Category Archives: Politics

July 11, 2013 · 12:01 am

Beyond the long arm of the law

When the Edward Snowden scandal broke I wrote a rather mealy-mouthed take on his theft of national secrets he was entrusted to safeguard.  Barack Obama and Edward Snowden might seem very different, but they’re two very similar men when it comes to their core characters.  Barack Obama  played his race for all its worth to end up attending some of America’s most prestigious universities and I have read speculations that he used his Kenyan ancestry to play games to receive consideration as a “foreign” student, akin to Elizabeth Warren dishonestly latching onto her Native American heritage to get special consideration in her teaching career.  He specializes in latching onto people who can advance his political aspirations and he ditches people just as adroitly once they have stopped being useful to him. Snowden appears to have honed his computer skills and used them to advance way beyond what his educational achievements would warrant and he seems to know how to latch onto the right people to advance his objectives too.  Snowden reached a level of political maneuvering way beyond his capabilities and thus we can see his glaring inadequacies in his silly rants about countries that refuse to give him asylum and while his communist handlers puffed up his importance to gain access to the information, they now want him to quietly disappear into the annals of duped American idiots.  Sadly, President Obama doesn’t know much more about the world or foreign policy than Edward Snowden and woe be it for us, he doesn’t realize that America’s adversaries aren’t done using him and playing him for a fool too.    It’s pretty pitiful to watch Putin orchestrate this Snowden situation and milk it for all its worth to make President Obama look like a helpless dupe.  And this is the man America chose to lead – the one who had a staffer thinking it was clever to say the President leads from behind.   I can assure you that no one working for Valdimir Putin would ever have thought to suggest such a milktoast sentiment as “leading from behind”.  I can picture Vladimir Putin,  sitting with his feet propped up, laughing big belly laughs as he reads American political news and reads the conflicted, disjointed, disorganized mess that passes for American foreign policy coming from this White House. This President really thinks it makes America look stronger to get all gung-ho to put women at the front in combat, while he simultaneously talks about slashing our military??? And I would imagine the President blabbering on about “Global Zero” and now the “zero option” for Afghanistan has most of  America’s adversaries laughing at us, thinking, “here he goes again, null, nada, nothing as usual”.

Now, I’ve spent most of my life baking cookies, taking care of kids, doing needlework, and  oh yeah, reading a lot about military history and military strategy, but here is what I would do. I would say hell no to women in infantry units and hell no to cutting our nuclear arsenal too.  I would say hell no to negotiating with the Taliban too.  And I sure would weed out every single one of President Obama’s Islamist sympathizers from our military and we would start naming our enemies and our adversaries, not hiding behind touchy-feely political correctness.  I would talk to other world leaders like adults and point out areas where we might be able to deal and I sure would talk about points of contention.  The worst mistake you can ever make as a parent is the same one a world leader should avoid – don’t make threats you don’t plan to follow through on.  If you tell your child, “Stop that or I will beat your butt!” and then your child continues to do that over and over and over again and all you do is repeat the same threat, well, even small children realize your threats ring pretty hollow.  The same goes for a President blabbering about “red lines” and telling Iran, “stop developing nuclear weapons or I’ll, ummmmmm, I’m not sure what I’ll do, just believe me I will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons!”  Pretty pathetic, right?     Here’s the difference between me and President Obama, I don’t say it unless I mean it.  And I do love reading about  military strategy, foreign affairs, military intelligence (both ours and lots of other folks).   Now I never intend to ever run for any political office, so you’re all safe from my strident, assertive American posture in the world, but really I wonder why Americans elect and fawn over so many people with weak characters.  The single most important trait our leaders should posses is a strong, honest character.   Failing that we end up with a government run amok, where respect for the rights of the people that should be of the utmost concern at all times, ends up trampled and discounted, in an ever widening cesspit of corruption.

Here’s where we end up when we bestow grave responsibilities and entrust unworthy people with power that they lack the character to wield fairly or wisely. The widespread corruption within the Obama administration, where privacy rights were violated cavalierly demonstrates that political  concerns matter most to this President, first, last, always.  His one claim to fame on leading – the bin Laden raid,  shows that puffing up Obama’s image mattered most and the egregious grandstanding by top administration officials after the Bin Laden raid led to the blowback attack by Taliban insurgents three months later that left 30 American warriors dead from their helicopter being shot out of the sky (here).  Yes, this President and his present-day CIA director didn’t have the sense to keep their mouths shut after the Bin Laden raid and named Seal Team 6 and wanted to regale the world with a minute by minute account of the raid, releasing way too much sensitive information on Seal Team 6.  In fact, everyone in this administration wanted to blab to the press about the Bin laden raid and I remember being struck by the insanity from the minute the news broke.  The Pentagon should have handled the release of any operational information and ALL questions regarding the raid should have been referred back to the Pentagon, where military professionals could control and make the decisions on what information could be released and what information needed to be safeguarded to protect our special force operators and their methods.   So, when this Snowden scandal hit, I found this administration’s lamentations about national security just a tad disingenuous.

This president isn’t fit to be a commander of any sort, especially not the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.  This president doesn’t understand any military issues, except the most superficial, divisive issues that  get used by left-wing activists to transform, remold, dismantle our military as the most highly trained fighting force in the world.  He truly thinks some big focus on “gay rights” will create a stronger military???  How about he study some real military issues and maybe read some real military history.  He has no respect for the US military and how people can conveniently forget that this man accused US servicemembers of being terrorists while he was a US senator leaves me baffled.  The truth is he never developed the character traits required of being a good military leader as a teenager getting high with this Choom Gang (ABC story here) or from his mentoring by his dear Uncle Frank Marshall Davis, an avowed communist.  He has immersed himself in far left grievance politics his entire life and has never done a single thing  that required personal sacrifice.  He doesn’t understand national security issues very well either and that is why he operates such a slipshod drone program using John Brennan to decide who lives and who dies as they secretly compile their kill lists and execute even American citizens with no oversight.

From just the things President Obama bragged about in his own autobiography, well, he would not be suitable to receive a security clearance – truly he wouldn’t.  Yet this is the man who is entrusted with enforcing his own “Insider Threat Program” (here), to stop the Edward Snowden types from betraying our country.  We’ve got a man who sees everything through his own personal political advancement.  He does not care about national security or the military  – he cares about his own big ego and everything that he can control, use, abuse, to advance his big ideas or make himself look good, as he and his staff of amoral political hacks charge recklessly ahead with no thought to the moral high ground or doing what’s right for the country.  This lack of character keeps the scandals churning and surely many more will follow.  Edward Snowden most assuredly damaged our national security a great deal, but then again I wonder if the damage is as great as that inflicted by this inept President and his band of  far-left loons, who waiver, waffle, weasel and wimp out of making tough decisions or following through on much of anything.  So, therein lies why I reacted in such a muffled manner, when I should have realized that just because one person is corrupt that doesn’t absolve another person of violating the law to highlight that corruption.  Sadly, neither one will ever be held to account for their actions, unreachable beyond the long arm of the  law.

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July 9, 2013 · 10:28 pm

The “zero option”

President Obama, in keeping with his big O plans, is reported to be mulling over a “zero option” for Afghanistan post 2014.  His entire presidency will be remembered for it’s big, fat zero ideas, so this idea is to leave zero troops in Afghanistan, assuring that our efforts and sacrifices there were really for naught (hint: that means nothing).  Here’s a USA Today story on this “zero option”.  There’s not even a whiff of a strategy or mention of US interests, it’s merely reacting based on personal animosity toward  Hamid Karzai, which this White House thinks justifies using US troops as a personal tool to get even with Karzai.  Don’t expect any big strategic plans from this crowd.  In Iraq his minions failed to get a status of forces agreement ironed out, leading to a precipitous American military abandonment, so this “zero option” continues the Obama leading from behind motif – nowhere to be found.  We sacrificed thousands of American lives so that President Obama can pave the way for the Taliban to return to power.  Hooray, for American leadership, right…..  I am so embarrassed to have these clueless fools representing our great country.  That often used to say, that while America plays checkers,  the Russians play chess comes to mind, except with this administration checkers seems to be way beyond their strategic-planning capabilities.

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June 30, 2013 · 12:07 pm

The Pretty in Pink American Foreign Policy

Ran across two more pieces on why we need to maintain our nuclear arsenal, so I’m not a lone wolf  howling in the wilderness.  “Obama’s Nuclear-Zero Dream”  (National Review piece here) written by Jack David (Hudson Institute bio here) explains why President Obama’s “nuclear zero” world exists only in fantasy and  he explains the suicidal nature of  the president’s proposals.  Mr. David lays out the history of our nuclear weapons capability and the nuclear disarmament efforts since the advent of the nuclear age clearly and he speaks with the weight of someone who has spent many years studying our nuclear capabilities, both offensive and defensive.  Also worth reading is Mr. David’s 2010 spirited argument against the nuclear-zero voices that keep pushing the United States to unilaterally disarm and rail against maintaining our nuclear capabilities, in a Wall Street Journal piece ( located on the Hudson Institute website), “The Dangerous Fantasy of a Nuclear-Free World” .

David Lawrence posted a short blog piece at the American Thinker website, titled, “Don’t Slash Our Nuclear Weapons” with this perfect President Obama policy description:

“We need peace through strength, not surrender through clichés.”  Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/dont_slash_our_nuclear_weapons.html#ixzz2XhmuK5Eu   Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Granted, many very smart people would like to see a nuclear-free world, just as many people (myself included) would like to see a world where peaceful interactions became the gold standard of international relations.  However, we live in the world as it is, not as we wish it were and our national defense demands facing the tough choices and employing the most careful consideration to maintaining our military might, for not only our own security, but for the security of the free world,  that depends on our strength to keep them safe too.  President Obama immersed himself in left-wing grievance politics in college and throughout his adult life.  He does not know much of anything about history and more glaringly his views on military matters demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of military history.

From rogue jihadi bands of fighters to world leaders around the globe, they smell American weakness emanating from this President and the sycophantic nincompoops he surrounds himself with.  He now has a dole of far-left doves fluttering about him, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice with peacenik quacker, John Kerry, to pontificate out of both sides of his mouth.  He picked the yes-sir, yes-sir, three bags full champion, Chuck Hagel, to turn the military into one big group therapy session, where the focus is on personal sexual relations and  GI Jane’s feminist aspirations.  And to figure out our Mid-East mirages he picked the “gone native” Arabist , John Brennan, who is so enamored of everything Arab and reminds me of the British Lawrence of Arabia crowd, who drew the modern-day Mid-East map, ignoring the shifting sands of ethnic and religious hatred.  They studied the Arab world, they lived among Arabs, they spoke Arabic, but they became tools for Arab interests rather than their own and this is the exact problem with Brennan.

In an ever-increasingly dangerous world, when we should be seriously looking at upgrading our military capabilities, to include keeping our front-line combat units trained and focused on these threats, we’ve got  this clueless bunch wailing about social issues in the military.  We should be vigilantly keeping our nuclear arsenal (both defensive and offensive) upgraded and potent.  This administration’s answer is more politicization within the ranks, rather than giving our military leaders the tools to build a stronger fighting force.  As my friend, Gladius, said, “I learned a long time ago, while still a 2LT, that the best welfare and care of troops is good leadership and good training. We went through a lot of feel-good crap on race relations back in the 70’s. Did no good. Then in the 80’s we went through a lot of feel-good crap about how to deal with women in the military. Did no good. People are people. They respond to good leadership and having a worthwhile mission. These people volunteered. They want to do something meaningful. The couple of hundred folks in the entire 4 million person military (counting Guard and Reserve) are causing all the trouble and causing the entire structure to topple.”  His blunt words speak the plain truth about the situation and he added, “They want good leaders and meaningful work. When I saw weak units, there was racial and sexual tension, poor mission performance and poor performance. When I saw strong units, there was none of that. And that applies whether the budget is bountiful or non-existent. The gutless bastards running the military these days have totally forgotten the basics of soldiering and unit cohesion.”

Amidst the looming gigantic defense budget cuts, this president traveled to the Brandenburg Gate, June 19, 2013, where Reagan threw down the gauntlet to the USSR, to blubber on about a nuclear free world and nuclear arms reductions (full speech here).  He lacks any clue as to how to project American resolve or strength, but he certainly excels at highlighting dangerously provocative weakness.  His “red-line rhetoric” and rose-colored proscriptions on the international stage mixed with his “white flag” waving entourage present a very “pretty in pink” American foreign policy – to include wanting the girls to lead from the front, while the President continues to lead from behind.  What an American image we present to the world……….wimpy, wimpy, wimpy.  I keep hoping we’ll get some national leadership with the strength and determination of a Vladimir Putin, yes, I admire his bold stroke moves to advance Russian interests.  We’ve got President Obama with his Gumby soul – he’ll bend any which way, to include tying our hands behind our back in the face of overt threats.   Just don’t expect him to do more than hide behind the skirts of his top female advisers.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, Gladius Maximus, Military, Politics

June 28, 2013 · 7:53 am

Little scraps worth keeping

On facebook the other day I saw one of those prevalent political signs posted by a “friend”, who is really a friend of  a friend of mine, who is a fantastic quilter.  This “friend” I thought was a quilter too, so I friended her. This “friend” appeared quite animated over the Texas abortion bill, leading to quite a flurry of “pro-choice” postings lambasting the “pro-life” stance.   Now, I have posted conservative comments many times online and in fact, back when I first started using the internet I became a frequent poster to the Excite message boards and someday (not today) I hope to elaborate on just how that experience ended up (bad beyond belief).  Today, however, I want to make a few comments or pose a serious concern I have about people jumping on hot button political issues without a moment’s hesitation.  Being a woman, a mother and a grandmother and growing up in the midst of the feminist movement, I feel justified in offering a few thoughts.  This “friend” posts a relentless stream of liberal and far-left lunatic slogans and I did comment on one about stereotyping conservatives and I posted a comment on a pro-abortion banner, but after a little thought, I decided not to engage in a back and forth and removed my comment.  This “friend” doesn’t want to discuss any political issue anyway and I doubt anything I could say would influence her opinions.  She appears to be locked down tight into the talking points political insanity – the us vs. them mindset.

Whenever the liberal left runs into a brick wall, like in the case of abortion, where advances in medicine lay lie to their central argument of viability of the fetus, that formed the pillar of their argument in the 70s and 80s, they repackage their messaging to deflect from the real issue.  The political slogan that caught my attention proclaimed in loud, large red letters: “WANT ABORTION OUTLAWED?  HOW MANY UNWANTED CHILDREN WILL YOU ADOPT?” and it brought to mind this long-abandoned viability argument.  There’s a complete lapse of logic in this argument this banner proclaims that needs to be addressed.  So, let’s start with the obvious main issue.  What exactly is abortion?  If this banner is to believed outlawing abortion produces “unwanted children”, so it’s saying abortion eliminates “unwanted children”.  Back when the push for legalized abortion gained force in America, the abortion argument centered on this very question of aborting “children”.  The pro-abortion faction pushed their cause by centering their argument on the” when does life begin” question and made the case that a baby wasn’t a baby until it was outside the womb and viable, meaning could sustain life on it’s own.  Medical advancement in the intervening decades pushed that ”viability” argument back into the second trimester of pregnancy and to adjust for this, the pro-abortion activists altered their talking points to a “pro-choice” messaging platform.  Now, if a baby born at let’s say 23 weeks of gestation could survive outside the womb, then that is a viable human life, right?  Of course it is, that’s why the pro-abortion crowd switched all their political dogma to a “pro-choice” message filled with endless repetitions of the phrase, “we want abortion to be legal, safe and rare”, to deflect from the central issue of just what is being aborted.  The science makes it clear that there’s no definitive point when they can declare viability and thus the “human life” question is a hot potato abortion proponents decided to sidestep.  Each pregnancy is different and the viability of each baby varies, which makes it risky business to engage in a scientific debate on viability or to try to set a viability timeline.

The abortion activists  conveniently switched gears and changed their focus to declaring legal abortion a “right” and by convincing young women that this is their “right”  to have sex with whomever they want and that the results are something that other taxpayers must pay for, because of course, it’s wrong to infringe on other people’s “rights”.  If I don’t want my tax dollars used to fund ridding America of “unwanted children”, then I am at fault for these “unwanted children existing, not the man and women/or boy and girl, which ever the case may be, who brought this child into the world???  This banner screams for someone to point out an obvious fact.  A pregnancy results from a man and a woman making a choice, in all but a few rare cases of rape.  Okay, in a tiny percentage of cases we can assume that both parties were responsible sexual partners and used birth control to try and prevent an “unwanted child” from happening.  And in another rare scenario couples face the choice of a child being detected with a serious birth defect or the mother’s life is imperiled by the pregnancy.. This leaves us with a glaring statistic that  in 2009 the abortion rate had decreased, but was 227 per 1,000 live births, so that’s almost a quarter of pregnancies ended in abortion (CDC figures here).  That neatly closes the “rare” argument.  And yes, I am “pro-choice” too, that means you have the right to whatever “choices” you make and you are responsible for the results of your choices, not me.  This is how “responsible”  citizenship works – we must be willing to take responsibility for our choices.

The more interesting moral leap that hit me in this banner is how are people who are opposed to abortion responsible for the sexual choices that other people make?  Here’s the absurdity of the whole “it’s my body and it’s my right” mantra – they’ve got a whining poster girl, Sandra Fluke, who attended prestigious universities, to attain a law degree, and is supposedly one of America’s brightest young women on the horizon.  Yet, she bemoans that the government is responsible for providing her contraception.  One should wonder why this smart young woman and her sexual partner(s), as America’s brightest young people (I am assuming she picks smart sexual partners) must turn to the government to subsidize their sexual activity. No, the pro-life folks are responsible for the “unwanted children” born to pro-choice women, which leaves me wondering, just what personal choices are these pro-choice women and their sexual partners responsible for?

This same “friend” had another blaring banner with an idiotic quote from Texas senator, Wendy Davis, proclaiming, “Lawmakers, either get out of the vagina business or go to medical school!”  Well, yes, I would prefer to only have to worry about my own vagina, thank you very much and by the same token I preferred to take care of my own reproductive choices and my husband and I footed the cost of providing for our four children.   When you are demanding other taxpayers foot the bill for your “rights” and then have the audacity to blame other people for the results of your choices, somewhere along the line there’s a huge gap in that reasoning.  This lack of logic permeates our political landscape on both the left and right, but sometimes the total lunacy strikes when you hear a heartfelt speech like the one Chelsea Clinton delivered lamenting the lack of services that Planned Parenthood provides that her great-grandmother didn’t have access to (story here).  Her great-grandmother was “forced” to give birth to Chelsea’s beloved maternal grandmother.  Chelsea misses how her political indoctrination precludes any logical corollary that if her great-grandmother had opted for an abortion, then she wouldn’t exist today.  She should be thankful her great-grandmother chose to bring her beloved grandmother into this world.  It’s rather sad in a way to see so many politically brainwashed young people, who just jump on the virulent partisan political train and never sit and dissect the rhetoric or think about issues broken down into their essence.  All I can say is that I have never known a pregnant woman who talked about her condition as it being a “fetus” and then as the pregnancy progressed to some imprecise “viable” point declared, “oh, it’s a baby now!’  It’s a baby from the moment you find out about it and that’s really why the deceptive language and subterfuge uses such loud, inflammatory rhetoric to get as many women throwing hissyfits as possible.  Who wants to deal with a lot of high-pitched caterwauling by angry women screaming about their vaginas?’  Not me, I like to keep mine private.

My paternal grandmother ended up pregnant by a young man who had two young women pregnant at the same time.  He married the other young woman and my grandmother gave birth to a truly “unwanted child”, my father.  She married and left my father with her parents – my great-grandparents, who raised my Dad.   My grandmother had only daughters with her husband, but she never wanted anything to do with my father or his children.  My grandmother never once spoke to me in my entire life, even when I was in the same room with her.  Many times my great-grandmother would tell my grandmother, “That’s one of Billy’s girls.” and my grandmother wouldn’t say a word.  My great-grandmother insisted on making it a point to make her daughter aware of my existence and she later would say reassuring things that my father,me and my siblings were her grandchildren and as important as all the rest of her grandchildren.   Despite my grandmother’s rejection,  I sure am thankful she gave birth to my Pop and can’t imagine wishing she had opted for an abortion….. how bizarre is that idea really, wishing that you didn’t exist?   Family situations are like the patchwork quilts my great-grandmother taught me to piece together – made up of varied pieces of scraps in lots of patterns and colors, when looked at individually can seem not worth keeping, but when you add them all together – it creates an amazing end product.  I learned from my great-grandmother, who loved my father probably more than she loved all of her nine children, that no matter how ugly or worthless you think a scrap of fabric is, don’t discard it.  Later on, those scraps might be just what’s needed in another quilt to create a beautiful design.  People are like that too – even the ones who start out as unwanted scraps might mean the whole world to other people later on.  In my book, everyone should be a keeper.

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June 20, 2013 · 11:20 am

Paving the path to Peace

Here’s a quick news story, “Egypt sees Ethiopian dam as risk to water supply” in the Guardian,  to illustrate the importance of access to water.   I stated in my last blog piece that access to water may prove to be one of the gravest friction points in decades to come.  In this report, Ethiopia, sensing Egyptian weakness, appears intent to move on a dam project.  This dam project will provide much needed energy for Ethiopia and development opportunity.  On the other side, this dam might spell looming crop failures and a crisis for Egypt.  Egypt, already in a precarious situation from the much-hyped Arab Spring, could collapse even more, because the Arab Spring was a big lie.   President Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood – the group that spawned radical Islamism.  President Obama keeps trying to paint the Muslim Brotherhood as a mostly secular organization, but there again is another one of those big lies he told.  Egypt’s economy has gotten much worse since the ouster of Mubarak and the prospect of a diminished water supply or an impediment to the primary water source for Egypt portends a potential for more conflicts, both internal and external.

This little example illuminates just one factor that might ignite another war or another internal revolt inside Egypt and we see these regional friction points all over the globe. It would be lovely if some naive notion like Global Zero could resolve the world’s problems and make us all safe.  The truth is we need to maintain our military might, restore our economic equilibrium and start working to be a shining example for democratic ideals.  The United States should be upgrading our aging nuclear arsenal, not dismantling it or allowing it to decay.  We need to be able to protect ourselves and the many countries that rely on our nuclear umbrella for security. The Wall Street journal ran an interview with former Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, in 2009 that I came across yesterday mentioned in another article (I forgot which article or I’d put a link to that too).  Mr.Schlesinger provides the most insightful, detailed, clear reasons why we need to remain a nuclear power for the foreseeable future in this piece titled,“Why We Don’t Want a Nuclear-Free World”.  (WSJ interview here).

We should take a leadership role with other world powers to strike a path toward resolving the third world hot spots by forging consensus, instead of playing out our high stakes strategic gambits on the backs of these much poorer countries.  Constantly upping the ante and fueling these conflicts with more and more weapons just prolongs the carnage.  Recovering from war takes decades, sometimes longer.  The American South remained trapped in poverty for almost a century after the US Civil War and even today remnants of the effect of that war can easily be found.  Some of these third world countries remain trapped in almost endless strife, where the people face a daily struggle for just the vestiges of survival.

To confidently support arming some lunatic rebel bands in Syria, where a video hit the airwaves and online, with one such “commander” slicing up his fallen foe and yanking out his heart and liver – and eating it, well, obviously it’s reprehensible to arm these types of barbarians in our name.  Assad is a monster too, so I’m not supporting him either.  The solution would be to try to limit the arms flowing in, instead of trying to find ways to fan the flames.  I watched Vladimir Putin talk about this video and I agree with him, but I think his trying to prop up Assad won’t work either.   If Russia, China and the US decided to end this Syrian tragedy, they could do it.  All it would take is deciding the carnage has dragged on long enough, end the senseless slaughter and work toward some sort of political arrangement.  President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s arrogant presumptions about redrawing the map of the Mid-East  to fit their political agenda has led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of civilians and will end up costing even more.  To use US might, directly or through arming others, imposes responsibility for the end result.  Supporting the Arab Spring has destabilized the entire region and their cavalier bravado looks likely to end in the region spiraling out of control and likely will lead to a larger regional war.

The last century’s collapse of colonialism, world wars and cold war era need to become historical stepping stones on a path to more constructive cooperation among the world’s leaders.  Assuredly there will be many twists and turns along the path and maybe even a few obstacles that seem insurmountable.  We might even come upon some obstacles that seem like a Sisyphean boulder that will keep rolling downhill to crush our hopes for peace. If we believe it is possible, the only thing standing in our way is the will to chip away at that boulder until it becomes just gravel to pave our path.  Being the daughter of a man who built roads for a living, I watched Pop blast away entire mountains, so I know it can be done;-)

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Filed under Foreign Policy, Military, Politics

June 18, 2013 · 6:34 am

Global Zero: Another Nothing-Burger Plan

This one article in The American Thinker titled “Global Zero: Naive, Dangerous, and Provocative” caught my attention, so after reading this piece by Sierra Rayne, I clicked on the website for “Global Zero” (here) to see exactly what they’re proposing.  This group, Global Zero, sets its goal as an elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2030 and the webpage boasts a video with President Obama speechifying on a “world without nuclear weapons” followed by a bunch of Hollywood celebrities spouting off about this issue and offering their “expertise” on nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation  – “the greatest threat” according to these yahoos.  Rayne offers a spirited defense of a nuclear weapons deterrent impact in some detail and backs it with historical examples to make the case.

Now, I admit to having an idealistic plan to get us on the road to peace, but it sure doesn’t begin with the US and Russia cutting their nuclear arsenals dramatically first, which is how the Global Zero experts propose we go about eliminating nuclear weapons.  Of course, “multilateral” negotiations will follow that and “proportionate” cuts will be negotiated. (one can only wonder what these folks have been smoking).  I think the very last countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals should be the US, Russia and China, or even India and a few other democracies, because these are world powers and military strength keeps a balance of power in the world.

I believe that if a handful of the world powers acted in unison to defang the rogue regimes of nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t take more than an example or two of taking out their nuclear capabilities before other similar countries opted to hand over their nuclear weapons without a fight. This might be a start at reining in nuclear weapons.  Even my scenario is fraught with complications and risks, but not anywhere as dangerous as to start disarming and hope others follow your example.

Peace can only come through strength, because nothing so encourages bullies (tyrants, despots and others seeking power) than weakness.  I tried not to laugh at our champion of “leading from behind” being at the front of this rose-colored, strategic nothing-burger plan.

Here’s another one of those home truths that I am so fond of using to make my point.  Let’s state what should be obvious, but apparently needs to be driven home once more – any weapon, be it a slingshot or a nuclear weapon, is an inanimate object.  Inanimate objects aren’t the problem.  Yep, it’s always the people that pose the problem and let’s be more precise here, it’s what’s in the hearts of man that can turn that slingshot or nuclear weapon into a “threat”.   We’ve always got to contend with people first and the rest of the inanimate objects truly rank as a secondary issue.

No matter which way the world goes regarding nuclear weapons, you can’t un-invent something.  You can eventually make something obsolete, but that doesn’t follow some neat little plan devised by left-wing political activists with a victory date already set.  Boy, President Obama sure fit the bill for this poster boy, because he naively announced the withdrawal date from Afghanistan before he even got the troops in place for his ballyhooed surge.  Of course, we all know the Taliban will be right back in power, because they smelled President Obama’s weakness all the way from the Pakistani tribal areas.

Let’s talk about people, since the solution to all human problems falls on our shoulders.  People always form groups –  it’s how we live.  Groups always compete and also many groups don’t get along (let’s face it Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, the long-running American TV show to teach kids to be “good neighbors” seems to be the global exception, not the rule).  So, let’s look at life in the “Neighborhood of Make Believe”, the imaginary setting in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for his puppet show segment in each episode.

I watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for years when my kids were young and unlike many children’s shows, Fred Rogers’ show, highlighted important lessons on the people problems, that carry us further toward finding peaceful solutions than most of the touted geopolitical experts in the world. In the Neighborhood of Make Believe reigned a bullying, irrational, impulsive monarch, King Friday XIII – the worst type of leader to deal with and as his name implies – bad news.  Each episode highlighted a different “people problem” and solutions to work out this problem.  King Friday never wanted to admit he was wrong, but his calm, more rational wife, Queen Sara Saturday, usually intervened to help resolve the crisis and to calm down King Friday and try to reason with him.

Sadly, the Neighborhood of Make Believe mirrors our real world rather closely, except in the real world we don’t have enough level-headed, steady leaders, like Queen Sara Saturday, running things (yes, she made running a group, “Food for the World”, a primary duty).

King Friday often made impulsive, poorly thought out decisions and it’s leaders like him that pose the challenge on dealing with the nuclear proliferation issue.  While King Friday loved to give long-winded speeches (he didn’t own a teleprompter thankfully), he still could be reasoned with, but in the real world we must contend with the threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of batshit crazy leaders, who don’t have a Queen Sara Saturday nearby to calm things down. Some idiotic celebrity-driven group like this, Global Zero, is just one more misguided attempt at trying to fix a complex, multifaceted problem with a leftover 60s “kumbaya” solution.

We need an international security framework, not some celebrities with a dopey plan.  Really, let’s put it this way, since ‘bullying” is now such a new crisis requiring national action: Is the way to deal with bullies to let them keep their sticks to beat up others and to force everyone else not to defend themselves (this is that zero tolerance that these leftists always embrace – hint: Global Zero)?  Yes, this is how these idiots solve the problems – no fighting, leaving the bullies to run wild and teaching other kids to be passive victims.  I dealt with some bullies on my school bus as a kid and got into more than one fist fight.  Zero tolerance for violence doesn’t deal with bullies on a school bus any more than an idiotic zero nuclear weapons policy will deal with the bullies in the world.

Every effort should be made to reduce ethnic and regional friction points, but in the big picture world, we all need a geopolitical structure that offers some stability.  That comes from global leadership and strength, not from the major world powers feverishly eliminating their nuclear arsenals and hoping others follow suit.    A phrase like “greatest threat” presumes a whole heck of a lot and basically it’s sheer arrogance to believe one problem poses the greatest threat.  Sure nuclear proliferation ranks as a serious threat, but personally I think something more basic could be a greater threat – access to water.

Since I don’t pretend to be an expert, I’ll concede the point that many unforeseen threats could emerge that jump way ahead of even water.    Some pandemic could pose an existential threat to many countries in rapid succession, throwing the world into a tailspin or some natural catastrophe, which impacts several continents.  Heck, it could even be both, a natural catastrophe followed by a pandemic. This is why I hate celebrity-driven causes, they’re filled with “informed experts”, who possess not an iota of understanding about military history,  grand strategy, nuclear strategy or even general history.  This glossily-packaged  cause is about the celebrities’ vanity, not about any serious effort to impact nuclear proliferation.

Here’s a thought, perhaps, the greatest threat just might be weakness, which this loopy movement would increase dramatically.  My best advice for people – if some morons come up with a plan that has ZERO in the title, consider it null (nothing but hot air).

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June 17, 2013 · 8:47 am

The emperor and his metadata robe (Diana West’s perfect metaphor)

Being naive about technology definitely can shield one from the realities of just how disingenuous our government’s explanations about NSA surveillance rank.  A couple days ago, I posted a piece about this topic where I equated this metadata collection to gigantic “junk mail folders”.  A casual conversation yesterday with my son who is a software engineer left me reeling with just how clueless I, along with many other Americans, am.  We heard soothing assurances lulling us into believing that everything’s safe, yes, “hey trust us”, because only metadata is being collected and the actual content of private electronic communications remains safely shielded behind this secure wall.  Turns out that wall, like most that our government is entrusted to secure, offers about as much protection as our southern border defense.    The new surveillance state,  justified by the so-called, post 9/11 reality, exists because it’s so easy to dupe technological dummies like me (and millions of other Americans).  My son explained that it’s easy to mine information from data, but he added the caveat, “it just depends what you’re looking for”.   In an effort to reassure myself that the government wasn’t deliberately lulling us into submission by this “metadata” only explanation, I said, “but it’s complicated and takes a lot of effort to find out the contents that they say are protected, right?”  My son smiled at my gullibility and said that he’s very good at mining data, but his skills are small fries compared to the people who do that for a living.  So, I asked why this administration seems so uninformed, like in Benghazi, where they came up with the narrative of the lame youtube video caused a spontaneous protest, if they have all this amazing technology to decipher information quickly.  My son hinted that might be a human lapse, not a glitch in the technology – sort of telling the boss what he wants to hear or feeding him information that fits his agenda.

This morning I stumbled upon this tidbit of information in a Rick Moran column (here).  In 2008 the Obama administration slipped in some amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the FISA Amendments Act, which empower the attorney general to access all of your private communications without any prior approval from the FISA court.  The Obama administration wrote enough loopholes into this act to stray far beyond any legislative constraints, leading me to the sad realization that this wall of protection for our private communications exists only as a rhetorical flourish to deflect us from asking more questions.

At this point, the more I read trying to understand the terminology, the more I realize that even the terminology exists in a relativist’s utopia.  Metadata, means data about data, but even that definition according to Wikipedia, is ambiguous (here).  The simplistic analogy that it’s like your phone records, which aren’t considered protected and needing a subpoena to access, seems rather hollow in light of just how much information about your private life can be gleaned from sifting through your metadata.  Since most of us remain clueless about the terms, the government feels secure, knowing that telling us “it’s just metadata” will keep us quiet because, we don’t really want to know how exposed we are.

Diana West, a brilliant political commentator, refers to this symptom in her new book, “American Betrayal; The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (here), as the situation in the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (here), where everyone pretends to see the invisible new clothes, except for a guileless child, who shouts out that the emperor is naked.  Maybe, metadata is just another set of fine invisible clothes the government has donned to keep us in our place,  but hopefully a few brave adults will cry out that they don’t see it .   Her Townhall.com columns can be found (here) and her blog (here).  West lays out the stakes for our country much more eloquently than I could ever hope to in her latest column No Constitution, No Borders, No USA.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, Politics, The Constitution

June 15, 2013 · 9:51 am

George Will on constitutional limits – time for some choke collars

The incomparable, George Will, perfectly explains the Constitutional fork in the road in America’s last century, in a column titled, “Slipping the constitutional leash” .   This “must-read” column lays out the history of our abandonment of the 10th Amendment (Washington Post column here) and the road not taken.

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June 12, 2013 · 5:23 pm

My mea culpa moment – Sarah Palin got it right

I mentioned in my previous post that I had said some negative things about Sarah Palin in comments at The American Thinker blog a long time ago (before we had a Republican nominee for President the last go around).  In a nutshell there were two things that bother me about Sarah Palin and I’ll get those out of the way before I get to the things I do admire about her, because even though I didn’t think she was ready to be President, she shouldn’t be written off as a national conservative voice.   The first thing that bothered me about Sarah Palin is how when given the opportunity to influence opinion on the national stage with a prominent news analyst position on Fox News, she didn’t offer anything more than repetitive political boilerplate comments.   The many times I watched her, left me wondering why she didn’t do more research and become better informed on issues and when Charles Krauthammer pointed out the obvious, he was pilloried by her ‘fans”.    I felt she wasn’t offering much to the discussions and outside of energy policy, where she really does shine, truthfully, she seemed in need of some intensive reading (particularly on history).  I remembered Lynne Cheney on CNN’s Crossfire in the old days and now there was a remarkable woman – brilliant, well-read on history, and a powerful voice for conservatives.  I kept hoping that Sarah Palin could move beyond the “lamestream media” trite phrases and really excel as a new voice of conservatism.  Her speeches indicated that she does have the ability to be on the national political stage.   The second thing that bothered me was how she was always getting on the cultural warrior soapbox, but she placed her family in the midst of one of the most detrimental cultural phenomenons of our time – that disgusting venture called “‘reality TV”.  My feeling is that a family’s home should be sacrosanct – a refuge from the world at large and a family’s internal workings should be private.  The American family has been undercut by the pervasive pop culture where people jumped on the Phil Donahue and Oprah train and for families to go on national TV to air private family issues in public ranks as one of the worst breaches of trust imaginable.  I was dismayed when she appeared with her “teenage mom” daughter on Oprah and allowed Oprah to question her parenting.  Then she had her entire family on display on a reality TV show, which laid lie to her culture warrior credo.

Well, in the past week, I remembered how the mainstream press lambasted Palin about her remarks about  “death panels” under Obamacare.  And here I’ll take my own dose of strong medicine and here’s my mea culpa moment – Sarah Palin didn’t flinch in that onslaught of criticism over her view on the “death panels” and she was right.   Watching this sad spectacle of Kathleen Sebelius refusing to intervene to save a little girl’s life (CBS report here) and listening to the remarks coming from Sebelius, proved that Palin had it right all along – government bureaucrats are more concerned about upholding their maze of rules and regulations than they are about saving a human life.  The alarming aspect of the case of this little girl in need of a lung transplant in PA was if this is how Sebelius and her band of medical “experts” react to saving  the life of a child, then one can only imagine how cavalierly they will treat the elderly, whose lives they may well choose to check as past the government-approved expiration date for many life-saving procedures.   After seeing how the Department of Health and Human Services handled the case of 10 year-old, Sarah Murnaghan’s desperate need of a lung transplant, it’s time to offer an apology for being so harsh about Sarah Palin (even though my comments never were posted online) and say one of the things I do admire about her is that she never wavered in the face of relentless media attacks on her position and the past week proved she nailed this “death panel” scenario exactly right.  We should all be very scared of the looming Obamacare bureaucracy.

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June 10, 2013 · 11:44 pm

NSA Junk Mail Folders

This latest massive security leak over the NSA spying on American citizens routine internet usage and on our allies (as well as our enemies) triggered the press to jump into a frenzied mob, albeit a very mindless mob at that.  “How dare the government spy on us” seems to be what’s got them in a tizzy.  Skip the American press to get any solid reporting!  The UK paper, The Guardian, landed the major haul – an in-depth interview with the self-identified leaker, Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA.  (interview here & here).

The dilemma for many of us, follow all the rules types, is that our instant reaction to this story is to demand they prosecute this leaker to the full extent of the law.  Whenever I catch wind of these stories of people with security clearances blatantly violating the trust placed in them by their government, well, I automatically judge that behavior reprehensible.  Since 9/11 our government leaped into overdrive on revamping, expanding and completely overhauling our intelligence capabilities, to atone for the colossal intelligence failures that led to that horrific attack.  The problem seems to be that with so many different agencies and contractors involved in this devilish monstrosity, that only big government can spawn, no one seems to be able to know for certain the full scope of our “intelligence-gathering” on ordinary, law-abiding American citizens.  The even larger looming security risk is with the government relying so heavily on private contractors for much of this work, our intelligence agencies set up a very insecure “team” to run this show.  Our premier intelligence agencies, which we’re paying through the teeth to fund, farm out much of this surveillance work to private contractors and seem to be placing our national security in their hands, rather than in the hands of fully vetted and accountable government employees.  (another piece from theguardian).

Amazingly, with so much spent to gather this vast amount of intelligence, the best this administration could come up with on Benghazi was blaming some lame video and offering varying “narratives”, minus any concrete evidence or hard facts.  No one in the administration has ever fully explained how Fast and Furious came about or who authorized it.  We’ve got an attorney general who blazed to national prominence  in the Waco/Ruby Ridge/Elian Gonzalez (corrupt to the core) Reno Justice Department and he seems incapable of speaking the truth, so help him God!   The former Secretary of State, told us, “what difference does it make?” and she, who rode her husband’s splendid political coat tails to power and who wielded many Presidential powers as the media cheered, “two for one”, to this day is hailed as one of America’s most respected women.  What a marvel there, where she ran a team of scurrilous sewer rats in relentless forays looking for any dirt she could dig on any and all she perceived as political enemies.   The media turned a blind-eye to her crazed witch hunts (the extent which hopefully someday sees the light of day).  She trolled the internet looking for a vast, right-wing conspiracy way back then – an internet trailblazer for sure.  And truly, no one in this administration has come anywhere close to understanding the Arab Spring or much of anything else going on in the world.

Billions upon billions spent for intelligence and this is the “quality” of what our government comes up with???  We’re spending a fortune for useless junk mail folders filled to overflowing.  The clowns in this administration  couldn’t put the pieces of some complicated intelligence puzzle together even with a numbered diagram in front of them and all the pieces already numbered to show them where they fit.  Basically we’re paying a fortune to fill up bottomless junk mail folders of useless minutiae.  What’s missing from all this reliance on computer wizardry and the ability to acquire so much information is a commensurate level of  human intelligence to provide the nuanced analytical requirement to produce a quality intelligence product.

A corrupt government deserves no loyalty and certainly this administration nudged out the Clinton thugs for the title of most corrupt administration in my lifetime.  So, I’m left in a moral quandary over this latest leaker, not ready to hail him as a hero for the people and not quite ready to demand we leave no avenue untraveled to hunt him down.  Our government is a national disgrace and quite frankly, we should all demand better, because let’s hope we, the American people, still hold true to some pride in being an honest, generous, worthy nation.   Let’s hope there are enough of us left who still believe in the Constitution and the rule of law.

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