war?

One or another side’s tactics does not logically tell us that we ought to choose a side and go to war.  It matters a great deal what each of the sides are fighting for.  And it is even more important to assess whether assisting one or the other side is in our interest.  There is always the option of neutrality.  It should be adopted in the vast majority of cases.

Assad is no great guy.  He, like most Middle Eastern dictators, has little regard for the rule of law, has enriched himself at the expense of the public, has used disproportionate violence against his opponents, supported our enemies in Iraq, and has associated with Hezbollah, which is undeniably a terrorist group.  That said, he has led a moderately prosperous, orderly, and tolerant regime that is multireligious, protective of Christians, and otherwise stable and predictable. We’ve seen in recent years similar dictators deposed in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt with totally unpredictable results that are clearly worse than the status quo ante.  We can deal with dictators; we cannot manage anarachy.  Even if Assad deserves to be toppled–and I am doubtful of this–what business is it of ours to sign on with a rebel group that is even more hostile to our nation and its principles?

One may wonder why Russia has become so involved with this conflict, supplying sophisticated arms and a great deal of diplomatic support to Syria.  Two reasons seem clear.  Russia, like the US, has carried on some of its Cold War alliances out of habit, such as its friendly relations with Cuba and North Korea.   More important, Russia  is acting as the protector of Orthodox Christians throughout the world.  This is in line with Samuel Huntington’s thesis in Clash of Civilizations and explains at least a portion of Russia’s foreign policy. This was the chief reason for its support of Serbia during the Kosovo affair, for example.

Why this would be so in Syria is not readily apparent, as the Alawite minority ruling group is a subgroup of Shia Islam.  But there is a pretty obvious explanation.  The Alawaite Ba’athist regime in Syria, like Saddam’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq, grew out of a secular ideology and historically has found its greatest support in a hodgepodge of ethnic and religious minorities. These minorities are all scared of the numerical majority Sunnis and their increasing extremism.  In Syria, the Sunni extremists are part of the broader Salafist/Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam that finds its most militant expression in al Qaeda.

Thus, we have a war with secular and religious minorities (Christians, Shias, Alawites, Druze etc.) on one side, who favor law and order and the devil they know, and, on the other side, fanatical Sunni extremists aligned with increasingly irrelevant secular enemies of the regime. The rebel platform is essentially one of genocide and religious totalitarianism.  This is what we are supporting, and this is undeniably worse than what Assad has delivered throughout his time as leader, in spite of himself, because of the coalition nature of his minority support and the type of governance that flows naturally from such a coalition.

America and Reagan were criticized for “arming bin Laden” during the fight against the Soviet client state in Afghanistan.  This criticism always struck me as pretty stupid and facile.  It’s like saying we were incredibly wrongheaded in World War II to support the Soviet Union, whom we later opposed, in order to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  Things change.  Coalitions come and go. There was no easy way to predict what exactly would come of the anti-Soviet rebels back when there was no Taliban or al Qaeda and, more important, it was worth it at the time to contribute to the devolution of the Soviet regime, even when some risks were apparent.

Whether that criticism of US policy has any merit, it surely is absolutely ridiculous to arm al Qaeda-aligned rebels simultaneously when we’re fighting a war with such people. There is no need for a crystal ball, unlike the 1980s support of the Afghan mujaheddin.  The better analogy would be if the US had adopted a schizophrenic policy during World War II of  aligning with Nazi Germany, while we were fighting Imperial Japan, even as the two remained allies themselves.

Let’s not forget what the real Benghazi scandal is.  Libya spun out of control after the US and European powers in 2011 undertook a totally lawless campaign there, a campaign without UN Security Counsel or Congressional authorization.   The rebels killed Qadaffi in cold blood, when they were not killing black Africans allied with the government.  Soon Libya, like Syria today, became a magnet for the “jihad tourists,” who undoubtedly could not resist the American target. Learning nothing of the very recent past, we’re now going to arm al Qaeda rebels because the regime they are fighting against used one among many nasty weapons in what is invariably the most nasty of wars:  a civil war.

The law of war is important, as is respect for the rights of civilians and other noncombatants.  But violations of the law of war alone are not a reason to go to war.  This is doubly so when the so-called good guys are just as guilty of violating the law of war as those whom we now aim to oppose.  Most important, the people we are proposing to support with arms, in addition to fighting atrociously, are fighting for a goal that is fundamentally atrocious:  Islamist totalitarianism and mass murder of  the Assad regime’s supporters. 

For a guy who appeared to have some sensible, nonideological instincts to oppose a great deal of military intervention during the 2008 campaign, Obama has shown himself to be as deeply wedded to the Washington DC interventionist consensus as anyone before him.  Indeed, he has apparently doubled down in his recent elevation of the interventionist Samantha Power to the post of UN ambassador.

We find the answer to this apparent contradiction in Obama’s lifelong leftism.  Obama is not essentially a pacifist, but rather an anti-American leftist.  He most favors wars that have nothing to do with America’s interest. In the liberal imagination, such wars are far preferable to wars where strategic goods like oil or commerce may be affected, as these interventions are marked by purity of intention.  Thus, he proposed to fold up the tents and scale back the war on al Qaeda earlier this week, even as he propels our forces into messy civil wars in Libya, Egypt, and Syria.  Worse, Obama is willing not only to ignore America’s interest in these cases, but to work directly contrary to it by arming al Qaeda-aligned rebels in the name of “humanitarian war.”

This is more than misguided do-gooderism.  This is treachery that knows no bounds, as it is no ordinary betrayal of the common good, but rather a treachery that imagines itself as a cosmopolitan, universalist morality that transcends parochial and discriminatory notions of mere national interest.

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Ten Years After September 11, 2001

Ten years ago today, our country and my family received a terrible blow.  We were attacked.  Our countrymen were murdered.  We were shaken. 9/11 is an important historical event that has defined much of the last ten years, but it was also a family tragedy for me, as my Uncle Donnie Regan gave his life that day in the line of duty with the New York City Fire Department.

I distinctly remember the day, as I’m sure most Americans my age do.  I was living in Texas at the time–taking time off and about to start my first law firm job in a few weeks–and received a call from a close friend.  They were evacuating the Dallas Federal Building.  I turned on the TV.  The first tower was already down.  I was stunned.  The second tower came down soon thereafter.  My alarm at this took a little time; at first, I thought this was a replay of the first tower falling.  Then I realized that this situation was even worse than I thought.  Rumors of the “mall in DC” being on fire were on the news.  No one knew the extent of it.   I spoke briefly to my parents, when I heard that Donnie–my uncle and the father of my cousins to whom I am closest–may have been at the towers.

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Hope and Change and Illegal Wars

Like night follows day, liberals oppose wars started by Republicans and shrug their shoulders at those started by Democrats.  Indeed, even when those wars–both Iraq and Afghanistan–were supported by congressional resolutions and UN mandates, there was much talk over the last decade of “illegal wars” and the evils of unilateralism.  All that talk evaporated when President Hope and Change assumed the helm.

The Libyan campaign manifests a certain amount of multilateralism (indeed, France is there, which is apparently the sine qua non of all multilateralism) but there is no authorization at all from a congressional resolution.  Under the War Powers Act, which was instituted post-Vietnam and post-Nixon, American military action of more than 60 days requires consultation with Congress and formal congressional support.  Indeed, this statute itself quite a bow to executive power, as the Constitution does not seem to contemplate any unilateral, executive military action other than in the case of repelling national invasions.  Congress must declare wars.  And, a fortiori must authorize warlike military action in general. Here it has partially delegated that power, but retained its essential role in the process.

Obama is thwarting that role and usurping the powers of war and peace solely to himself.  This is, quite frankly, the traditional mark of a tyrant.  It should have all Americans from every background and political persuasion concerned.

Here we have an action far overseas, that has been subject to minimal explanation to the American people and is based on a very dubious rationale of stopping so-far-nonexistent-masacres, and not a single American legislator has voted in favor it.  The deadline for such authorization has come and gone, and Obama has announced quite lawlessly in my view that he does not have to and does not intend to seek any congressional support for the Libyan campaign. 

Ideological and cowardly as our political leaders are, we’ve seen little institutional concern over Congress’s rights here. Their one trump card now would be to defund the campaign.  But there seems little support for that. If this war is indeed popular, shouldn’t the Congress at least vote to authorize it, if only to preserve its own institutional power? One would think the Congress would ant to shore up its ability to prevent a future unilateral war.  And this war, unlike Iraq, is truly unilateral insofar as it emanates from and is sustained by the will of one man alone, the President, without any checks and balances to speak of!  That he has teamed up with other regimes, some democratic and others less so, is immaterial.

We are witnessing one of the chief evils of a Republican-Party dominated national legislature:  they rarely see a war or military action they’re willing to oppose, which passivity they imagine to be the height of patriotism.  In spite of this imagined seriousness, some completely idiotic wars have come and gone this way (such as Kosovo), and, from a purely self-interested standpoint, it should be noted that Democrats do not return the favor even after they’ve voted in favor of military action, e.g., the ridiculousness that is John Kerry.  While the President deserves some deference on foreign policy, particularly in the age of al Qaeda, that deference can be taken too far.  When the President has no congressional authorization whatsoever and violates a statute to commit a war, that is the time for nonideological action based on the institutional concerns of the legislative branch itself.

The President, like all presidents, quite naturally and predictably changed his tune and supported Bush-era institutions such as the GITMO detainment and related executive rights over foreign policy.  This is what powerful men do; they are jealous over their power and their prerogatives.  But Congress, contrary perhaps to the expectations of the Founders, has proven to be a bit of a pushover, particularly on matters of war and peace.  Why is this? Well, the less they do, the less responsibility they have, and thus the less blame they must endure for failure.  This seems to be part of the problem.  In addition, the rise of ideological politics, where ideologically motivated political parties seek certain ends without regard to which branch may implement them seems to have been an unexpected development of the last 100 years or so.  The Founders imagine a politician to be a proud man, naturally avaricious of power, and therefore unlikely for ideological or other goals to give up that power.  The founders, nearly all lawyers, imagined the genius of the advocacy system writ large, whereby faction would balance faction and each branch of government would be on guard against the others. What they did not contemplate is that ideology and the politics of party would castrate men, rendering them obedient and humble before the President elected by a national plebiscite.  The disaster of Vietnam shook Congress from its stupor.  Let us hope nothing quite so bad is required to get the Congress to check the ambitions of Obama.

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Birth Certificate Released: Was That So Hard?

Obama took two seconds to do what he should have done years ago:  produce a certified copy of his original birth certificate.  Why is this such an affront?  It is only an affront to those who think it is “racist” and mean to ask tough questions of the man with the most powerful gig on earth.  Well, buck up Obama and friends.  That’s how it goes.  Was it mean when Bush’s National Guard Records or Dick Cheney’s 20 year old DUIs were dug up? No, that’s just life.  

Obama cruised through an election in 2008 with minimal inquiry into his sordid past, i.e., hanging out with terrorists, community organizing, a nutty racist church, minimal credentials, no record of achievement and scholarship.  The “Birther” mythology fits into deeply rooted and perfectly reasonable concerns that this guy, who seems so dead set on weakening America, is an alien in spirit, if not in fact.  It’s analogous to the Black Helicopter mythology around Clinton or the 9/11 Trutherism that dogged Bush:  looney, but revealing of deep seated anxieties.  Good for Donald Trump, strange as he is, for asking questions in a persistent way that need to be asked.   In doing so, he exposed Obama as a liar, as he said all along he’d released these documents, and then this, the rela document, comes along. 

The next stop is this guy’s dubious academic credentials.  While it’s clear Obama is not a total moron, he is not nearly as smart as his degrees suggest.  Obama’s mediocre unscripted speaking and turgid, uninspired writing suggests he’s a lightweight.  And, lest we forget, so does his haphazard and incoherent leadership as President!!!  While his record is what matters most in the next election, the media’s duplicity and professional negligence in his first election matters too, if, for no other reason, than perhaps this will get them looking at Obama and his confused decisionmaking a little more closely if for no other reason than to prevent the Donald Trumps and Glenn Becks of the world from getting a scoop.

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The Birth of an “Idealist”

A good long article from the New Yorker on how Obama went from being a skeptic and critic of the humanitarian rationale for US intervention in Iraq to becoming the warrior chieftan that would “lead from behind” in Libya.  The most striking thing is his incoherence.  He has no “doctrine” in spite of attempts of critics and supporters to find one for him ex post. 

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The Testy President

Obama got a little cranky with a Texas news reporter this week.  The reporter was pretty respectful, but challenged a few things Obama said, and he didn’t like that one bit.  Obama, one must recall, was a state senator in a one party town, a US Senator in a one party state, and was elected through smoke, mirrors, and glittering generalities, after the grim crucible of semi-rock-star status among fawning law students and wildly liberal Democrats in Hyde Park, Chicago.  I know, I was there, and most professors rarely dealt with harsh criticism from students and peers, particularly someone like Obama, whose self-selected seminar-style classes were mostly made up of committed liberals who thought he was the s**t even back then.

Ace points out what happens when the failing president leaves the bubble:

Sample testiness:

When Watson persisted, Obama said, “I just said that was wrong,” and, later, “I just said that wasn’t true.”

I think he’s talking about the politically-motivated decision to send one of the retired Space Shuttles to NYC instead of the more-deserving Houston, but it sort of doesn’t matter — it could be about anything. His petulance and lack of adult-level conflict-navigation skills are on display.

Obama does not do well when challenged, whether by people or circumstances. One can hardly blame him; he’s hardly had to face any challenges in his life and so he’s never developed the coping skills most people pick up by their early teens. Although previously praised for having a “first class temperament” and preternatural cool, he doesn’t — almost everyone can appear charming and even masterful in easy situations.

I never lose my cool when buying coffee at Dunkin Donuts, for example. I don’t get angry or seem desperate. Because… it’s not a difficult situation to face.

And pretty much that’s been Obama’s life. The toughest thing he’s faced is dealing gracefully with being overpraised. His skill in dealing with challenge is mostly restricted to charmingly deflecting compliments and flattery.

2008 won’t be like 2012 in that respect. The national media is all-in with Obama, and will do what it can to shield him, coddle him, as he’s used to; but not everyone out there will be on Team Obama, and some reporters (like this local guy in Texas) might actually decide to do their jobs and, as they say, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

And Obama won’t handle that well. He never has responded well to criticism.

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Our Unserious Leaders

America’s politics are more and more resembling those of the Soviet Union, where very little is at stake, 90% of the issues are off the table and decided by committees of connected elites, and the  theater of politics, including elections, are there mostly to cover up the reality. 

Last week we observed vitriolic denunciations and counter-denunciations of Republicans and Democrats in the run-up to the budget funding bill, but in the end only $60B (and possibly less) was ultimately cut.  These cuts only affected the small sliver of discretionary spending.  This is chump change when we have a $1T yearly deficit and tens of trillions(!) of unfunded liabilities in the decades ahead.

Obama this week in a highly partisan speech denounced the Republican proposals, in particular those of the fairly serious Paul Ryan, as mean-spirited and violative of the American “social compact.”  His liberal supporters swooned at his passionate defense of the welfare state, but in doing so he and they as well remind us that they are not serious people and are not taking seriously the unfunded liabilities that cannot be sustained in the decades ahead.  Something must give. 

Republicans may not be terribly serious or courageous on average, but a few of them are very serious and are saying what needs to be said about the budget problems.  Of course, sacred cows like our bloated defense budget, bailouts for banks, various forms of corporate welfare such as farm subsidies, and much else should be on the table.  But at least the topic of our fiscal problems is on the table among Republicans and not dealt with through magical thinking, as in the mind of Obama.  Much of the credit belongs to the Tea Party, the amorphous collection of grass roots conservative activists who were not terribly impressed with W’s spending spree and were jolted into action by Obama Care.  This movement, while containing many unserious people, has at its core a very serious point:  we are spending ourselves into oblivion and must get a handle on it or our country will destroy itself. 

Obama is no leader.  I believe he knows the fiscal crisis to be a reality, but he also knows that it would be very costly politically to do something about it.  He has been willing to expend this capital to grow the welfare state into a permanent institution that makes everyone a welfare case through Obamacare, but he has not done what is necessary to preserve (or sensibly reduce) the commitments already made in the form of Medicare, Social Security, and much else.  This reveals him as what I always thought he was:  a coward, a mouthpiece for conventional Democratic Party talking points, and someone indifferent about America’s strength and prosperity.

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Debt Delusion

The recent budget fight is simply a precursor of what must be done.  Both sides are still playing small ball, messing with discretionary spending, when the huge entitlement bomb is going to cause our demise.  While Democratis cry about “cruel” budgets, our debt will go up more this week (about $50B) than the $38B or so that Congress was able to agree to cut.  We’re using bandaids and aspirin when wholesale amputation and emergency surgery is required.  Columnist Robert Samuelson put the matter well in his column today:

We in America have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies.

While Paul Krugman cries that Obama is a wimp and Republicans are cruel, it is our continued, insane-level of deficit spending that is cruel.  It has real practical consequences today ($5 gas) and tomorrow (a shrinking, sclerotic, no jobs economy).  There are signs of seriousness and hope among both voters (the Tea Party) and politicians (Paul Ryan, for example),  but one wonders if the stars can align for the kind of serious courage needed to get this sorted out before we have a real Greek-style meltdown.

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Where’s the Speech?

In addition to the fact that our “allies” look like something from Mad Max–and some consist of al Qaeda--I am struck that we’ve not heard an Oval Office address.  I cannot recall a military action in my lifetime without some run up, a domestic debate, some sign off through resolution or otherwise by the Congress, and a solemn case made to the American people by the President.

Obama, instead, allowed himself to be persuaded this was a good idea–scared perhaps the Clintons would undermine him for inaction–and then he was off to Brazil.  Obama seems to think he could get into war as an afterthought, much like his appointment of strange leftist weirdos such as Van Jones.  He forgot forces on the right and left have an opinion about this.  And he really forgot that he was not elected to start “wars of choice” but rather to end them.

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Sullivan is Out of Love

Andrew Sullivan is nothing if not prone to revisiting his earlier enthusiasms.  I suppose there is a kind of authenticity in that . . . “often wrong, but never uncertain!”  He loved Bush for a while, but grew disenchanted on account of Iraq and the gay marriage issue. Then he liked Ron Paul for a spell until Paul’s old school conservative views from the early 90s were revealed.

Now he is down on Obama due to the Libyan campaign (and in particular the lack of any public relations campaign). I checked Sully’s website not sure if he’d be against the campaign or say that anyone opposed to it was the second coming of Neville Chamberlain. His strong enthusiasms are not matched by equal philosophical clarity.

But Sullivan does make a good point that every patriotic American should agree with:

My anger is not simply at what I regard as the folly of starting a long war with someone as insane as Qaddafi, but at the way this war was foisted on the public with absolutely no warning.

It shows contempt for the American people, and their views, and contempt for the Congress and its role in deliberating before going to war. As [James] Fallows notes, this entire debate was entirely about changing one man’s mind, not the country or the Congress or the people. Only the emperor counts, and if he happens to be wrong, tough luck. Who would have thought we’d elect Barack Obama to replicate the worst aspects of an unaccountable executive?

Sully is confusing his idealized image of Obama with Obama the reality.  Obama is not replicating anything.  He is taking the natural tendency of the American executive–to obtain and protect power in its operational sphere–and wedding that to un-American big government ideas.  He believes in government, his foreign policy views derive from his concern that his domestic big government programs may be harmed by foreign wars, and, more than the average politician, he really really believes in himself.  Obama doesn’t have much faith in America, however, so when he’s alienating the majority of Americans (as in healthcare) or thumbing his nose at historical American practice (as in the Libyan operation) he feels like he’s being faitful to his core mission.

Obama’s incoherent embrace in 2008 of the war in Afghanistan while poo-pooing Iraq should have been a clue.  By then, both were the same types of campaigns fought for the same reasons using the same strategy.  True, Afghanistan harbored the 9/11 attackers and began as a revenge operation, but by 2008 both wars were nation-building efforts to spread Muslim democracy and root out homegrown anti-government insurgents.  By 2008, neither campaign had much of anything to do with revenge or international terrorists, other than a prop in the propaganda that supported the campaigns.  That Obama could embrace this kind of incoherent nonsense bode ill of him, and I wrote as much at the time.

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Oh You Mean We Must Be Civil Too?

Remember after Rep. Giffords was shot by a psychopath last month? There was much talk about the tone of politics and the horrors of incivility, particularly on the right. But civility is a neutral value. It’s supposed to apply to everyone. And it has some value, so long as it is not code for stopping all harsh criticism rooted in facts. There is always a problem in application: the left thinks it’s goodness personified and that its opponents are not merely stupid or mistaken, but deeply evil and mentally ill. So for them civility is just a tactical position; the real goal is silence and disempowerment, as we’ve seen in university settings and other places where the left has dominance.

So isn’t it interesting that when thuggish mobs have taken over Wisconsin’s capital and derailed a democratic process, that Obama has said nothing of their tactics–which apparently involve intimidation and threats–but rather celebrates the power of unions and takes sides, in a matter wholly unusual for an American president and wholly at odds with his civility talk last month. Of course, unions have traded in violence and threats since day one. This has always been their modus operandi. Go watch Hoffa sometime. Or read about the Greyhound strike. It’s for real, but the left is so convinced of its rectitude that they don’t even realize the double standards that they are purveying in their calls for civility, while they celebrate the thuggish unions that are the bane of America, particularly when transported into the government sector.

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State of the Union

I didn’t even watch it.  From what I read, it sounds like more proposals to invent flying cars and perpetual motion machines to save the world.  The big drivers of our misfortune–unsustainable entitlements, financial trickery, mass third world immigration, and the off-shoring of our manufacturing base–will be untouched. 

Robert Samuelson says most of what needs to be said here.

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Obama’s Birth Certificate

I’ve mostly avoided the birtherism issue.  It sounded fanciful, and I haven’t looked into it until recently.  But here’s a question: why hasn’t Obama released his long form birth certificate?  And why, after much fanfare,  has Gov. Abercrombie stated that it may not be there?

It seems to me that we need not go into full blown conspiracy mode to acknowledge that there are several possibilities of varying degrees of probability.  One possibility is that it never existed.  Obama was midwifed on Hawaii or elsewhere, and his mother or grandparents reported his birth directly to the Department of Health.   Perhaps, he figured it was better  not to show the shoddy records, which could not be verified other than believing either his deceased mother or grandparents.

Two, his birth certiciate indicates his parents weren’t married, which might be embarrassing.  After all, his father had multiple wives, his mother was only 17 when she was pregnant, and he quickly disappeared after Barack’s birth.

Three, his birth certificate indicates something else embarrassing, like a social disease, or perhaps something intended not to be embarrassing, but which has become so:  classification not as “Negro” but as Caucasian or Polynesian (at his mom’s direction), and this is also embarrassing considering his self-obsession with his black background.

Or, least likely but most politically damaging, he really was born in Kenya, and is now on a train he can’t get off.

While Obama has produced a “short form” Certificate of Live Birth from the Hawaii Department of Health,   Obama has not released his long form certificate.  It would look something like this.  No one has seen it.  The governor implied this week it may not be in the archives.  And these are objective facts.  Obama and the complicit media’s failure to sort this out with full disclosure (as too with his transcripts and much else) leads to understandable suspicion of his background and, it would seem, needless chatter and distraction.

Perhaps Obama wants its this way, a stalking horse to distract his opponents and make them appear nutty.  That said, if he really wanted to dispose of this mess–as he said he wants to and as his ally Gov. Abercrombie has attempted–that long form would be released, and it has not. This is not conspiracy talk; this is the situation Obama himself has created.  And it is reasonable to assume something is being hidden by his refusal to release all kinds of records from his recent and not-so-recent past.

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Paul Krugman’s Blood Libel

Sarah Palin got in some hot water this week for suggesting the left’s rseponse to the Loughner shooting was a “blood libel.”  Way back in the day, when Jews and Christians lived apart from one another in Europe, this was a popular myth of Jewish mendacity:  that they engaged in ritual murder of Christians for their religious ceremonies.  It was fueled by confusion, prejudice, and the theological view of Jews as the murderers of Jesus. More recently, it’s become a secular term to denote murdeous intent by one’s political and cultural enemies.  It’s undoubtedly what was leveled at the conservative half of the country by the left in the wake of Arizona’s shooting.  The self-righteous rage at Palin reflects the various ways she is hated as a symbol of this half of the country.  It also reflects another important phenomenon: the self-righteous view by the mostly leftist Jewish minority that no one can ever make an analogy to Jewish suffering without also agreeing with broader, mostly left-of-center Jewish views, and that to make such analogies is an act of hateful anti-semitism.

Paul Krugman, however, has upped the ante.  After his earlier, divorced-from-facts attacks on the right, he has now suggested that those critical of the federal government’s various unconstitutional welfare programs are engaged in “eliminationist” rhetoric.  That’s an interesting term.  It finds its origins in the propagandistic book Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen is an historian who penned a controversial and largely discredited thesis that the Germans of the Holocaust mass murdered Jews after embracing an “eliminiationist” paradigm, and that this view was widely embraced by Germans at every level of society.  While short on facts and analysis–after all, why did the Germans hide the Holocaust if it was a logical outgrowth of majority views–the book was popular and reached a mass audience.   Krugman’s defamatory slur is doubly troublesome, as it conflates the rhetoric that would eliminate welfare or national health care with the kind that would eliminate millions of people.  Details, details.

The left and right undoubtedly do not like one another in this country and have different values.  However, it is the left that appears more unhinged, at least in its mainstream.  While we have our share of fringe elements concerned about the Trilateral Commission and Obama’s birth certificate, it is the mainstream Democratic Party that invited Michael Moore to their annual convention in 2004.  It is they who responded to this attack with venomous rage before a single fact connected this mentally ill shooter to any political faction at all.  And now it is Krugman–not Sarah Palin–who has tried to connect his opponents with murderous, Nazi antisemitism.

I’m not sure if anyone else has picked up on this inflammatory usage of his.  In any case, he is a fool, and the left, in their hate, are projecting their own hostile and homicidal feelings on the right, whose Tea Party rhetoric and appeals to the Constitution are almost completely nonviolent.

Indeed, the left’s habitual violence, far from being condemned, is embraced at the highest levels.  While his campaign and Tuscon speech were largely conciliatory, Barack Obama began his political career in the living room of a former Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers.  The Weathermen, as they were also called, were notorious bombers, cop-killers, and all around bad people.  Angela Davis, a California professor, was involved in a communist murder plot in the mid 1970s; today, she’s honored as an esteemed academic.  By contrast, no one in the mainstream right rallied around Tim McVeigh (undoubtedly a right-wing, if extreme terrorist), nor Eric Rudolph, nor other violent extremists of the right.  Such extremism, incidentally, is a feature of any political movement. The question is how such extremists are dealt with and treated by the mainstream leadership.  Here the left has failed, where the right has largely behaved responsibly.  But the left appears to be engaging on a wide scale in what psychologists call “projecting”:  that is, imagining their opponents to have their own worst traits.

Let’s not forget, it’s the left that romanticizes Che Guevara and makes excuses for the dictatorship he served; is it any wonder they assume all their political opponents want to kill and destroy as much as they do.

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The Deepest Cuts

I wrote not too long ago about how ridiculous it is Obama has essentially quadrupled deficit spending, and created an astronomically expensive new entitlement, while demanding deep cuts from the military.  This is undobutedly the fruit of his early 1980s, Nuclear Freeze, anti-military worldview.

I personally think the Pentagon could save a lot of money by scaling back America’s commitments around the globe quite radically, adjusting its retirement system, and changing its procurement process.  But the bigger solution must come from narrowing the mission:  we should retain power projection ability, but one focused on territorial defense, as opposed to defending amorphous “interests.”  With a few exceptions–sea lanes, nuclear proliferation, terrorist training camps–we can mostly ignore the globe’s parochial hotspots, which have little to do with us and the outcome of which will barely affect us.  It seems to me the US gets relatively little in the way of return from having forces in places like Germany, Guam or South Korea.  Let’s keep a few logistics bases, a decent number of carriers and prepositioned gear, and mostly let the world go to hell.

That said, we still need functional aircraft, tanks, or our great wealth will make us the subject to bullying and shakedowns by more militarily powerful countries.  It turns out our planes are getting very old (see below)

And yet we’ve largely scuttled the F-22, the F-35 strike fighter is on the chopping block, and the Marines this week lost their Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. The latter is a particularly bad cut–unless some off-the-shelf choice is quickly chosen to replace it–as the current amphibious vehicle is super-old, slow, poorly armored, and cannot realistically last another 20 or 30 years.  Of course, the EFV’s development was super-expensive, problem-plagued, and typical (I’m sad to say) of major USMC weapons-development programs, such as the costly Osprey.

 

The Legacy Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle Destroyed in Iraq

You have to know a wee bit about military gear (and how old much of it is) to know what replacements are reasonable and what are not.  You also have to have a strategic vision not to allow the Pentagon to metastasize into developing capability for fighting ten wars, simultaneously, all with gold-plated leadership, retirements, and contractors.  Obama seems to have neither the necessary knowledge, nor vision, to intelligently tackle Pentagon reform, and Gates appears to be simply following the boss’s latest 90 degree turn. Both are seeking to cut crucial programs, while continuing the role of the US as global cop.

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