Growing up in the 60s & 70s, with America divided over the Vietnam War, the endless partisan one-upmanship between the Left and the Right is all I’ve ever known. For a few moments after 9/11 it seemed like America had united for a common purpose, but it quickly turned into more of the rancorous partisan flame-throwing, blame games, and jockeying for political advantage atop the World Trade Center rubble and thousands of dead victims. Despite the divides in America, I had the privilege to be a part of a unified team – the United States Army.
I became a Cold War warrior in 1979, when I enlisted in the United States Army. That experience reinforced my core values, which already aligned with the Army’s Values, but it also greatly shaped my world view. Reading about foreign policy, foreign intelligence operations, military affairs and being an unrepentant news junkie became life-long habits, but I am not an expert on anything.
My overriding political belief is that every American should diligently protect and defend The Constitution, because the rule of law protects the rights that keep us free. Everyone has to play by the rules, no exceptions.
This blog and everything I write is MY OPINION. I make no claims to being an expert on anything. After my short time in the Army, I devoted my time from 1981 to 1999 to being a homemaker and volunteer in Army communities wherever we lived. While everything I write is my opinion, I do try to cite sources and explain how and why I believe the things that I do. If anything I write is not properly attributed to a source, please tell me and I will edit it immediately.
In 1980, I was assigned to a Pershing missile battalion, as a public affairs specialist. Of course, being 19 yrs. old and having completed a three-month basic journalism course at the Defense Information School, I really wasn’t much of a journalist and knowing next to nothing about the Army, I assuredly wasn’t a “specialist” on anything.
I’ve written plenty about my family, my life and assuredly more about my political opinions than anyone wants to read. However, this post is going to be a another personal story, except this time I’m trekking back to 1980 and some important things I learned serving in a Pershing missile battalion.
My trip from the Defense Information School (DINFOS) at Fort Benjamin Harrison, IN to my Pershing missile battalion in southern West Germany went about like most trips in my life – some bad luck with my baggage. I flew to Philadelphia and was supposed to go from Philadelphia to McGuire Air Force Base and from there to Germany.
When I went to retrieve my bags in Philadelphia, which consisted of a large suitcase and my duffel bag with all my Army uniforms, my suitcase was missing. At the counter I was informed that my suitcase had likely been sent back to Pittsburgh. So, I filled out the necessary paperwork for missing baggage, then found the bus I was supposed to take to McGuire.
At McGuire, my parents were waiting, having driven from the Pocono Mountains in PA to see me off to Germany. My mother was very worried about me flying to Germany by myself, but I kept telling her that I wasn’t alone, I was with soldiers who are all part of my team and besides that a girl, who had become a good friend at DINFOS, was on the same flight as me. I introduced her to my parents.
The Army back then didn’t do direct assignments for lower enlisted soldiers, so at the 21st Replacement in Frankfurt, it was a routine of standing in formations constantly, as names were called out and soldiers given their assignments, processed and sent on their merry way to an Army unit in Germany. I ended up being sent to a Pershing missile battalion.
Being very scared of guns, the bus trip to my unit was hours of reading my information packet over and over, then staring at the big Pershing missile on the front of the packet. All I did was worry about what I had gotten myself into. I joined the Army after refusing to go back to college after my freshman year. My parents were hounding me to death that summer of 1979 and I decided I needed to get a job.
I don’t know why I settled on the Army, but along with receiving a lot of college information in high school, I also had military recruiting brochures. The recruiting information made it sound like travel and interesting jobs, more than signing up to protect America. I called the Army recruiter, who came to our home and I signed my paperwork without even telling my parents. My mother was beside herself, to say the least. During my swearing-in ceremony, in a group of dozens of other enlistees, there was this woman loudly sobbing in the back of the room… that was my mother.
It was very cold when I arrived in southern Germany, in January 1980, with only my duffel bag of military uniforms and no civilian clothes, because my suitcase was still in the States. The battalion had around 1000 men and less than 100 females. The little PX on our kaserne had no women’s clothes, so I bought a couple of pairs of men’s jeans, a couple sweatshirts, and a tan, bomber-style corduroy jacket.
Even though I had bad luck with my luggage and I had worried myself sick on the bus ride, I hit the jackpot on leadership there.
Some people can inspire you for life, even though they’re only in your life a very short time. Many teachers are like this. In the Army there are many outstanding leaders, who can do that too. The Army has two tracts of leadership – commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), with two distinct military missions. NCOs are the leaders who carry out the day-to-day training and execution of the mission in the military – they are the leaders soldiers rely on for daily guidance. My first sergeant in my battery (field artillery units call their companies – batteries) was a hard-as-nails, 82nd Airborne/Vietnam vet, who had a single focus on being prepared for war. He was also one of the best leaders I have ever met. Despite the gruffness, he took the time to get to know his soldiers. He not only talked to his soldiers – he listened to them. What I liked best was he was willing to listen to questions and patiently answer them.
My first battalion commander also left a lasting impression and was an outstanding leader. He also talked to his soldiers and listened to them. He explained the Army and our mission in terms that made me feel like I was part of a long-tradition of warriors dedicated to the most important mission – national defense. He also often mentioned bits of military history that inspired in me a life-long love of reading military history. In a few months, he inspired me for life – that is a great leader.
I met my husband in that unit too and he was a very good NCO, who taught me one of the most important life lessons: The mind controls the body, the body does not control the mind. He also convinced me that I could conquer fear and win, even when fear had convinced me that I couldn’t do something.
He also inspired in me a belief in diligently reading and studying boring training manuals, regulations, reports, etc. Although my job was ostensibly an “information specialist” and he was an 82nd paratrooper, he taught me that every soldier should become an “information specialist”, in the sense of learning as much about soldiering and how the Army works from top to bottom. He was like a walking encyclopedia of Army knowledge, even as a young sergeant.
He taught me that other people are counting on me to be part of the Army team.
Learning that it’s not about “me”, but about “we” is a lesson all Americans, especially the partisans, should learn.
The word count for this post is well over a 1000 and I didn’t tell the story I intended to, so I’m going to write about that story in another post. That story fits in with being an “information specialist” too.
We haven’t even “officially” exited the “Obama nightmare” and entered the “Trump Strong-Man Era”, but I’m stitching away… Used red and white for this pattern, instead of just one color, as the pattern instructed. Think it will make a cute Valentine’s Day tissue box cover for my youngest daughter’s desk. Think I will make one for my oldest daughter’s desk at her work too.
Now, on to politics: What in the hell are Obama and Kerry trying to do? They have not only sold Israel down the river a second time, but they’ve basically handed over regional domination in the Mid-East and beyond to Russia, Iran and China. All the thugs on the world stage, thanks to this feckless administration, are in the driver’s seat and America is almost irrelevant.
Back when Hillary was Secretary of State and the Arab Spring bloomed bright in delusional idiots’ heads, the Obama administration tried to sell the Muslim Brotherhood as a “mostly secular” organization. The Obama administration supported the ouster of President Mubarak and backed Mohamed Morsi, a MB leader. That move completely put Sinai security in jeopardy and effectively threw Israel into a very serious security crisis.
With all the mainstream media and Dems hype of “fake news”, well the Obama administration & Democratic Party continue to be the biggest aggregators of “fake news”, with their endless fabricated “talking points” and “narratives”, which the mainstream media repeats constantly… selling it as real news. Let’s be clear, this hype is really propaganda that is planned, packaged and sold to generate hysteria and public concern – it is designed to manufacture “public opinion” that aligns with their political agenda. In simple terms it’s sophisticated mass media brainwashing and it only works with massive media collusion, as I must have said dozens of times in the past year. The orchestrated nature of the talking points (aggressive keyword messaging with relentless repetition) and the vast mainstream (liberal) media collusion that aids in that messaging is combined with a relentless repetition of polling data to manufacture public opinion and nudge it toward the desired political agenda.
Here’s a repeat of what I believe Clinton SPIN and Obama “narratives” really are:
The reason Trump broke out of the pack was because he used the borrowed Clinton-style mass media saturation/scorched earth strategy.
That strategy is a sophisticated INFORMATION WARFARE strategy introduced into American politics by the Clinton political operatives.
The mass media saturation strategy was developed by far-left Alinskyite Marxists. The messaging wall required for mass media saturation to succeed requires the active collusion of the mass media NEWS outlets to facilitate it, by actively and relentlessly repeating the messages of the political candidate or activists using this “buzz word, catchphrase spin (talking points messaging). Mass media saturation INFORMATION WARFARE requires mass media collusion to succeed. This strategy can NOT succeed without mass media messaging dominance to CONTROL (“win”) the 24/7 news cycle (or as the Clinton team dubbed it – the spin cycle).
It is a form of mass media brainwashing and antithetical to American free speech principles! To succeed this strategy requires MEDIA COLLUSION.
It can NOT work without that media collusion.
Here are the components:
Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.
Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.
Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls)
Only Democrats had successfully used this strategy before Trump, because the liberal media never before gave BILLIONS of dollars in free media for one GOP candidate, to run a “GOP Insurgency” for 8 months straight on all three cable news networks nor did the mass media cable networks ever collude or facilitate in the mass media messaging for any Republican candidate or cause.
Just as the Wikileaks leak has exposed the MEDIA COLLUSION between the DNC and the media to rig the system against Sanders, that SAME media collusion exists between the Potemkin Trump campaign (or the Clinton operatives who were in the shadows masterminding this charade) and the media.
Those electronic trails exist!!!
This mass media saturation requires constant messaging coordination between political operatives and the media facilitators to keep the SPIN cycle moving. Trump’s “win, win, win” is exactly like Carville’s “sex, sex, sex” during impeachment. I feel sure Trump’s MEDIA COLLUSION will be exposed before November.
And the scorched earth part of the strategy is really just the mass media saturation strategy on steroids, replete with endless character assassinations (low-energy Jeb, lyin’ Ted, little Marco, etc.) and a take no prisoners attitude.
The selling of polls as a “scientific” metric to gauge public opinion and polling results over 50% as a legitimate reflection of the “will of the people” has dumbed down America and created a nation of sheep, easily herded to conforming to the polling/media viewpoints. Watching how polls were used to sell Donald Trump as the “GOP Insurgent” by the liberal media and many “conservative” news outlets during the GOP primary, then watching the liberal media switch to the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 mode at the end of February/early March with the staged showdown in Chicago and coordinated media talking points blitz of “Trump the Fascist”, the media wasn’t just reporting the “news”, they were active political players, driving a political agenda. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC , the Washington Post and many others were actively engaged in shameless agitation propaganda to discredit Trump and promote Hillary. FOX News, Drudge Report, many talk radio venues, along with Wikileaks (a likely Russian front) and others were busily selling Trump.
Now, I’ve been called all sorts of names in the past year online, but since I am a nobody homemaker, have no monetary incentive to bolster any political candidate, well, I don’t really give a crap what names I get called. I am still free to speak my mind in America. So, first I want to point out a polling sound bite the media is selling to hype the “fake news” crisis and then I want to make a few big picture comments.
A Mediaite article citing a poll about dumb Trump voters who believe “fake news” has been getting circulating on Twitter, largely retweeted by liberal media types. The Mediaite article states:
About Half of Trump’s Voters Really Think Clinton Is Involved in Pedophilia Ring
“No matter how many times law enforcement and the media insist that there is no Democrat-led pedophilia ring being run out of a D.C. family restaurant, there will always be people who believe that there is.
Specifically, there will always be Donald Trump voters who believe thatHillary Clinton traffics kids out of a pizzeria basement. That story was spawned and propagated by fake news sites and even led to a man discharging a gun inside of the restaurant in question. Still, the rumor persists.”
You got it? Trump voters are just mindless idiots, who need smart liberals to police the news and protect them from “fake news”. The right uses a lot of these same tactics now too and Trump won, because he mastered the Clinton SPIN cycle during the primary, where he repeated endlessly that he was “winning in all the polls” and the American media (liberal, FOX News, talk radio) all colluded to sell Trump as the “GOP Insurgent”. Sure, there’s discontent across America and populist sentiments swirling, but Trump is a media-created President, the same way President Obama was cast as the second-coming, walking on water, making the seas part, transformational leader.
Now, we move to the Russian influence operations hysteria. where massive effort has been expended to turn Russian influence operations into an existential crisis “threatening our democracy”.
First off, my default reaction to hearing about “our democracy” makes me want to shout, “America is a republic!” Then my less reactive response to the Russian influence operations hysteria is, “what the hell did you expect from Russia and other adversaries, when our President is so gutless that he allows US Armed Forces to be humiliated repeatedly by being harassed in international territory and last January, Iran captured two American naval vessels and crew, then had them on their knees, broadcasting those images around the globe? It was the most shameful, gutless act of moral cowardice and failure of American leadership since probably Somalia in the 90s. The Obama administration and John Kerry did NOTHING and praised Iran for resolving the situation peacefully… They got on their knees too!
Only when the Russians escalated their information warfare operation during the 2016 election did clueless politicians notice the Russians are on the move – because it affected Washington politicians. The Washington politicians weren’t concerned enough to demand actions when Iran took our sailors hostage or Russia was buzzing our planes and harassing our ships. No, only when it became a partisan political issue could President Obama and the Dems get on their soapbox with their liberal media friends colluding to manufacture this Russian influence crisis.
Russians and other American adversaries have continued influence operations for DECADES in American universities and colleges, in black urban areas, and throughout the American educational system. President Obama marinaded in professors who were promoting anti-American agendas and willing purveyors of hostile foreign influence operation messaging. The Marxist/Alinsky crowd are some of Russian influence operators most willing accomplices and useful idiots for decades. The entire PC agenda is permeated with old Soviet-era messaging.
Yes, we have a Russian influence problem, but the real threat to America is the lack of American republican values & virtues, as espoused by our founding fathers in our founding documents, having enough influence in America.
We lack a common American bond.
The partisan, social (cultural) and economic (class), and ethnic divides are splintering our nation into small, rabid, enemy factions.
Creating hysteria over Russian influence in our election, while doing nothing as Russians literally harass America’s military with no fear, is about like the French with their idiotic burkini ban. French police patrolling beaches to harass Muslim women who are wearing modest swimwear, yet not securing their border, shows the complete disconnect from understanding real threats vs. ridiculous political antics masquerading as sound policy.
We need to respond to real acts of aggression forcefully and without fear or hesitation!
We need to quit with the endless information warfare being waged between American partisans.
“United we stand, divided we fall” – that’s as simple as it gets.
Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on Tuesday and as an American citizen, who believes in The Constitution of the United States, I accept that as the final verdict. This is how our republic works, end of conversation. I don’t believe he or Hillary are “fit” to be President, but the constitutional requirements are sparse, so beyond age and citizenship, that position is open to any Americans:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
What I feel about either Trump or Hillary doesn’t matter in the least – I abide by The Constitution, because I believe in the rule of law and protecting and defending The Constitution.
In 1998, being fairly new to the internet, I started searching the web thinking I would like to find pen pals around the world, because I had several pen pals in foreign countries when I was a teenager. During that searching I came across “message boards” and landed on the Excite message boards, where beyond the people trying to hook-up with others in relationships, they had the politics boards. Following politics is another interest of mine, so I began commenting on politics there, using the name: mhere.
When the Clinton impeachment scandal broke, those boards went crazy and since I had spent a good bit of time lurking, just reading postings, before venturing into posting any comments, I was familiar with many of the regulars posting there. Some of them liked to change their user names, but it quickly became obvious who they were, because of their writing style and comments.
When the impeachment scandal broke, a new crowd invaded the Excite politics message board – the Clintonista mob, who viciously attacked anyone who spoke out about The Constitution or impeachment. I quickly noticed that the writing ability of this new crowd was much better than most of the Regulars and these people debated like top-notch criminal defense attorneys, trying to argue the Regulars into a corner and silence them.
That bullying tactic, trying to silence other people, ticked me off, so I decided to argue to the best of my ability and back them into a corner. I have always liked to debate politics. As the weeks went by, it seemed like new people joined the Clintonista mob, determined to silence me (mhere). I also noticed that some of my arguments and snarky lines began to be picked up by some real Republican and conservative pundits on TV.
What happened next is my story, tabbed at the top of my home page, Messages of mhere. I apologize to regular readers for rehashing this again, but since I am not FREE to move on, alas, I must continue to repeat all this. I wrote my story in that annoying third person, I used pseudonyms out of fear, and I wrote it in my snarky manner, because that’s me. The story is true, the pseudonyms are real people.
At the top of my home page, I have a tab “Confessions of mhere” with a timeline from about May of this year, but it goes back to other events that have happened.
In March, at National Review Online’s comment section, which was still Disqus then (they changed to facebook). I was debating against Trump and his idiotic killing ISIS family members to scare ISIS terrorists, as a good military strategy. I posted a response to another poster about The Constitution and I was told to “SURRENDER NOW, Sue! It’s the only possible outcome…”:
“susanholly Angry MFing Texan • 3 days ago
I understand the anger, but raging mobs never solve anything – we need to unite our country, not divide into enemy factions and burn it to the ground. Please read President George Washington’s Farewell Address. He warned about the danger to our republic from extreme factions.
Maya Angelou, my late mother’s least-liked American poet, said it best:
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but it has not solved a one.”
See, sometimes even poets you don’t like say something worth quoting:-)
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LincolnAppleyard susanholly • 3 days ago
SURRENDER NOW Sue! It’s the only possible outcome…
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susanholly LincolnAppleyard • 3 days ago
This comment has bothered me for hours – was this a threat? Who am supposed to surrender to? I am a law-abiding, private citizen. I’ve never owned a firearm in my life and in fact, I don’t even have a speeding ticket. So, who am I supposed to SURRENDER NOW to? This is a friendly online chat, so what exactly did you mean?”
So, I am going to state upfront that I believe my computer has been tracked since 1998, from when I was attacked in my home in 1998, by a retired general. Since I was only commenting on the Excite message boards and am a homemaker: who was only talking to close family and friends, who does not belong to any political groups, the only possible thing that could have led to him attacking me was the Excite message boards. That general was a Bill Clinton general, who had retired suddenly, not long before the impeachment mess. From what my husband had heard through the rumor mill at work ( he was still an active duty sergeant major at a large infantry post), imo Bill Clinton and this general have a lot in common with their personal conduct. That general also hates my guts. I believe, some letters I wrote during Desert Storm ended up at the Department of the Army and reflected poorly on his wife, who ran the family support activities during Desert Storm.
I barely escaped being locked away in a state mental hospital permanently in early 1999. Since 1999, I have been determined to expose what happened to me. Since starting my blog in late 2012, I decided to use my blog to write about not only politics, but to tell my story about what happened to me and to explain who I am and what I believe. Texas state judge, Albert McCaig, Jr. (Buddy) recommended I start a blog. His nephew is married to my youngest daughter and he performed the wedding ceremony in Texas. In 2010, he started a blog, which I found out about on facebook, through family mentioning it. I posted a few comments there. Then out of the blue in 2012 Buddy emailed me discussing a Ralph Peters article. At that time I was writing comments on Ralph Peters’ NY Post column looking for a way to tell my story. I had also given my attorney all the information about my story by that point and I didn’t think he believed me, which I told him in an email and I gave him the passwords to my facebook and hotmail accounts. I started writing more details in my hotmail draft folders, just in case he decided to listen to me.
Since, I believe the Clinton thugs, still monitor my computer, I told my attorney and Buddy whom might be able to help and also suggested they find people they trust to help. I told them watching how the SPIN cycle and character assassinations operate, it takes a lot of media collusion, so monitor who is contacting whom. I told them to follow the law and get the proper law enforcement people involved in following my computer and who attacks it, then following back to who they are contacting. I had set up a Penzu journal, which has military-grade encryption and I gave Buddy the password to that and told him to contact my attorney. Since I believe the Clinton thugs still monitor my computer and have tagged me a terrorist and “threat” (Buddy advised me that I am on several watch lists – even though I don’t have so much as a speeding ticket), they too know everything I do online and also have access to my Penzu journals. So, I’ve had to make my plans to expose them, knowing they are reading all my plans – quite a strategic challenge to hope to win against those odds, right?
I believe Buddy was contacted after Ralph Peters was convinced I was a threat. Through Ralph Peters, they located Buddy and Kinnision, two old Army buddies of Ralph to assist. For almost a year, in 2012, Buddy kept emailing me links to news articles and I responded with comments. I chatted more, but his comments were very sparse. He got to know me. I told him about what had happened to me in 1998 shortly after I started blogging, when I came up with an idea of how to use my blog to expose my story. My only contact with Buddy or my attorney has been online, on the computer that they are monitoring since 1998.
Since I kept writing comments in my notepad for years that I am not giving up and am going to expose what they did to me in 1998, they can’t afford to let that happen.
They recruited a retired Army general in 1998 to attack an enlisted soldier’s spouse, all to silence her over her comments posted on a freakin’ online politics message board.
The great irony was I was writing such dangerous comments as “No One Is Above The Law” and “The Constitution applies to EVERYONE.” and “Lying under oath is a CRIME.”
I told my attorney and Buddy to build a RICO case against them, which takes a lot of time and a lot of legwork. So, here we are, where I was being told “SURRENDER NOW, Sue! It’s the only possible outcome…” for writing about following the law again… That’s subversive somehow??? Who in the hell I am supposed to SURRENDER to, I am not sure. However if it’s this criminal enterprise, that would be surrendering to the enemy, because I am an innocent American citizen, who has been followed and monitored by these thugs, who have abused their power since 1998 and I refuse to SURRENDER my liberty to them!
Since I didn’t know for a long time if I could trust Buddy, at times I have panicked, worrying about how to keep my family safe, especially my disabled husband, who would trust that retired general without question, because that general was my husband’s brigade commander during Desert Storm. I sent an email to my youngest sister in PA a few years ago, telling her that I really was attacked during 1998 and I gave her my blog link. She never has mentioned my blog again, so I assume they sent someone to warn her I am a deranged terrorist or something. My four children call her to report on me. I have told my children about my blog and I mentioned that in my Penzu journals each time. My children never said a word to me about my blog afterwards, but they quiz me on my views and mention often they have just talked to my youngest sister.
So Buddy and my attorney and those aiding are tracking those who are accessing my Penzu journal, back to who is in charge of this. I told Buddy and my attorney, a two-star JAG general that no matter what, follow the law and whomever they bring on board to assist must follow the law too.
I feel certain that most of the people they are lying to in the US government and US Armed Forces believe they are really tracking a dangerous terrorist, because a lot of effort has gone into silencing me.
I assume things are escalating in their efforts to silence me, since on Tuesday night, my best friend from high school, whom I hear from occasionally, called to see who I voted for, all of my kids keep asking me how I feel about the election, I had that discussion with my son on Sunday about “It’s Legal, where he quizzed me on my views on torture too, which seemed bizarre. (I don’t support use of torture and think it’s counter-productive, for what it’s worth). And last night that son made a trip down here ( an hour) on a weeknight to check on me and quiz me some more on how I feel about the election and if I’m okay with it. Of course, I just got done with my Twitter storm too;-)
With so much interest in who I voted for – I left the top of my ballot blank. I was happy to vote for Senator Isakson and my Representative, Buddy Carter. I wrote to my sister, Wendy, yesterday, and since nothing in my life is private, here is that email (sent at 6:17 am), which I am sure she has reported. I am redacting a few names, out of consideration of their privacy:
Hi Wendy,
Sorry for not responding to your email. I kept intending to write and then didn’t get to it. I thought you had gotten your old living room furniture at a Haverty’s. I thought that , if I remember correctly, because I thought it was you who recommended them, when we bought living room furniture here in the early 90s. You mentioned the cat peeing on the furniture, well some of these dogs are hard on the furniture too – harder than the kids were truthfully, because the kids didn’t chew holes in the furniture and I didn’t let them eat in the living room. Lucy, a small terrier mutt stray that I brought home years ago likes to nibble on the corners of throw pillow and she also nibbled a hole in the corner of one middle couch cushion at the back, where she likes to lay. I had gotten those quilted pet slipcovers for the sofa and loveseat, which helps to keep her away from the actual furniture cushions, but she’s chewed a lot of holes in these quilted slipcovers too.
These dogs make such a mess with the shedding and a couple of them pee on the carpet all the time. In fact, I need to steam clean the carpet in the living room and the computer room real soon – it’s getting bad with spots again.
I don’t know if I thanked you for the cookbook from the church in Kunkletown. I appreciate it a a lot. The cover has a very nice picture of the church on it. I always thought the early settlers there used good sense to perch the church on the hill rather than in town, because it’s stands out there and is very picturesque. BLANK told me the old houses in Kunkletown are looking very run-down and he said you told him the younger people don’t take care of them. I was attached to the house in Kunkletown and I loved the old maple trees in the front yard, but BLANK had those removed. I wonder if the lilac bushes are still there, where we had one on our side of the backyard next to a forsythia bush and Mammy had a larger one closer to BLANK and BLANK’S house.
I’m like Pop and very attached to trees that I planted. We lost a large piece on the willow tree from that hurricane and it blew most of the leaves off that tree. The other trees withstood the wind and kept their leaves, but not that willow tree. Tom took the optimistic view and said, “Oh well, it will get new leaves in the spring.” That’s true, but that tree gets leaves very late in the spring, because I’m always looking at it in the spring and waiting. A very small live oak in the front yard has gotten really big and so has a red maple, which was really like a bare stick when I planted it back in the 90s. I got that when the new YMCA building opened here and some conservation group had a stand giving out free bare root trees. That maple tree was about a foot and half long stick with a few roots in it. It’s now taller than the house. The live oak is almost that tall too. I really like live oaks trees, because they stay green all year long.
You had mentioned old bottles and of course, being a hoarder, I would love to have them, but I can’t afford to send you postage to mail them and I don’t want you wasting the money. Perhaps BLANK, BLANK or BLANK might want them. I have mine in the garage, because they are too much to dust all the time and I intended to buy a glass cabinet to display them, but never did. At this point I have too many books and other stuff, that I don’t have any room for a cabinet, unless I get rid of something else. I need to get rid of a lot of stuff – all the closets are full and I have stuff stacked in my sewing room, because there’s not enough room in there for all that junk. It’s hard for me to part with sewing and craft stuff, but at least I have stopped buying any more since I quit working. Now the trick it to become more productive and use more of that stuff.
BLANK called me last night. She writes to me every once in a while and I write back when I get to it. She had an email account, but doesn’t like going on the computer, so she stopped emailing me and mails letters now. This probably sounds weird, coming from me the queen of letter-writing and pen pals, but I really don’t like writing letters with pen and paper anymore. I love the convenience and spell check with email, plus it’s free and fast to send emails, plus you can include links and attachments (although I have a hard time doing attachments). I wish BLANK would get back to emailing, because it’s much easier. I rarely buy stamps these days and I try to do as much online as possible – especially paying bills and shopping. She called to ask who I voted for. I didn’t vote for either one for president and just voted down ballot. We had a Senator and a Congressman running for re-election, both Republicans, so I had to vote for them. I like our Congressman, Buddy Carter, from what I have seen of him in Congressional hearings – he’s very humble and down-to-earth and doesn’t pretend to be an “expert”. I told BLANK, he asks good questions in the House oversight committee hearings, which considering he’s not a lawyer surprised me and he remains very courteous too. Trump should hire a Southern gentleman or talk to Buddy Carter to teach him manners. Everyone likes to make fun of southerners, but the rest of the country could learn something from the traditional manners down here and Trump would be less of a national embarrassment if he cultivated the manners of Southern gentleman. I am proud to have Buddy Carter representing me. BLANK said she and BLANK voted for Trump. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. BLANK chatted a little but, it seemed very odd that she would call out of the blue just to ask who I voted for.
BLANK is into all that living like the Amish stuff (not the morals & religion part, lol), but with his using horses for logging with his sawmill. I told BLANK I was going to read my book last night and not watch the election returns. I mentioned the book to her, because of BLANK’S interest in the old-fashioned stuff. The book is Young Pioneers by Rose Wilder Lane, who was the real life daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and she actually edited (highly edited) her mother’s stories to get them ready to be published. Rose Wilder Lane was a famous journalist & writer in the early 1900s. This Young Pioneers is a fictional novel based on Charles and Caroline Ingalls, Lane’s grandparents. move to the Dakota territory. I told BLANK about this “cooling drink” of water, molasses and vinegar, that was mentioned several times in this novel. It sounds hideous to me, but BLANK told me BLANK drinks that sometimes, so I guess the Amish must drink that too. I googled it and it’s called Switchel. Sometimes ginger is added to it too. There’s actually science to drinking that as a “cooling” drink, because the molasses is high in potassium and replaces electrolytes and the vinegar gave it a sweet and sour taste. I’ll pass on trying that, but here’s a very interesting article from The Smithsonian magazine I found on this:
Well, I’ve rambled on enough. Saw the news that Trump won when I got up … omg, we’re in for some amazing times and the dumbing down of America is complete when our choices are Trump or Hillary. Let’s hope Kellyanne stays nearby to keep him from mean tweeting other world leaders…
Take care.
Love,
Sue
I would love nothing better than to move on too, but since I believe I am being held a virtual captive and due to these circumstances, I can’t. I will never “SURRENDER NOW, Sue” to tyranny – it ain’t happening!
If I ever can expose them, I want America to decide who is the “terrorist”, but considering with these subversives, they even wrote a narrative where Bowe Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction”, I feel certain we’re in for a lot more Redefining America.
SEVENTEEN years of this crap from these people and yeah, I would sure love to be FREE again in America and move on too.
I will continue to work to expose the WHOLESALE PUBLIC CORRUPTION of the Clinton machine!
Both of my sons know a lot about the law and The Constitution. One son is very good at foreign languages and understands intricacies of foreign policy, while the other is a science (especially quantum physics) and math geek. I am just a homemaker. This isn’t going to be a whinefest, just statements of what I believe to be the reality, so bear with me. In America, unless you have fancy titles or can lay claim to being some sort of an “expert”, your opinions and comments are considered not worth listening to. Even my sons are like that. So, when it comes to who they will believe, even if it’s me vs. “important” people with titles or military rank, I suspect they would believe the people with fancy titles or military rank.
When I joined the US Army in 1979, I had already gone to college one year and my parents struggled to pay my tuition and expenses that year. I took out a student loan to help pay for my second semester. My year at college was disastrous, both academically and romantically. Broken-hearted on both counts, I decided I didn’t want to go back the next year, so despite my parents pleading, I refused.
During the summer of 1979, one day, and after weeks of trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I called an Army recruiter. So, I went ahead and signed my enlistment paperwork without discussing it with anyone. When I told my parents, they were overwrought and horrified, because I was a girl. My mother was sobbing, but my father asked me if I had already signed the paperwork. When I told him I had, he seemed resigned and he said, “You gave your word, so you’ll have to keep it.”
The Army was the best thing ever to happen to me, in many ways. Like many females, I did not complete my first enlistment, due to marriage and having a baby. The decision to get out of the Army took me months to make. I may have joined the Army capriciously, but I left the Army, after months of agonizing and feeling torn by two duties – my duty as a soldier vs my duty as a mother, knowing that that little bit of Army training taught me important life lessons, like the importance of putting mission above self, like the importance of duty, like the importance of accountability, like the importance of living by the US Military Code of Conduct and Army Values.
My husband had just been promoted to E-6, he was a very dedicated solider, NCO of the year for our brigade, inductee into the Sgt. Morales Club, 82nd paratrooper. He wanted me to get out and he kept telling me that he could provide for us. Since we were stationed in Germany, his big concern was that if something happened and we deployed, what would happen to our baby. He knew lots more about the Army than I did, so he explained that if something happened, family members could be evacuated back to the States, under a NEO evacuation. He told me that if that happened, we would have to hand our baby over to someone else to take back to the States, because we were both deploying. He told me he didn’t want to hand our baby over to other people and he told me that he would rather go fight and have me safe in the States. He told me he would work hard to provide for us.
I did sign my chapter paperwork with just two weeks left before the deadline date, because by Army rules, you had to decide before you were 7 months pregnant. So, I signed my paperwork, then had to fly to the States to out process, but I got a passport and turned right around and flew back to my husband in Germany. So, while I got out of the Army, by waiting so long to decide, I had put myself into another bad situation – I was now not a command-sponsored family member and thus, technically the Army had no responsibility to evacuate me in case of a NEO evacuation. My husband and I talked about that several times and I spent time looking at maps of Europe and trying to figure out what I would do, if that happened. My husband was sure the Army would still look after me, because I was an American and an Army wife. Nothing did happen, but that experience of making one decision without knowing all the ramifications made me into a person who prefers contingency planning.
So, that is how I came to decide to be a homemaker. I loved the Army and I missed it, but I have no regrets about choosing to put taking care of my children first, while my husband continued his Army career – he was a better asset to the Army than I was. He was a very good infantryman. The Army needs very good warfighters more than it needs Army journalists.
All this personal bio plays into the larger issue I want to get to:
What is the Law?
“Comey said” that Hillary did not commit any crimes, so her actions were “legal“. My one son, with the same conviction as someone like Congressman Cummings, repeated this “Comey said” argument during a discussion Sunday. The discussion became more like an argument and I suspect my son believes Hillary has bad judgment, but because she has held important positions and is a lawyer, she knows a lot. He believes that because Comey said “not criminal” that means the FACTS are now irrelevant and don’t matter.
In our discussion, this “expert” belief came into it when my son mentioned General Petraeus, whom I do NOT respect and whom I believe got away easy for the crimes he knowingly committed. I don’t really care about his military record or his chestful of medals. I don’t care if he’s a military strategic genius or one of the “greatest” generals of his generation.
To me he grossly mishandled highly sensitive information, that could have jeopardized American lives in the field – end of conversation. He lied to try and cover up. For me, when people do this, I no longer trust them and I believe they are asecurity risk to the United States of America.
I don’t really care that he had Clinton lawyer, David Kendall, work out a plea agreement, so he got off on way lesser charges. The actual FACTS, which aren’t disputed, are he handed over his black books and other classified information to his mistress/biographer, to aid her in writing his biography. Petraeus supporters hype that his mistress, a US Army trained intelligence officer, had a security clearance, as a point to exonerate General Petraeus.
Here are the FACTS on her having a security clearance. A security clearance is a privilege given to people, entrusting them to handle our nation’s sensitive national security information. The clearance allows access to sensitive information to carry our your official duties. The clearance is not for personal, partisan-political, random curiosity or any other purposes. It is NOT for writing a book. She was a trained intelligence officer, who had classified information, that was not secured in her home, but she also had hundreds of classified documents on her home computer unsecured. So, her having a security clearance and being a trained intelligence officer actually makes her actions worse, in my opinion, for the same reason General Petraues’ actions make me have no interest in listening to anything he has to say, they should have known better. General Petraeus and his mistress put personal interest above the safety of soldiers in the field, by such “extremely careless” handling of highly sensitive information. Here are some of the FACTS reported from the FBI affidavit:
“FBI agents found hundreds of classified documents on Paula Broadwell’s home computers in Charlotte during their investigation into her relationship with then-CIA Director David Petraeus, according to newly unsealed FBI documents obtained by the Observer.
More than 300 of those documents were classified as secret, according to a 2013 FBI affidavit accompanying the agency’s request to search Petraeus’ Arlington, Va., home.”
And this: “The affidavit is signed by a Charlotte-based FBI agent. Its allegations include:
“The documents show that when confronted by the FBI, both Broadwell and Petraeus appeared to mislead investigators about their extensive exchange of classified material, most of it involving military and diplomatic operations during Petraeus’ years as commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”
And this: “The FBI gathered recordings Petraeus made as military commander in the Middle East in which he discussed information classified as “Top Secret” with reporters.
In an audio file taken from Broadwell’s home in November 2012, Petraeus can be heard discussing “sensitive military campaigns and operations” with reporters from the Washington Post. His only demand was to be referred to in the subsequent stories “as a senior military officer,” the affidavit says.”
And this: “Petraeus tried to stop the FBI investigation as soon as he heard about it. According to the affidavit, the FBI began its probe in Tampa, Fla., after a person identified as “Witness 1,” who is clearly Tampa socialite and Petraeus confidante Jill Kelly, complained of receiving threatening emails from someone who had access to the CIA director’s schedule – a potential breach of security.”
And this: Broadwell, a married mother of two, and Petraeus, also married, took steps to hide their correspondences. The affidavit says the two used pre-paid cellphones and email accounts “using non-attributable names.”
So, back to my discussion with my son. He was so adamant about The Law, that he told me the national security information is the President’s information and he can do anything he wants with it – that’s The Law. He told me all the things the President can do and when I pointed out the information is not the president’s personally, but that the President is entrusted, as part of the President’s DUTIES, to handle our nation’s secrets , my son kept telling me, “It’s his information, he owns it and can do anything he wants with it.”
My son said that “legally” the President could turn over every bit of classified information to our country’s enemies and there’s nothing anyone can do about it – it’s “legal”.
I tried to explain that The Law loses all meaning if it loses all connection to our foundational principles. I tried to explain natural law and that The Law must be girded by principles or it loses all meaning. My son cut me off and said, “It’s legal and don’t go there.”
He told me the Declaration of Independence isn’t The Law.
I tried to explain it to him again, that it is the foundation of principles upon which The Law stands. Without those principles, The Law is just a piece of meaningless paper – it becomes edicts imposed by RULERS. Again, he dismissed that and repeated, “The President can do anything he wants with national security information, he owns it, it’s HIS!”
My son also made a little tin foil hat and put it on my head, when I told him, that I believe, we are headed toward a constitutional crisis, because despite what “Comey said”. Hillary’s emails weren’t just “a mistake”, she and the Obama administration, being part of these email (((CHAINS))) the FBI Notes discuss, deliberately jeopardized national security.
Top secret SAP information discussed via personal email and all the actions to obstruct justice, cover-up and lie, lie, lie can’t be ignored.
Too many American lives in the field serving America, demands accountability for this deliberately negligent handling of national security information. According to the FBI Notes, there’s an email from a CHAIN between President Obama (using his gmail account) and Hillary Clinton too. The President signed
Hillary distributed those guidelines and reminders to State Department staff on proper handling of national security information. They both put their names to the proper way to protect national security information, then grossly violated their own guidelines. That goes to “intent”. Intent doesn’t have to be nefarious, in the sense of doing it to harm America. Intent can mean you ignored the law for your personal interests (like Petraeus and his mistress for his biography) or convenience (as in private email was easier to use or it was easier than carrying two devices).
I tried to tell my son that the President swears an oath:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
If the The Law allows the President to engage in actions that totally violate his oath and the national security of the United States, what on earth does “it’s legal” mean? The President, Dems and media keep hyping, “Comey said, nothing criminal”, which they spin as she’s innocent. Well, here we come to the question of “justice”. The FBI notes indicate serious crimes were committed by Hillary Clinton, many of her cronies and people in those CHAINS. The Constitution allows the President power to pardon all of them.
So, we are at a point where one political party can do anything, or as my son said, “It’s his information! He could give all of it to our enemies and there’s nothing anyone could do! It’s LEGAL!”
The American people, most of whom don’t follow the news and are easily swayed by mainstream media news (Clinton colluders), pundits, celebrities and SPIN, are voting today. I don’t think it matters either way which one of these two UNFIT candidates gets elected. I feel certain, Trump would get impeached quickly. I feel certain that Hillary would be blackmailed by America’s enemies relentlessly and exposed by leaks of highly sensitive information our enemies have, which SHE jeopardized by her “extremely careless” handling of highly classified information.
I think my son would believe Hillary Clinton or General Petraeus over me if it ever came to who to believe. They are important people with titles and I am just a homemaker, who was locked up for 18 days in a mental facility during impeachment & labeled bipolar – after being attacked for a few months in my home in the FALL of 1998.
Even though I told the truth, I have no credibility within my own family, because it was deliberately destroyed in 1998.
They have credibility and clout, no matter how much they lie.
I love my son, no matter what, and I’m working hard in my life on learning to forgive people and turn the other cheek.
I think about “Justice” a lot. I told my son that I am keeping that tin foil hat. Unlike Hillary Clinton or President Obama, I do believe in following the law and The Constitution. I would never support overthrowing the government, violence or any other subversive actions. However, I fully support working hard to expose the truth. And unto that end I will continue to peacefully work – Obeying the law every step of the way.
The past week should be a short enough time span for anyone to see how the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines collude with the liberal media to SPIN (LIE) to change the public perception about issues and events in the news – it is hard-nosed propaganda to control America.
So, as I wrote yesterday, the Clinton campaign full-force Scorched Earth 2.0 to throw every slur against Trump they can is in full-swing, but there’s another propaganda move in the works. This one for post-election and all of them, from President Obama, on down started setting the stage for that this week.
No matter who wins: President Obama will make sure Hillary & Bill Clinton and all their close associates have full pardons before he leaves office in January. He will also fire James Comey and install someone who will crack the whip and squash all attempts to investigate the Clintons.
One week ago James Comey sent his letter to the House leaders informing them that he was reopening the FBI criminal investigation into Hillary’s email server. That decision came from the discovery of emails stored on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which the FBI is investigating in Weiner’s sexting with an underage girl case. So, the initial Wall Street Journal report stated there were 650,000 emails found on Weiner’s laptop and that many thousands of them are Huma Abedin’s State Department emails.
So, the story went from that information, to more FBI leaks indicating many of these emails are NOT emails previously turned over to the State Department. Abedin’s lawyer dismissed this as Abedin does not know how the emails got on that laptop. Friends of Abedin, inside the Clinton camp, reported various explanations, like Abedin didn’t know her email was backing up onto that laptop and more of she did not even know those emails were there.
The Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines united with their friends in the liberal media to launch an all out SPIN blitzkrieg to shut down the FBI leaks and to discredit both Comey and the FBI. This week it’s the FBI is out of control, the FBI is a bunch of Trump fanboys, Pelosi saying Comey needs to be fired, Comey violated the Hatch Act, there is no “investigation” (using their old parsing what words mean gimmick), etc. etc. Abedin will be cast as a victim of Islamophobia.
This media blitzkrieg is setting the stage for the Clinton pardons and Comey’s ouster, regardless who wins. Obama will play it off as he’s trying to set a new tone in Washington, where everyone plays by the same rules or some other bs line to turn the tables on any Republicans who cry foul and the minute the Republicans start speaking out, the SPIN, with full media collusion, will be, “those Republicans are on another right-wing witch hunt!” Obama has higher approval than either Trump or Hillary at this point, because their awfulness makes him look better. He will leave office pretending he tried to end the divisiveness, while assuring that the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines still control the political narrative in America.
And into the media mix we have Russian active measures – where there are Russian agents, willing accomplices,and useful idiots spewing angry right-wing rhetoric. DrudgeReport and Breitbart seem like two likely conduits for Russian propaganda efforts to foment far-right anger, but there are more subtle ones too. And speaking of the Russians, the Left is in full Red Scare mode, and Hillary resurrected the Daisy girl ad… isn’t that a bizarre propaganda twist. No more bizarre than that Americans, faced with lying politicians and very corrupt liberal media collusion, are seeking the “truth” from a Russian front, Wikileaks, which is reporting on the corruption of the American government and media… It’s all very surreal.
Angry Americans, who speak out about the WHOLESALE PUBLIC CORRUPTION, have already been set-up by Trump, the Bill Clinton DUPE, with his strong-man delusions, fomenting angry rhetoric, giving legitimacy to a lot of racists in America, and Trump’s idiotic big name enablers, who got on board with the over-the-top rants. All of them will be cast as “haters”, “dangerous deplorables”, and “not who we are”.
Obama already is putting these poison pills into the media narrative. The Clinton/Obama/Democratic Party machines know Obama has the constitutional power to make sure the Clintons remain above the law. He can’t afford to let Hillary go down, because he will go down too – his entire administration jeopardized national security with their grossly negligent handling of sensitive information by using private email.
The FBI Notes of Abedin’s interview already exposed that President Obama used private email to discuss classified information with Clinton, using her server email. (page 93 of FBI Notes). Abedin asked how that could not be classified when shown this email and asked for a copy. She then provided information that she didn’t go on the trip to St. Petersburg and noted that the security protocols in St. Petersburg were not necessarily the same as they were for Moscow , where they were not allowed to use blackberries. So, the topic of the email between Obama and Hillary, which Obama was discussing using his GMAIL account, was Russia.
Since the Russians (and many other foreign intelligence agencies) still follow sane security protocols, unlike the Obama administration, I would not be surprised if they exploited the private emails accounts of EVERY top Obama administration official.
The Obama administration is a national security nightmare and a threat to America.
That’s the TRUTH.
Although the Clintons and Obama don’t understand anything about actual military strategy or how to use military power, they have perfected a vile form of INFORMATION WARFARE, which really is nothing more than wimpy cat-fighting that women do naturally. Cat-fighting involves whispering campaigns, spreading vicious gossip and lies, manipulating people (especially men) to do your dirty work for you, playing the victim, blackmailing enemies, etc. Most men don’t understand cat-fighting, although some wimpy men, like Bill Clinton and his war room, the leader from behind and Trump, have mastered it… Of course, thatwitch2016, being a very, catty, bitchy woman is a natural at it.
I prefer real military strategy – it takes more integrity and careful planning.
It’s late in the game for American national security and strategic “experts” to get their heads out of their butts and get back to nuts and bolts basics:
BIG PICTURE/LITTLE PICTURE – LEARN IT, UNDERSTAND IT, PRACTICE IT ALWAYS!!!
Every successful military strategy is based on deception and yes, that means one side is “conspiring” to defeat the other side, so being called a “conspiracy nut” doesn’t even phase me in the least. I study military strategy – ends, ways, means. I try to discern strategies, just like I analyze systems – figure out the parts and how they operate together. I read a lot about military history and military strategy and have for decades, but I am NOT an expert on anything. I am a homemaker, but most of all I am an American, who swore an oath to defend The Constitution always.
The following is a repetitive LB message, which I posted at The American Thinker again this morning. It might be removed. Many of my comments there get removed, I suspect because Trump is very popular at their website. I also have posted a few comments at PJ Media and interestingly enough, the author, Roger L. Simon (a Trump supporter), descended into comments recently, to accuse me of making straw men arguments. Yes, I am controversial… and persistent. So, first here is my comment at The American Thinker article by Patricia McCarthy, The Cluelessness of ‘WWWDC’. This article was berating white-women-with-college-degrees for supporting Hillary. Here’s my comment:
“Crooked Hillary, awful in ways both obvious and alarming, isn’t why Trump is losing and it’s also not because of feminist blather. The reason Trump is losing is because he deliberately has been exploding his own campaign for months now, trying to use the Clinton-style scorched earth media strategy that worked like a charm in the primary.
His campaign staff and surrogates spend every minute trotting after him, cleaning up the verbal garbage he spews constantly. Trump could have spent the time since the convention working to unite the GOP, studying policy and staying on a coherent message, but instead he decided to play a high stakes scorched earth face-off with Hillary, hoping to recapture that primary “winning in all the polls” mojo. The reason it hasn’t worked is that scorched earth only works with massive mass media collusion. The “corrupt media” was corrupt in the GOP primary giving Trump billions of dollars in free media and selling his talking points non-stop. That allowed Hillary to bury her email server scandal and also propelled only the worst GOP candidates to gain any traction (per the Podesta email – promoting the Pied Piper candidates)
That Clinton Scorched Earth requires:
Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.
Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.
Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls).
Trump tore the GOP apart, using a hyped GOP establishment conspiracy theory (identical to how Hillary plays her vast, right-wing conspiracy), but his angry followers, who were duped by this con man, still want to blame everyone else for his failures. Trump’s primary talking points and relentless repetition of them by both him and the media sold him as “winning in all the polls”.
This Clinton SPIN media messaging, which morphed into the Obama “narrative” media messaging is wholesale public corruption, where the media elite and one political party control the political messaging 24/7 in the mainstream media and they reinforce that messaging by selling manufactured opinion cascades (polls) and talking points, which they repeat relentlessly. The repeated messages are what people remember and the repeated polls brainwash people to believe poll numbers reflect “the will of the people”.
This isn’t just about this election, it’s about a corrupt system designed to allow Leftists and Democratic politicians to control the media messaging and thereby control the political process in America. This corrupt media collusion, that worked to assure Trump dominated in the GOP primary, is working to bury Trump in dirt now. This is the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 . Everyone can see the corrupt media pile-on now, where the media keeps hyping one Trump scandal after another – all stories that are years old and which the media sat on for the past year – to use in October to destroy Trump. Trump is just too stupid to realize he was a Clinton dupe all along, he thinks he can beat the Clintons at their own scorched earth, not even realizing that to win with that strategy requires massive mass media collusion – it’s totally corrupt (but to borrow Comey’s words, “not illegal”).”
The Clinton operatives and their friends have many more devastating hits on Trump planned out, with the worst saved up for days before the election. That reality should check the exuberance of Trump followers, but they keep believing he is great and will win. His campaign is imploding and each Clinton hit will expose Trump’s deplorable character with irrefutable evidence – they spent the past year compiling video tapes and combing records. This is how the Clintons operate. Trump has recycled Bill Clinton women and Putin emails.
Cheer him on at your own peril. Rumors are swirling there’s tape of him using racial slurs… He’s taking the GOP down into the sewer with him.
“That reality should check the exuberance of Trump followers, but they keep believing he is great and will win.”
For the record I would like to say that is absolute nonsense. We are in an election of two people with a tremendous amount at stake. No one said anyone was “great” here or even close. It’s a choice and in my case easy to make because I believe in the rule of law. You disagree, fine. But quit making up idiotic straw men.
Each time Trump comes back with one of these “counter punches”, the Trump pundits keep spinning it that he is back or he’s not out.
The Clintons are the most corrupt political machine in modern American history, perhaps all of American history. The Clinton machine orchestrated the GOP Insurgency with friends of Bill in the media elite. Yes, hard to prove, but the billions of free media selling Trump was obviously corrupt. In late Feb, all but FOX pivoted to the “loose cannon” mode.
Hillary should have been indicted, just as Bill Clinton should have been removed from office for lying under oath, obstructing justice and intimidating witnesses, which were all in the charges. GOP Senators waffled.
Trump seems more like a gift to the Clintons to get Hillary elected than the one thing standing between Hillary and the White House- he is the perfect dupe. Every time he “survives”, there’s another more devastating liberal media revelation of Trump dirt, while Trump is relying on Wikileaks to save him. Bill Clinton set up the perfect triangulation strategy – Bernie the kook on the left, Trump the kook on the right – with the middle cleared for Hillary. Despite her many lies tonight – she stayed calm and poised and did not loose one bit of her foothold on the middle ground. Trump gained nothing.
Tonight he rambled out one attack after another, much of it garbage. And then he ended this debate praising “no stamina Hillary” : “She doesn’t quit, she doesn’t give up, I respect that. I tell it like it is: She’s a fighter!”
Frankly, all along (since 1992), I’ve suspected that there was some hostile foreign intelligence influence in the Clinton SPIN cycle media messaging strategy and their souped up impeachment spin – Scorched Earth media messaging strategy, which morphed into the GWB Derangement Syndrome media messaging strategy, then morphed into the Obama “Narratives” media messaging strategy. And now we have experienced the Trump “GOP Insurgent” media messaging triumph to burn the GOP to the ground, in the primary, and we’re at the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 media messaging strategy to make sure Hillary wins – no matter what. All of these media messaging strategies were totally corrupt and relied on massive mass media collusion to brainwash enough Americans to buy into them to succeed. However, they all also are at their core run like military-style INFORMATION WARFARE strategies and sorry, most of the Dems, to include Hillary and Bill Clinton, know nothing about military strategy. Bill Clinton is a political genius, he is not in any way, shape or form a military strategist. The “SPIN” fits with his area of expertise- political messaging.
I’ve always been suspicious of the Carville/Matlin duo, which did in George H.W.Bush – something smelled off with them during that election, their hokey love affair and everything about them. Another Clinton spin meister supreme, George Stepanopoulos, choirboy looks, and now Chief Anchor and Chief Political Correspondent for ABC News.
So once again, here is what this strategy really is and yes, I made up the “mass media saturation strategy” name myself, long ago, because that’s what the strategy IS:
Mass media saturation is the military strategy of swarming juxtaposed to a mass media battlefield
Scorched earth is the military strategy of scorched earth (a war crime under the Geneva Conventions btw) juxtaposed to a mass media battlefield, Scorched earth information warfare is a take no prisoners blitz of vicious character assassinations AND mass media saturation on steroids.
Combined, they have been ruthlessly used to divide America into hostile, warring factions
The Russians are playing a worldwide media messaging game – BIG picture and that Iranian incident of seizing two American ships in January was part of it:
The Wiki-leaks dumps are part of it, even Lavrov’s “oh, so disingenuous pussy joke” with Christiane Amanpour (Iranian, pushed for US intervention in Balkans, married top Clinton State Dept official- getting closer access to Clinton White House), was a middle finger to US leaders. For the pearl-clutchers saying, “How could you be suspicious of Amanpour?” Well first it was her theatrical prodding US intervention in the Balkans, which made me wonder why some “Leftist” was urging US military action, so here’s the LB Guide to Profiling again.
Here’s the Lavrov brilliant attack on American leadership:
Here’s another BIG Russian media message for the US and the West:
For the record, I could not care less when people attack me personally or call me a crazy conspiracy nut, but I sure hope that the people entrusted with our national security get their heads out of their butts SOON, because the Russians ARE on the move and they have a COMPREHENSIVE MILITARY STRATEGY and they have been incrementally waging it for DECADES against America and the West. There should be a few Cold Warriors, who remember how this game is played.
Hillary or Trump are both surefire losers for America – one is too stupid to realize Putin is fluffing him and the other has so much dirt that the Russians are holding and ready to blackmail her, that she’s compromised six ways to Sunday.
This isn’t just about presidential “politics” or some benign media messaging strategy, because the Clinton mass media messaging is just part of this. The Russians are escalating their cyber warfare actions, their geopolitical actions AND military actions.
This is the culmination of a DECADES’ long comprehensive military strategy to neuter the United States and the West and the main effort has been to fuel virulent partisan factions in America and destroy Americans’ confidence in the media, in their economic system (Wall Street attacks ring a bell), the police (hey BLM, ring a bell), and the entire American governmental system. It has been a comprehensive military strategy all along.
This election now enters Scorched Earth: The Death Match Edition.
Putin again plays chess, while the US, as usual, plays checkers. So, contrary to Newt, Huckabee, Giuliani and other pathetic Trump mouthpieces, this election isn’t a binary choice between Trump or Hillary. It’s a scorched earth battle between two rabid, very corrupt American partisans, Trump and Hillary, then there is Putin, who is waging a scorched earth battle against American democracy.
While Hillary and Trump take the low road, entrenched in their vicious underhanded character assassination attacks in the media, and the liberal American news media colludes to facilitate Hillary’s attacks against Trump, Putin is waging his own scorched earth campaign against America. Putin’s scorched earth extends way beyond just Trump and Hillary, in fact, most of his effort is directed at waging a propaganda war against the US Armed Forces, by setting up confrontations to make American forces look weak and cowardly. He has China and Iran aiding in these efforts. Putin’s war involved years of careful information warfare against America and he’s now trying to launch the decisive battle. Putin’s aim isn’t just to promote Trump, it’s to destroy the credibility of the American electoral system.
The weakest point for any country is during a transition of leadership change. Putin , Iran, China are all on the move, while Obama continues to golf and the American public talks itself into exhaustion about Trump’s grabbing women’s private parts.
Trump presently is burning up Twitter today, with attacks against Republicans again, more burning the GOP to the ground, intent to take as many Republicans down with him, as his campaign goes up in flames. What a “leader”. His only concern is about his damaged ego and being a LOSER. The “p*&&y” video is assuredly not the last video exposure of the real Donald J. Trump, in this flaming hot mess. If the rumored video exists of Trump using the n-word emerges, his campaign will be not a Three-Mile Island leak, but the Chernobyl of American presidential politics – everyone will be rushing to escape … He’s going down in flames, so any wishful thinking that he “won” the debate Sunday and is going to turn his campaign around rests as delusional.
Hillary’s minions in the media are trying to divert attention away from Wikileaks’ deluge of email leaks and draw attention to Trump. Her only concern is about herself. The email leaks are clearly showing the wholesale public corruption, with widespread liberal media collusion, between many news media outlets and the Clinton campaign… oh, what a surprise.
Since last Fall, I’ve rambled on about Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy and how the Clinton spin really works – it works only with extensive media collusion, which in turn manufacture opinion cascades. It’s a mass media brainwashing operation, where the relentlessly repeated messaging dominates, even blocks out, other messaging. So, imagine my shock when finally, my youngest daughter told me last night that her husband was telling her about the leaks show the Clintons pushed the media to promote Trump in the GOP primary. As if she was informing me of some big news, she said, “Mama, your conspiracy theory was right.”
It took Wikileaks to prove the actual electronic trails, to expose the media collusion with the political operatives. However, that collusion was obvious if you tracked the messaging and the strategy. Information warfare involves identifying the messaging, who is conveying the messaging, who is the target of the messaging and the means employed to wage the information warfare. All of this can done without high-tech analysis of the information battlefield – it can be done by carefully watching and listening to mass media messaging. It takes human intelligence to analyze it – not high-tech.
Again, here are the basics:
The reason Trump broke out of the pack was because he used the borrowed Clinton-style mass media saturation/scorched earth strategy.
That strategy is a sophisticated INFORMATION WARFARE strategy introduced into American politics by the Clinton political operatives.
The mass media saturation strategy was developed by far-left Alinskyite Marxists. The messaging wall required for mass media saturation to succeed requires the active collusion of the mass media NEWS outlets to facilitate it, by actively and relentlessly repeating the messages of the political candidate or activists using this “buzz word, catchphrase spin (talking points messaging). Mass media saturation INFORMATION WARFARE requires mass media collusion to succeed. This strategy can NOT succeed without mass media messaging dominance to CONTROL (“win”) the 24/7 news cycle (or as the Clinton team dubbed it – the spin cycle).
It is a form of mass media brainwashing and antithetical to American free speech principles! To succeed this strategy requires MEDIA COLLUSION.
It can NOT work without that media collusion.
Here are the components:
Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.
Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.
Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls)
Only Democrats had successfully used this strategy before Trump, because the liberal media never before gave BILLIONS of dollars in free media for one GOP candidate, to run a “GOP Insurgency” for 8 months straight on all three cable news networks nor did the mass media cable networks ever collude or facilitate in the mass media messaging for any Republican candidate or cause.
Just as the Wikileaks leak has exposed the MEDIA COLLUSION between the DNC and the media to rig the system against Sanders, that SAME media collusion exists between the Potemkin Trump campaign (or the Clinton operatives who were in the shadows masterminding this charade) and the media.
Those electronic trails exist!!!
This mass media saturation requires constant messaging coordination between political operatives and the media facilitators to keep the SPIN cycle moving. Trump’s “win, win, win” is exactly like Carville’s “sex, sex, sex” during impeachment. I feel sure Trump’s MEDIA COLLUSION will be exposed before November.
And the scorched earth part of the strategy is really just the mass media saturation strategy on steroids, replete with endless character assassinations (low-energy Jeb, lyin’ Ted, little Marco, etc.) and a take no prisoners attitude.
Putin is calmly watching the American freak show and waging a masterful information warfare offensive against an America, unaware it’s under attack, and he is planning real strategic military moves. America isn’t even aware Russia is launching a REAL offensive against the West.
Much of this post is a rehash of old stuff, but I wanted to add a bit to this emerging propaganda picture, not to prove anything, but to encourage others to start looking big picture/little picture to find the Russian active measures to interfere in our electoral process. It’s not just the Democrat bigwig email leaks or Wikileaks that concerns me. It’s the escalating hostile military actions being employed against US Armed Forces by Russia, Iran and Chinacombined with this Russian intelligence overt influence in our election, that makes figuring out the full scope of the Russian big picture imperative. And, thepieces emerging in this Russian strategic big picture make me very uneasy. Putting them together correctly is crucial to America’s national security.
The Syrian “Moderate” Rebel Mirage
A fantasy pervaded the entire argument for earlier intervention in the Syrian civil war. It’s the lie propagated by the Obama administration, Syrian rebel lobbyists, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), John McCain and pundits like Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol.
The argument centered on this belief in arming the mythical “moderate” Syrian rebels. It’s also a lie, that I hope ends up fully exposed, because the US military ended up maligned and badly used in this shady Obama “narrative”. The Obama administration began arming so-called Syrian “moderates” in this civil war, early in the conflict. The stories permeate about Libyan weapons being shipped from Libya via Turkey, into Syria.
The “arm Syrian moderates” crowd never talks about who would take charge of Syria, if this plan had been implemented – hint, there are no real “moderates” amongst the rebels, they radicalized early as US vetted intelligence knew early on in the Syrian conflict. Here’s a McClatchyDC link from 2015 on that issue:
“Extensive interviews with Syria policymakers from the Obama administration, some of whom spoke on the record and others who requested anonymity so as to freely describe the administration’s behind-the-scenes debates, reveal that the Obama administration was warned early on that al Qaida-linked fighters were gaining prominence within the anti-Assad struggle.
Senior officials chose to look the other way, however, and flog a misleading narrative of a viable moderate force. Today, the same extremists have seized wide swaths of Syria and Iraq, uprooting millions of people, threatening the stability of U.S. regional allies, and sucking the United States into another open-ended conflict in the Middle East.
The Syrian rebellion began in March 2011 as part of a wave of mostly peaceful Arab protests against autocratic regimes that had quickly toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Within months, however, it was clear that State Department pleas for Syrian opposition activists to remain nonviolent weren’t working in the face of the regime’s increasingly brutal crackdown on demonstrators.
It didn’t take long for militant Islamists to join the fight, justifying their participation with literalist interpretations of religious scripture about fighting oppressors. That noble-sounding rally for jihad had a magnet-like draw for disaffected young men and women from across the Muslim world.
By that November, just eight months into the rebellion and only two months after President Barack Obama had called for Assad to step aside, a memo from senior policymakers to then-National Security Adviser Tom Donilon warned “that this thing was becoming jihadized,” as one former top official summarized it. The response?
“There was never any indication that the memo was read,” the former official said.
Two aides to Donilon, who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said he was unavailable for comment.
The rebel power shift was even sharper the next year. Extremist forces were increasingly active, and the outline of what would become the Islamic State was taking shape.”(my highlight)
I suspect the biggest purveyor of this Syrian “moderate” myth is the ISW and FOX News rolls out General Keane to keep selling that.
Going back
Here’s a timeline with some links that explain the Obama administration’s arming and training of Syrian rebels (interfering in fueling a civil war in Syria – arming NOT “freedom-fighters, but Islamists of varying degrees of radicalization):
The heavy arms include mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles, which are integral to countering Bashar Al-Assad’s bombing campaign.
Many have suspected that the US was already involved in sending heavy arms.
The administration has said that the previously hidden CIA operation in Benghazi involved finding, repurchasing and destroying heavy weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, but in October we reported evidence indicating that U.S. agents — particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens — were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.
There have been several possible SA-7 spottings in Syria dating as far back as early summer 2012, and there are indications that at least some of Gaddafi’s 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles were shipped before now.” (my highlight)
“WASHINGTON — A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.
The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.
The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.
The clandestine intelligence-gathering effort is the most detailed known instance of the limited American support for the military campaign against the Syrian government. It is also part of Washington’s attempt to increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has recently escalated his government’s deadly crackdown on civilians and the militias battling his rule. With Russia blocking more aggressive steps against the Assad government, the United States and its allies have instead turned to diplomacy and aiding allied efforts to arm the rebels to force Mr. Assad from power.” (my highlight)
September 2012: Elizabeth OBagy published a report at the Institute for the Study of War – Jihad in Syria
May, 2013: John McCain went on his secret fact-finding trip to Syria with the SETF and Elizabeth O’Bagy as his guides.:
“Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) met with rebel leaders in Syria on Monday, The Daily Beast reported, making the senator the highest ranking U.S. official to visit the country since conflict broke out over two years ago.
CNN and Politico confirmed the visit with McCain’s office.
While in the country, McCain met with the Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council leader Gen. Salem Idris.”
O’Bagy was also moonlighting as the political director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Syrian Free Army lobbying group. She and that SETF escorted McCain on a “secret” fact-finding trip, where later photos of McCain emerged, which were claimed to be McCain with Syrian “moderates”, but whom other experts have identified as Islamist terrorists. The president of that SETF was reported to be connected to Palestinian terrorists.
September 2013: The drumbeat for more US intervention in Syria escalates, but then O’Bagy is exposed as a liar, more questions emerge about exactly who we are arming in Syria and Obama waffles. John McCain hires O’Bagy, right after the ISW fired her for lying about her doctorate.
September 11, 2013: The ISW canned O’Bagy for lying on her resumé, but that was after everyone from Secretary of State, John, Kerry, Senator McCain, everyone in the freakin’ media, to include the Wall Street Journal, accepted Elizabeth O’Bagy without any vetting of her credentials:
“The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-ed piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying about having a Ph.D., the group announced on Wednesday.
“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”
Story Continued Below
O’Bagy told POLITICO in an interview Monday that she had submitted and defended her dissertation and was waiting for Georgetown University to confer her degree. O’Bagy said she was in a dual master’s and doctorate program at Georgetown.
Kimberly Kagan, who founded the ISW in 2007, said in an interview that while she was “deeply saddened” by the situation, she stands by O’Bagy’s work on Syria.
( POLITICO reports – Obama’s Syria address: special coverage)
”Everything I’ve looked at is rock solid,” Kagan told POLITICO. “Every thread that we have pulled upon has been verified through multiple sources.”
Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, told POLITICO in a statement that “we were not aware of Elizabeth O’Bagy’s academic claims or credentials when we published her Aug. 31 op-ed, and the op-ed made no reference to them.”
“We also were not aware of her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, and we published a clarification when we learned of it,” Gigot said. “We are investigating the contents of her op-ed to the best of our ability, but to date we have seen no evidence to suggest any information in the piece was false.” (my highlight)
September 19, 2013: President Obama signed a bill to “arm and train Syrian” rebels, but said little publicly
“President Obama on Friday signed legislation that gives the U.S. approval to arm and train Syrian rebels in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS, or ISIL).
The approval was part of a larger bill that funds the government through Dec. 11. It was approved with bipartisan support in the Senate on Thursday and in the House on Tuesday.
While Mr. Obama did not comment on the legislation when he signed it Friday afternoon, he did mention the fight against ISIS earlier in the day, at the Democratic National Committee’s annual Women’s Leadership Forum.”
September 27, 2013: McCain immediately hired Elizabeth O’Bagy and she still is on his staff. I’ve wondered if she ever underwent a security background check or if strings were pulled and that was waived for her:
“Sen. John McCain has hired Elizabeth O’Bagy, the Syria analyst in Washington who was fired for padding her credentials, The Cable has learned. She begins work Monday as a legislative assistant in McCain’s office.
O’Bagy was a young but well-respected advisor at the Institute for the Study of War and had emerged quickly as an important voice among those arguing in favor of intervention in Syria. McCain and others had cited her work publicly before her nascent reputation collapsed when it was discovered that her claims to having a combined master’s/Ph.D. were false and that in fact she had not yet defended her thesis.”
January 9, 2014: The Obama administration was considering resumption of arming Syrian rebels, after ISIS had reportedly raided Free SyrianArmy warehouses that contained US -provided weapons:
“WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is considering the resumption of nonlethal military aid to Syria’s moderate opposition, senior administration officials said on Thursday, even if some of it ends up going to the Islamist groups that are allied with the moderates.
The United States suspended the shipments last month after warehouses of equipment were seized by the Islamic Front, a coalition of Islamist fighters that broke with the American-backed Free Syrian Army and has become an increasingly vital force in the nearly three-year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
But as a result of the rapidly shifting alliances within Syria’s fractured opposition, some of the Islamists fought alongside the Free Syrian Army in a battle against a major rebel group affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
That has eased American qualms about resuming the aid, the officials said.”
The ISW and McCain, plus Obama’s friends from the Muslim Brotherhood/Palestinian terror network, kept pushing for the US to aid the Syrian “moderate” rebels.
“The U.S. is providing more arms and training to the moderate rebels in Syria, under a growing secret program run by the CIA in Jordan. Sources tell NPR that secret program could be supplemented by a more public effort in the coming months involving American military trainers.
The change in strategy comes as the White House sees Syrian leader Bashar Assad growing in strength, and continuing to strike rebel strongholds.
Another factor: Russian leaders appear unwilling to help end the three-year-old civil war and are continuing to provide weapons to Assad. Finally, al-Qaida fighters and their allies are expanding in Syria, a development that some believe could threaten the U.S. homeland.”
September 2014: President Obama expanded from CIA arming and training Syrian “moderates” to dragging the US military into this fiasco of arming Islamist nutjobs. Here’s how the vetting Syrian “moderates” went – from Patrick Poole at PJ Media:
“As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and as bipartisan leadership in Congress pushes to approve as much as $4 billion to arm Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State.
This confirms PJ Media’s reporting last week about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups.
On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border.
“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade.“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal.
“Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now inQalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.”
Poole continues:
“But the Free Syrian Army is not the only U.S.-armed and trained “rebel” force in Syria that the Obama administration is having serious trouble keeping in the “vetted moderate” column.
Earlier this week I reported on Harakat al-Hazm, which was the first of the “vetted moderates” to receive U.S. anti-tank weaponry earlier this year. Harakat al-Hazm isreportedly a front for the Muslim Brotherhood as well as Turkey and Qatar, its Islamist state sponsors.
An L.A. Timesarticle was published this past Sunday from the battle lines in Syria. The reporter recounted a discussion with two Harakat al-Hazm fighters who admitted, “But Nusra doesn’t fight us, we actually fight alongside them. We like Nusra.””
The Obama Syrian debacle continued through 2015 and in the news, you could follow reports of various ME leaders going to Moscow to talk to Putin, as Putin planned his own Syrian intervention, while Obama kept floundering arming Islamist terrorists (yes, I believe he was arming Islamic radicals in Syria FROM the beginning).
September 2015: Congress dragged the US Army general, Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, before Congress to berate Austin about the failure to vet and train more Syrian moderates. Austin reported only a handful of “moderates” were vetted and trained. Instead of getting a clue, that there aren’t any “moderates” left in this brutal civil war in Syria, where both sides have used chemical weapons, John McCain used the opportunity to grandstand and insult the general and the US military. McCain said”
“Highly critical of Austin and Wormuth’s presentation, Committee chairman Sen. John McCain(R-Arizona) said that in his thirty years onn the committee “I have never heard testimony like this. … Never.”
“I have never seen a hearing that is as divorced from the reality of every outside expert and what you are saying,” McCain told Austin.”
October 2015: When the Russians started bombing in Syria last year, I noted 3 ISW maps, 2 used on FOX broadcasts and one on CNN’s website, which identified the area with the largest Russian strike group north of Hama, identified in the map legend as Syrian rebel-controlled, ISIS-controlled, and Jubhat al Nusra-controlled. Three maps at the same time, one area in Syria, and the Obama narrative was the Russians aren’t attacking ISIL, they are targeting CIA-backed rebels:
“When Russia acted in Syria the ISW provided maps to FOX news and CNN – where the maps differed, the WH narrative and military analysis by the FOX military analysts Gen Jack Keane (also in the board of ISW) and LTC Shaffer did not match the details on the map:
Gen.Keane pushed for arming the illusive “Syrian moderates” and yet the “narrative” at the time the Russians moved in Syria, the neocon big voices were screaming about the Russians and claiming they were targeting US-backed “moderate” Syrian rebels. The heaviest shot group of attacks on these maps was north of Hama, which these ISW map legends indicate was controlled by Jubhat al Nusra, Syrian rebels or ISIS – 3 maps from the ISW – three different takes on the strikes the Obama narrative and the ISW were ranting were the Russians targeting “CIA trained US Syrian “moderate” rebels. The media and punditry “experts” all went with the “narrative”.”
When I thought about these maps, something is wrong that everyone from the White House on down relies on the Kagan crowd, the Institute for the Study of War and listens to John McCain bloviate about Syria. McCain had access to US vetted intelligence, but he relied on O’Bagy and the ISW, run by Kimberly Kagan, Dick Cheney and his daughter, and General Jack Keane. No one dares question their “expertise”. These maps, all from the ISW, indicate THREE separate ISW takes on who was controlling the area in Syria where the heaviest air strikes occurred in October 2015. The Obama White House and McCain railed about the Russians attacking CIA-backed rebels. So, according to these ISW maps, just who were the CIA-backed rebels??? Why does the media trust the ISW maps? Does the US government have maps that are reliable?
Even today, McCain, General Keane and mouthpieces all over the media keep talking about how the US should have intervened earlier arming Syrian “moderate” rebels, but that is a TOTAL lie – there never were “moderates”, they were Islamist-backed and armed rebels all along, with the Palestinian terror network playing a central role. The president of the Syrian Emergency Task Force had Palestinian terror connections, the Muslim Brotherhood has always been a funder of Palestinian terror, and the Obama administration, the ISW and John McCain have lied to the American people since 2011, when out of the Libyan debacle, the US started funneling arms from Libya to Syria.
This post has run longer than I intended, so in my next post, I’m going to go through the Trump-Russian connections, more McCain questions, and how it all ties in with this Syria mess too. It’s important,because Putin saw his chance to expand his sphere of influence in the Mid-East and he has masterfully set-up one propaganda embarrassment after another for the US, with the crucial aid of Iran. Putin, through Iran has led Obama and Kerry around like hapless dupes, every step of the way in this Iran deal.
President Obama and John Kerry began paying Iran to release hostages.
The most embarrassing incident, again, one where the US military took the blow, made to look like weak, ineffectual idiots occurred in January 2016: America on its knees (LB blog post January 13, 2016):
President Obama delivered a rambling, disjointed final State of the Union address last night. He warbled on about American values, bridging partisan divides, and more hopey changey blather, but he did not mention an international incident with Iran taking custody of 2 US Navy ships and detaining 10 US sailors.
Today, Secretary of State, John Kerry, bragged about kowtowing to Iranian officials and unbelievably he bragged about his smart diplomacy, where he lauds his handling this situation peacefully. He actually thanked Iran for releasing our sailors.
If there are any people left in the Pentagon who aren’t political hacks, they assuredly must be furious about this administration bowing to Iran. What really happened was not brilliant diplomacy, but a complete submission of the US to Iranian muscle-flexing. The Obama administration has failed to respond to escalating provocations, emboldening Iran to engage in this latest stunt, knowing full well that the Obama administration would not respond forcefully. Thanks to these clueless, wimpy, leftist nitwits in this administration, video of these American sailors, on their knees in submission, will now be broadcast all over the Mid-East. So, the message Secretary Kerry is not brilliant diplomacy, it’s America’s military on its knees.
In the real world, far away from the neutered Obama administration, weakness is a potent provocation. Safe to state – neither smart nor powerful!
Next post will be the Russian connection in our 2016 election
One of my favorite books, which I keep on my table next to my recliner. The simple velvet ribbon bookmark with beads, is one of my quick projects.
Partisanship can, not only dull our conscience, it can throw our moral compass completely off-course, to the point that we become lost in a swirl of raging waves of overblown rhetoric, mindless lobbing of partisan invective, and end up as furtive enemies waging an escalating American unCivil War of Words. Certainly, the casualties aren’t the thousands of dead bodies that pile up in real war, but nonetheless this war comes at a great cost and is not just harmless “politics as usual” or without casualties. This unAmerican Civil War of Words is killing not only our American character, it’s killing our American republic.
Top photo: Junk on top of my craft cabinet. Bottom photo: Several candlewicking pattern leaflets.
America really began as a place where Europe’s religious malcontents, adventurers, assorted riffraff and yes, the bold and daring, decided to strike out and build their own future. That’s really who we are. We are a people, who can not only pull up our roots and plant them in a strange new land, we are a people who will learn to adapt and thrive, despite hardships. Above is a photo of the top of my craft cabinet. On the right is a container filled with ribbon scraps. The bottom photos is of pattern leaflets for candlewicking.
Candlewicking is an unique American form of needlework invented by American pioneer women, who moved West in the 1800s. Money and sewing supplies were scarce, so in the usual American fashion, industrious and creative American women began using candle wicks, which were made of braided cotton, to create a new form of embroidery, with open designs, using a colonial knot, which is similar to a French knot. Candle wicks were readily available and cheap, but the open designs allowed covering a larger space with embroidery, with less stitching.
American women weren’t just along for the ride, when they came to America, they were partners in the adventure. They helped build America too, but they also learned to create, innovate, repurpose, conserve, and strive to provide the best they could for their families.
America is a land where we are FREE to dream, as big or as little, as we choose. The photo above is a small stack of some of my dreams for future quilting projects. I use little post-it notes to mark pages in magazines and craft books all the time, to bookmark projects for the future. That Sunbonnet Sue Quilt Special is from 1986 – someday when my patience for applique peaks, I’d like to use ideas from this applique masterpiece and design my own unique Sunbonnet Sue masterpiece.
Being able to keep dreaming is part of our American spirit too.
Sunbonnet Sue is an American original, just like candlewicking. And for those who don’t think needlewomen and quilters can organize, rebel, and express themselves eloquently here’s how Sunbonnet Sue became a beloved quilt motif and how some quilters in the 1980s revolted:
“People fell in love with Sue’s sweet temperament, her ever-present bonnet, and the wholesome and good-natured vignettes of her everyday life. Soon Sue was found on postcards, greeting cards, and even became a design element on plates and dishes.
Her chunky features proved to be enticing for hand quilters and stitchers, and so Sue became preserved for all eternity in a quilt block. In the early 1900s she appeared in the Ladies Home Journal and Woman’s World magazine as well as countless newspapers and pattern magazines. During the Great Depression, Sue surged to popularity, as folks yearned for brighter and sunnier days.
Sunbonnet Sue’s popularity took a hit in the ’70s and ’80s as some quilters dared to shout, “Not all of us love Sunbonnet Sue!” A group of quilters in Kansas, known as the Seamsters Local #500, worked on a controversial quilt that came to be called, “The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue.” The current events and social unrest of the time are depicted in the blocks of that quilt.
Sue is pictured at Jonestown, Three-Mile Island, eaten by Jaws, tied to train tracks, struck by lightning – her death is represented over and over again in applique quilt blocks. The original quilt is now in a museum at Michigan State University.”
Note: a picture of The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue quilt is at the link above.
The lower photo above is a plastic container of bookmarks, made from leftover scrapbook paper, stickers and yes, I use ribbon from that container of ribbon scraps, as a way to use little scraps of ribbon, rather than throw them away. I often put several of these bookmarks in cards for friends, in books that I’m giving as gifts or just hand some to my friends and family. Often, I go in my sewing room and sit at my little craft table and make two or three bookmarks in 10 or 15 minutes, while I am thinking about blog posts to write, but I also experiment with other craft junk and styles of bookmarks, braided ribbon ones, simple ribbon ones, or even the corner bookmarks, which you can see in the photo below:
My friend, Marrietta, is an expert quilter and she does perfectly mitered corners on all her quilt bindings. She also doesn’t throw away small scraps of fabric. Many years ago she lived here, but then she and her husband moved to Arizona. Instead of working on sewing and craft projects together like we used to, we now stay in touch and share photos of our projects and inspirations on facebook. She makes all sorts of projects with small fabric scraps, but while my quick relaxation project is bookmarks, her thing is making quilted potholders.
Marrietta also taught me how to be a more productive crafter and sewer. She doesn’t make just one thing at a time. Everything is an assembly line process with her, where you break the project into steps and make four of five at a time. One time in the mid-90s, she bought these doll heads and hands, plus angel wings on sale somewhere. She had an idea for angels, so we combined our supplies, since I had a lot of ruffled lace. We used clear plastic cones, then improvised more cones from some thick acetate-type stuff, which I pillaged from my husband’s stuff in the garage. Hot glue and a couple hours and we made about a dozen of those angels. I kept one, which is in the photo below:
American women took quilting in all sorts of new directions from the staid Old World and American quilting today is still alive and thriving, in fact, American quilters share, teach, and inspire each other in online forums, with videos and blogs. Below is a picture of just a few of the potholders Marrietta has sent me over the years. The Hawaiian shirt potholder, in the center, was made with Hawaiian print fabric scraps, that a friend of hers from Hawaii mailed her
.
I can trace my father’s family tree back to pre-Revolutionary War Pennsylvania, where they arrived in Philadelphia from Germany and settled in the wilds of northeast Pennsylvania. My father’s generation spoke PA Dutch at home, but very few of my relatives still speak PA Dutch. While many Americans are proud of their ethnic roots, from whence their ancestors came, the more important thing to be proud of is being an American.
America is all about believing, that within every individual, lies great potential, no matter the color of your skin, your religion, your ethnic background, whether your’re a man or a woman – in America all things ARE possible. It is the aspirations of people for millennia to be FREE, played out, writ large in our great nation.
Watching this descent into 2016 Election Hell, isn’t just a national embarrassment, it’s the culmination of decades of social and governmental decay. The Clintons ushered in a new era of politics in America, a brand of not just ruthless partisanship, but actual information warfare waged on the national media battlefield. It’s a vile brew of corrupt fundraising, vile character assassinations, vile mass media messaging manipulation, and vile mass media collusion to sell their messaging, all sold with endless manufactured polling data.
George W. Bush barely managed to win in 2000. Barack Obama took the Clinton information warfare to a more ruthless level and due to his endless racial politics, he has avoided being held accountable for the widespread corruption within his administration. The minute you criticize him, his Alinskyite foot soldiers attack with charges of racism. Every area of the executive branch is thoroughly corrupt, even the Defense Department, where narratives substitute for facts or the truth.
Hillary Clinton and her aides, who grossly and deliberately jeopardized national security and blatantly obstructed justice, were allowed to escape any accountability, because prosecuting them would expose the widespread mishandling of sensitive information by President Obama and his White House staff. Hillary Clinton represents total disdain for the rule of law in America.
Donald Trump seems intent on playing gutter politics, like the Clinton machine, but he is also banking on overt Russian intelligence interference in our electoral process, especially with the email leaks. Donald Trump represents the very worst in America celebrity cult worship.
This post began with a photo on one of my favorite books – (“War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars”, Andrew Carroll). I keep a letter by General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the most famous American military leader in World War I, bookmarked. General Pershing suffered great personal loss, but he still gave his full devotion to serving America. His heartfelt letter to his young son, Warren, speaks to the American spirit we need to rekindle, to get our moral compass pointing toward a stronger, united American future:
“I want you to come so that you yourself can see something of the army and see something of France. I want you to know while you are still a boy something of the fine patriotism that inspires the American soldiers who are fighting over here for the cause of liberty. They are fighting as you know against Germany and her Allies to prevent the rulers of Germany from seizing territory that does not belong to them and from extending their rule over the people of other governments who do not wish to be ruled by Germany. I might add that in order to do this the German army, under orders from the Ruler of Germany, has committed most serious crimes, and for that also we are fighting in order to punish them.
I want you to see some of the battlefields of France with me, over which the American soldiers have fought in carrying out the great purpose of our people. It will enable you to realize later in life just what sacrifice means and just what degree of sacrifice our army is called upon to make and which they have made and are making bravely and courageously.”
He promised his young son a trip to France to see the battlefields and in words meant for his son only, General Pershing sums up the larger purpose, simple, poignant and meant to be private, a father trying to teach his son what we hold dear. He kept his promise to his son and here’s a photo of young Warren Pershing with his father in France.
General Pershing spoke of selfless sacrifice. His entire life was a testament to serving America first, which is a far, far cry from self-serving Donald Trump’s America First or Hillary’s endless opining of being America’s #1 victim of the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”. We need leaders who are personally willing to serve America first
While the mainstream media remains immersed in this stupid Clinton/Trump Twitter finger-poinitng on “he started it”/”no she started it”, in regards to the President Obama birther issue, and we’re still titillated by General Colin Powell’s “#DickingBimbos, calling it like he sees it” personal emails leak, here’s what every American, especially our leaders need to be aware of and alarmed about. –
Russian active measures
Back in January 2013, I wrote a blog post, “Putin By A Mile”, where I mention a debate with the older of my two sons:
“Later one of my sons brought up a continuing discussion we’ve had for a long while now and finally I think he sees my point of view. When I first mentioned to him that if it came to picking Vladimir Putin vs Barack Obama for a hypothetical geopolitical competition , I’d pick Putin in a heartbeat. When this conversation began a year or so ago, my son would list off all the “evils” that are Putin, such as the alleged polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko (here) and his KGB past. The following is my reasoning for picking Putin.”
I went on to say:
“Here are some of the things I considered. This all goes back to something I mentioned in a previous post that I think knowing people always trumps knowing “about” people. Years ago, I read a book that I had signed out from our local library that was Putin’s first lengthy interview with a western reporter. His answers provided clues to how he thinks about being a leader of his country and what his hopes and aspirations are for Russia”
And more of the same naive claptrap:
“While Putin’s actions do remain diametrically opposed to ours and most assuredly will produce future friction points, his actions make perfect strategic sense from the Russian viewpoint. He aggressively has secured energy resources and engaged the US in nuclear arms wrangling where he certainly pushed and received the things that are advantageous to Russia.
Then we have Barack Obama where he refused to sign the Keystone Pipeline deal, he gave away too much in the nuclear arms dealing and he and Madame Secretary have made one after another terrible missteps, stabbing our allies in the back, while bowing and scraping to our adversaries. He’s put us on the path to not only universal healthcare, but to being a universal third-rate bit player on the world stage. If I were assessing how the strategic plane looks from others’ vantage points, I would wonder, “those stupid Americans, they don’t even have the national will to promote their own interests”. And truly, any administration that utters a phrase like,”leading from behind” is worthy of only supreme contempt, in my opinion.
The ill-mannered TV reality urchin, Honey boo boo can keep Barack Obama, but as for me I’d pick Putin by a mile.”
Tonight my son was talking to me about Putin again and he knew from these many discussions over the years, that I had naive blinders on when it came to Putin, believing that the man who gave that first interview to a Western reporter, was the same man America is dealing with today. I wasn’t seeing Putin as the very serious threat he is. My son was right all along, as he’s been warning me, “Vladimir Putin is a very bad man!”… and I kept saying naive stuff, like, “we should try to see the world from his eyes” and “at least he is a strong leader, looking out for Russian national interests”.
My son said, “Putin’s playing Alexander Dugin’s “Foundations of Geopolitics” perfectly.”
I had heard mention of this book, but didn’t really take it seriously. My son told me he read it in Russian, while at college, and he hadn’t seen any English translation available online. He told me about how a lot of hardline Russian nationalism was even apparent in Russia, 11 years ago, when he did a study abroad in Russia one summer.
I’ve been awakened in the past year to Russian actions dominating the world geopolitical sphere and usurping American influence around the world.
Of course, President Obama’s totally feckless and clueless foreign policy played right into the hands of all of America’s adversaries.
The book, “Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia”, written by Alexander Dugin and co-authored by General Nikolai Klokotov, in 1997, lays out an empire-building blueprint for Russia. Wikipedia lays out a content listing of this book , which will give you an idea of Dugin’s Russian strategy. Wikipedia also states:
“Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, head of the International Department of theRussian Ministry of Defence, apparently advised in the project.[1] Klokotov stated that in the future the book would “serve as a mighty ideological foundation for preparing a new military command.””
Here’s another link with the table of contents only (I have not located an English translation of the book itself).
“Few books published in Russia during the post-communist period have exerted such an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites as Aleksandr Dugin’s 1997 neo-fascist treatise Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii(Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geo-political Future of Russia). The impact of this intended “Eurasianist” textbook on key Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and the Putin periods.
Five years before President George W. Bush announced his “axis of evil,” Dugin had introduced three key neo-Eurasian axes: Moscow-Berlin, Moscow-Tokyo, and Moscow-Tehran. The basic principle underlying these three axes was said to be “a common enemy,” by which he meant the United States”
Dunlop continues further in the article on one of those axes:
“The most ambitious and complex part of Dugin’s program concerns the South, where the focal point is a Moscow-Tehran axis. “The idea of a continental Russia-Islamic alliance,” he writes, “lies at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy. . . . This alliance is based on the traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilizations.” As the result of a broad Grand Alliance to be concluded with Iran, Russia-Eurasia will eventually enjoy realizing a centuries-old Russian dream of reaching the “warm seas” of the Indian Ocean. Russia is to enjoy “geopolitical access—in the first place, naval bases—on the Iranian shores.”
As the result of such an alliance, Dugin argues, Russia-Eurasia should be prepared to divide up the imperial spoils with “the Islamic Empire [of Iran] to the south.” Which part of the South should come under Russia? “What is the Russian South?” Dugin asks at one point in his book. He answers that it includes “the Caucasus [all of it],” “the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian,” “Central Asia [that is, all of the former Soviet republics],” plus Mongolia. Even these regions, he adds, should be seen “as zones of further geopolitical expansion to the south and not as ‘eternal borders of Russia.’” Turkey is seen as being almost as dangerous to Russia-Eurasia as are the United States and China. Turkish minorities must be provoked into rebellion, and there is a need, he stresses, to create “geopolitical shocks” within Turkey.”
“The book declares that “the battle for the world rule of [ethnic] Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution.” The Eurasian Empire will be constructed “on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.”[1]
Military operations play relatively little role. The textbook believes in a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services. The operations should be assisted by a tough, hard-headed utilization of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resources to bully and pressure other countries.[1]”
Further in the Wikipedia entry:
“The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: “the main ‘scapegoat’ will be precisely the U.S.”
In the United States:
Russia should use its special forces within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism. For instance, provoke “Afro-American racists”. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.”[1]”
So, I admit, that I, like many Americans (especially Donald Trump), have been very naive about Putin, because this Moscow/Tehran axis is already threatening American forces. AND these email leaks sure seem like CYBER WARFARE, to undermine Americans’ faith in our electoral process. All those blog posts of mine, about how the Clinton SPIN and the Obama NARRATIVES are part of an INFORMATION WARFARE strategy and antithetical to American free speech principles, well, I think I am right about that and I also think there’s a great deal of Russian influence in that information warfare.
Here again, perhaps, my son has a better sense of the problem. He said we might not find all sorts of active agents or active willing accomplices working for the Russians. He said the entire Democratic Party and liberals, with their constant anti-Americanism, are ready-made USEFUL IDIOTS. He said Americans, due to celebrity cult worship and failure to study history, are a ready-made army of USEFUL IDIOTS. Even the Russian interference in our election has been turned into a partisan debate, making it difficult to cut through these partisan blinders and get Americans to wake-up and see the threats beyond America.
In high school, I had a German/Russian teacher, who was a retired US Army translator. He actually helped fuel my interest in military strategy, with his love of WWII Army war footage, where he seemed to have the Army vault at his disposal. He would explain all sorts of historical stuff and he knew a lot about Nazi propaganda. I took 4 years of German and 2 of Russian (remember very little of either), but I remember in my Russian class, which consisted of me and a handful of boys, we decided to order these pins to wear, with Russian phrases in Cyrillic. I don’t know what happened to those pins, but the one pin, I sure think fits this election better than Hillary’s “Stronger Together” or Trump’s “Make America Great Again”.
The pin said: Русские идут (The Russians Are Coming)
libertybelle diaries 