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What Wins Wars

Source: What Wins Wars

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Trump on “being tough”

As if we don’t have enough evidence that Donald Trump is UNFIT to ever be commander in chief, here’s a short piece by Kerry Jacoby, at the American Thinker, “Donald Trump and China: Read This before You Vote”. Jacoby recalls his memories of Tiananmen Square in 1989. He writes:

A year later, in a Playboy interview, here is what Donald Trump said of the Chinese government’s handling of the Tiananmen Square massacre:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world” –

Then the interviewer changed the subject.

So, no, Trump fans, I will not vote for this man. Not in the primary, not in the general.

I saw the pictures. Nothing can excuse that statement.

This man is a monster. And he can’t have my vote.

Don’t give him yours. For freedom’s sake.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/donald_trump_and_china_read_this_before_you_vote.html#ixzz42V4YyxAl
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An interesting viewpoint

A tweet from abroad that says it all.

    1. If you’re an American confusedly watching the darkest forces of ur nation rally behind a demagogue-maybe u can understand the Mid East now.

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Update on Navy investigation into captured US sailors

Barbard Starr at CNN offers an update on the US sailors captured by Iran in January 2016:

Washington (CNN)The 10 U.S. Navy sailors captured and briefly held by Iran in January made repeated mistakes that led them into Iranian territorial waters and being captured, according to an initial Navy investigation.

The investigation has not yet been released, but CNN spoke with a U.S. official directly familiar with the details. Because the sailors and other naval personnel could be facing disciplinary action, the report may not be released until their fate is settled.

“Initial Navy report finds sailors captured by Iran made several errors”

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On America’s Side (a reprint)

Here’s my January 22, 2016 blog post, On America’s Side:

“The side I’m on is that of America.  And for very, very positive reasons.”  – Minta Marie Morze

 

A couple weeks ago my 10 year old granddaughter, a very bright student enrolled in the gifted program at her public school, mentioned something she learned at school, which I told her is not correct and what she learned really plays into the problems plaguing America and it also speaks to our future.  My granddaughter said, “America is a democracy.”  Reflexively, I corrected her and said, “No, America is a republic!”  Thus began a stream of back and forth, because as of yesterday she told me that her teacher still says, “America is a democracy.”  I told her again that her teacher is mistaken, because assuredly, America is a republic, set up as a constitutional federal republic.   However, watching the demise of federalism and the reliance on pop culture and public opinion polls to silence dissenting opinion, I’m wondering if America has descended into that hellish, brutish state where on the whims of ginning up anger and use of slick mass media manipulation (propaganda) to sway the mob,  the only thing that matters is the “majority rules”.

On polar ends of the American electorate, this fraying of trust or even understanding of this basic fact crops up in ever disturbing ways.  On the political left, they’ve got  angry mobs taking to the streets to compel justice by force and college bullies silencing opposing views with rules imposed by fiat, “I disagree, so you can’t speak!”.  In the Presidential run they’re wading in a shallow geriatric pool with a dyed-in-the-wool socialist resonating with disenfranchised Democrats and a pathological liar, riding on her gender and spewing paranoid vitriol about some imaginary dangerous right-wing conspiracy out to do her in, and by extension do in the American people too.  She sees a vastright-wing conspiracy around every corner.  Her answer to every problem in America is another federal program, to encroach evermore deeply into the lives of American citizens.

Freedom for local communities and states to manage their own affairs falls to the ever-expanding beast that crushed the very breath of liberty out of not only local and state governments, but out of individual American citizens.  We’ve become a people conditioned to bow to the popular opinion poll on issues, as manipulated by mass media propaganda.  When the left wants to sway Americans to a particular view – big bucks go to various activists and groups (many Soros funded) and the propaganda blitz ensues – Hollywood makes movies and TV shows promoting that view and mainstreaming it into the culture, “experts” hit the airwaves extolling it, and then the media reinforces the idea with polling data, much of it dubious, selling this view as popular and reporters will grill the outliers, who dare speak up against that view, lecturing that the majority of Americans believe the now carefully manufactured and manipulated view.  It’s a type of insidious brainwashing and peals the death of liberty and The Constitution.

Now, on the political right, the use of mass media manipulation has rarely been understood, let alone used, that is until the Trump campaign, which is using the Carville/Begala playbook, as I’ve stated repeatedly.  That’s what I see – Bill Clinton’s perfect triangulation lining up, if Hillary can avoid an indictment.  This post is not going to be a regurgitation of my own conspiracy theory, but here’s the link to my thoughts on that.  Assuredly, as I’ve stated many times, I will not ever vote for Donald Trump, because his campaign highlights the capitulation on the right to accepting manufactured hype about polls over principles.  The heart of conservatism,  weak though it beats, will not survive if it succumbs to the reality TV culture and slick mass media manipulation of Donald Trump, who rambles on about his poll numbers endlessly, but does not hold to conservative principles or even basic civility.

On the right then who, well, Ted Cruz promised to be a principled conservative who would take on Washington and he has stood up against the Washington insiders, but in the process his personal style engendered absolute loathing among his fellow senators, on both sides of the aisle (read Charles Krauthammer’s very astute assessment).  Do I agree with Cruz on the issues?  Absolutely, but here again we get to reports, many which Trump helped spread, that Cruz is so despised that many GOP establishment people would rather support Trump, whom they know is not conservative,  to destroy Cruz, who is.  In a less polarized era and where pop culture celebrity didn’t carry more credence than ideas and republican principles,  most of the other GOP candidates, admittedly with both pluses and minuses in my view, would still be able to gain some traction.  Every single GOP candidate running against Trump offers more coherent policy, offers complete sentences and thoughts,  and from this Mom and grandmother, displays better manners.  Trump may be mega-rich, but he behaves like a boorish jerk!

With Trump monopolizing the media cycle, with the aid of the mainstream media selling people on polls over principles,  none of their messages even get noticed as the GOP’s Paris Hilton spews mostly incomprehensible gibberish.  In fact, Paris Hilton actually marketed a clearer campaign message in her cute video (see above) with easily understandable policy positions, but disgruntled GOP base voters project their hopes and beliefs onto the blank canvas that is Trump’s “making America great again”, because assuredly if you write out Trump’s rambling speeches and comments, there’s a lot less there than you’d imagine and a whole lot of conflicting ideas, beliefs, proposals, all overshadowed by the relentless repetition that he is winning in the polls (popular).   He’s created this aura of “inevitability”, which now is reaping a snowball effect, as more and more GOP kingmakers are weighing their options and opting to throw in with Trump, despite reservations that Trump is even loyal to the Republican party – they are willing to toss the reins of their party to a man who converted less than a year ago and has spouted conflicting gibberish, all based on he’s a winner and great at making deals.   Trump is already working out deals with those despised GOP establishment folks his supporters want destroyed.  Trump admitted he talked to Mitch McConnell last month – so yes, the backroom cronyism moves full-speed ahead.

That’s the gist of Trump’s campaign, because I dare anyone to actually make lists of Trump’s statements on various topics to include the incomplete sentences too, compare how they line up for consistency, try to discern core principles, then look at what he said with whom he was speaking (he’s a chameleon and can cozy up to Bill Clinton as easily as Rush Limbaugh on the golf course).  Finally, when you’ve done that honest assessment, devoid of how you feel, analyze how many times he repeated his poll numbers and stated he is winning and look at how many times he said that to divert attention from an issue or question he did not answer.  It’s a deliberate media manipulation tactic and it’s one perfected by the American political left, not GOP political operatives.

Here are a a few other oddities with the Trump campaign, from someone who has followed presidential campaigns since I was 8 years old in 1968.  Trump wrote about not liking to shake hands in one of his books – he has a germ thing and doesn’t want dirty people touching him.  Has he ever done the usual shaking hands that’s par for the course in politics?  From what I have seen he flies in, does his rallies and flies back out, then does his “connecting” with voters via late night Twitter attacks and the cable news circuit, not up close and personal.  His campaign started with Roger Stone as his campaign manager.  Stone quit or was fired in August, when the Trump/Megyn Kelly dust-up happened.  Oddly enough, Stone is still out there speaking for Trump and no other visiblecampaign advisers or spokespeople emerged until November, when this former Tea Party activist, Kat Pierson, started hitting the airwaves as the Trump spokesperson.  Stone, according to Wikipedia, has a book due out January 26, 2016 – “Jeb! And the Bush Crime Family”.  Note that since Stone quit or was fired he seems uneasy and nervous whenever he appears on TV defending Trump – something smells off to me, but hey I’m a woman and we roll with that female intuition thing.

Another thing I noticed is that the Trump camp sure compiled massive opposition research, which Trump and his campaign advisers (whomever they really are) dump these nasty stink bombs at the most strategically brilliant times.  For a novice politician, who can’t even spit out coherent political policies, the political astuteness of both content and timing of these attacks seems quite incredible.  Any GOP competitor rises in the polls – boom, the Trump campaign dumps a full payload.  The Trump campaign even seems to be feeding opposition research to The Last Refuge blog, which has become Trump Polling Update Central, and when Mark Levin came out criticizing Trump for attacking Cruz, yesterday that blog ran this hit piece of opposition research asserting the son of Levin’s fianceé works on the Cruz campaign.  For Trump, who isn’t much on the details, his campaign is more effective than the Dem operatives who launched that Bush DWI stink bomb years ago.  The irony of The Last Refuge blog is they no longer welcome opposing opinions from actual conservatives.  It’s Trump or the road, and they ran this hit piece on Levin, which appears to be opposition research (sleaze to damage Levin’s credibility) provided to them by the Trump campaign.  If Trump ends up exposed as a fraud, there will be a lot of very angry populist mobs, with so many conservatives investing so much hope and belief in Trump, so hope I am wrong about Trump being a fraud, as this could get very ugly, very quickly.

National Review orchestrated a “Stop Trump” campaign, ostensibly to save conservatism.  My friend, Minta, sent me an email last night stating:

“This new issue of National Review is a big problem, but not for the reasons someone might think. The general view around here is that instead of the authors writing a manifesto about what Conservatism is, and what it means, they look as though they are attacking one person. They could have achieved the better result by supporting someone like Cruz. I love the authors of the Nat’l Review this time, but they are risking looking like elitist snobs. Where were these manifestos when Lois Lerner wasn’t indicted, when the IRS was going after the Tea Parties, when the military was being dismantled, when the VA was shown to be anti-military?”

Minta got it exactly right, the Trump supporters get angry when other conservatives disagree and conservative stalwarts like George Will end up screamed at by populist pundits like Bill O’Reilly, another speaker for the little people, who also is  a friend of Trump’s, so when Trump doesn’t articulate his positions clearly, O’Reilly helpfully fills in the blanks on what Trump meant and does character references for Trump too.   In this environment, Trump’s supporters are emotionally invested in Trump, in the same way Obama supporters became cultish in their belief that one man could singlehandedly transform America.  They want a Messiah or a strongman, not a President, with clear CONSTITUTIONAL checks on his/her power.   I want less government control and less power in Washington’s hands, especially after President Obama’s imperial presidency.   Herein is why I don’t think Cruz will ever gain much traction – his fellow GOP establishment peers in Washington want him annihilated and Cruz talks like an elitist Harvard lawyer.  Cruz has nowhere to go to attract voters, if he moves to the middle he loses the conservative base voters who stuck with him, the GOP establishment is throwing in with Trump and moderates will never gravitate to Cruz, with his hardline conservative record and on top of that he comes across as an elitist Harvard lawyer who talks down to the little people.  He is not someone your average Joe would want to have a beer with.   Rubio, Christie, Kasich all have more personal appeal frankly.  They come across as nice people.  Jeb is doomed by his last name, Carson hasn’t been able to convey he’s a viable Presidential choice and Fiorina, smart, does her homework, but she always comes across too scripted and worse than that she usually seems angry and uppity.  She does not convey much personal warmth.

Trump has severely damaged the entire GOP field with his scorched earth campaign style, so it’s hard for me to envision any of them being able to repair that damage by November, but this is the season where anything is possible.  And on the bright side, for this conservative, at least the Democrats have an even worse mess on their hands.  Whatever happens, the larger question of,  “Are we a democracy, where angry mobs silence dissent and popularity polls rule over principles or are we a republic grounded in The Constitution?” may become the defining issue of the 2016 campaign.  In the meantime I am looking for some good books or sources to explain Our Republic to my 10 year-old granddaughter, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know.

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The Woman’s Way of War (a reprint)

I”m reprinting two posts today, so first up, The Woman’s Way of War, a January 27, 2016 blog post:

Trump decided to skip the Thursday debate and the buzz centers on the Megyn Kelly flap, but truly what is the real motive – to harm FOX news and specifically target one woman.  Trump, using his high-profile as a presidential candidate, now leads  a mob action to try and ruin one American citizen’s career,  over one question she asked in August that angered him.  Is this the type of leader America needs?

Sure, he’s trying to suck the oxygen out of the other candidates and keep the attention on him, but he is trying to hurt FOX and Kelly – make FOX  lose money and he wants Kelly fired.  Is this what America needs in a President?

I still believe he hired the “best” political operatives and those are not on the Republican side.  There’s a high stakes mass media propaganda game playing out and there’s a high stakes political game between the Clintons and President Obama playing out.  At the moment, with leaks from the FBI about the gravity of Hillary’s email situation weighed against the mutual adoration comments from Obama and Hillary, it appears the Clintons are winning in that tug of war.  I also believe Trump is a dupe in this saga – the circus clown act, while the Clintons sit back with their popcorn and drinks and enjoy the show.

The triangulation strategy is in play, Bernie the kook on the left, Trump on the right, with the path clear right up the middle for Hillary and it is working.  It’s all about “winning”, for not only Donald Trump, but for the Clintons too.  Hillary can sit back and relax while Trump’s sideshow keeps the attention on him and the GOP and conservative punditry snarl and snipe at each other (classic divide and conquer strategy),  confident that Obama will not indict her.

Welcome to the new Amerika.

For regular readers, please go read news somewhere else, watch FOX news or CNN or MSNBC, read National Review or the Daily Kos, because this is going to be a long regurgitation of old LB rambles and you’ve heard all of this before.  Yes, I am going to get on my soapbox.

Many things bother me, about not only Donald Trump, but also about his campaign and even beyond that, this entire presidential race.  Yes, populist anger swirls in the far edges of both political sides.   This populist discontent allowed for Bernie Sanders to gain traction on the left and now we have Trump on the right.  For months I’ve been going on and on about mass media manipulation and propaganda and my suspicions that Trump hired  dem political operatives: read here, here, here.  From a Dec. LB post:

The only team The Donald is on, is his own.  He does not care about the GOP party or causes per se, they’re just the vehicle he is driving to become President, where he believes his dynamic business acumen will single-handedly “make America great again”.  He’s right on many issues – even in his latest kerfuffle about Muslim immigration, on the main points he’s right – it doesn’t make sense to be bringing in Muslim immigrants from several countries that are hot beds of Islamist terror and where the collapse of government in many of these regions makes adequate vetting impossible.  And he nailed the alarming truth that the Obama administration doesn’t know what the hell is going on with their own immigration policies.  A pause makes perfect sense.

Time will tell if the Carville/Begala campaign modus operandi, that I strongly suspect is playing out in the Trump campaign, is true or just a nutty conspiracy theory.  For me, it doesn’t take much imagination to envision Bill Clinton calling Trump when he caught wind that Trump was considering running.  Trump and Bill Clinton golf together and have known each other for years.  Trump was a yuge Clinton supporter.  So, the phone call could have been as simple as this:

Bill Clinton calls Trump :  Hi Donald, I hear you’re thinking of throwing your hat into the 2016 race?

Trump:  Yes, I am.

Bill Clinton:  Well, you know I believe Hillary is the best candidate for 2016, but I wish you good luck and you know, Donald, the one bit of advice I’ll give you is you’ll need great political advisers.  A national race is really complicated.

Trump:  Well thanks for that advice.  I am still putting a campaign staff together.

Bill Clinton:  No problem Donald, you know I am already taken (laugh, laugh), but the best political advisers are Carville and Begala.  Those GOP political advisers don’t have the guts to run a tough race.

Trump:  Thanks, you know me,  I want the best political advisers.   You know I’m going to fund my own campaign, if I jump in.  Do you think Carville and Begala would work for a GOP candidate.

Bill Clinton: I can’t speak for them, but you know, business is business, so you’d have to talk to them yourself.

Set-up done.  It could have been that easy for Bill Clinton to manipulate the downfall of the GOP primary. Carville and Begala easily could have advised Trump to keep the business relationship secret, because Republicans go into derangement mode about them.  It’s obvious Bill Clinton threw his weight around and called in all sorts of favors within the Democratic party to bury this email server scandal and the Benghazi committee investigation to get her campaign on track.

https://libertybellediaries.com/2015/12/14/my-review-of-the-gop-field

So, how does the Carville/Begala mass media saturation propaganda technique work – well it’s a military “swarming” strategy played out on a mass media battlefield.  It is dangerous, it is insidious and it is used in countries where free speech is silenced and mass brainwashing goes into keeping people in line. It is antithetical to our American way of life and it IS a threat to The Constitution of the United States.

Over the months I’ve watched the relentless use of particular phrases by Donald Trump – the “winning”, “make America great again”, but most of all that constant repetition of his polls numbers.  The last time I saw this technique used so effectively was during the Clinton impeachment saga.  Back in October, I became suspicious:

At first, I thought this would be impossible, but as I’ve watched Trump continue to agitate and throw out these verbal hand grenades at any in the GOP field, who looks like he/she might move up in the polls, then add in all these outrageous lines he keeps throwing out to alienate wide swaths of the electorate, it all seems orchestrated and contrived.  A couple days ago he was blaming GWB for 9/11 and not keeping America safe, yet it was President Clinton who let bin Laden go and who did nothing to deal with Al Qaeda’s attacks on American interests – USS Cole, Khobar Towers, Mogadishu ring any bells.  No, Trump attacked GWB…

I began to think Trump’s operating like a Clinton sewer rat and he sure fixates on the polls – just like the Clintons.  Every other word he speaks is about his poll numbers and the press feeds on that too.  This training the American public that polls determine what’s right and wrong, not the merits of the issue, worked like a charm during the Clinton impeachment.  “Who cares if a President lies under oath – the American public doesn’t;  just look at the President’s poll numbers”, went the argument.  The media sold that line of reasoning and the American people bought it.

https://libertybellediaries.com/2015/10/21/a-triangulation-theory/

I have repeated many times that I was attacked in my home during impeachment.  I could not get anyone in my family to believe me and I still can not prove any of it – the entire saga is tabbed at the top of my blog – Messages of mhere.  I was just a homemaker commenting on the Excite message boards in 1998.  A few days ago, on a National Review comment section, I mentioned my situation:

susanholly
Her paranoid obsession with seeing vast, right-wing conspiracies around every corner is what led to her landing in this private email server mess in the first place. She wanted to thwart those dastardly “right-wingers” from having access to her official State Department communications. Now that she has been caught breaking the law and all of her emails have been exposed, to not only those mean Republicans, but likely to hostile foreign intelligence services too, her defense sounds as tired and pathetic as when her husband, then the chief law enforcement official in the land, lied under oath.

I’m a nobody homemaker and I’ve spent 16 years trying to find a way to expose what happened to me. I started a blog and then decided to try contacting several journalists a few years ago and tried telling them my story. I wrote about what happened to me during impeachment, while writing commentary countering the Clinton spin. I’ve posted the link to my story in various places in comments sections. I used pseudonyms in my story on my blog, but every person is real and I offered several journalist the real names of every “character”. My purpose was not to become “famous”, but because my husband was an active duty solider and I believe Army assets and a retired general were used to attack me in my home. I believe she was behind it. Lacking a way to prove any of this has kept me from going public. That retired general has been a reliable Dem shill since his precipitous retirement prior to impeachment and my husband served under that general, earlier in their careers during Desert Storm. Oddly enough, private letters I wrote during Desert Storm to my husband’s company commander, relating my adventures with this general’s wife, butting heads over her wearing her husband’s rank, as the queen of family support activities in the brigade, made it all the way to the Dept of Army after Desert Storm, I believe. The Army back then had some “command team” idea akin to the “co-president” and as a NCOs wife and being a former solider myself, I will never bow down to some stupid woman using borrowed power to boss me around. My husband is a veteran of Grenada and Desert Storm. My story sounds so impossible and I have no political connections or power, but in light of this incredible reckless effort of setting up a private email server in her home to thwart her imaginary right-wing foes, perhaps someone might someday investigate my story.

http://libertybellediaries.com…

Steve
Susan, OK, I read thru your blogs, and you will need to provide more explanation of why you think Hillary is behind your problems if you expect others to believe you. Why would Hillary think you a threat? Do you have direct knowledge of Bubba’s activities or Hillary’s activities? Dispensing with the cutesy nicknames would help.

Susan
Why? Well, the only place I was commenting about politics was on those Excite message boards. Unfortunately, I did not save those boards or I would have taken action years ago and trying to prove a conspiracy is very difficult. As impeachment rolled along, in the Fall of ’98 is when this occurred. I started noticing that specific arguments and things I pointed out in my posts began to be picked up by actual Republican pundits on TV and online news sites. Then I pointed out in detail that the Clinton spinmeisters were using mass media propaganda to block any other voices from gaining traction in mass media venues. I pointed out that they were setting up a manufactured opinion cascade -with relentlessly citing President Clinton’s popularity poll numbers. I think of it as much like the military strategy of swarming juxtaposed to a media battlefield, so to speak. In my spare time I have read extensively on military strategy for over 30 years – it’s an interest of mine, along with propaganda. Watching the Trump campaign, you can see another manufactured opinion cascade playing out, where through media saturation he now sits poised to present himself as the “inevitable” campaign. Americans have been conditioned to accept polls as the deciding metric in all matters, with complicity of media reinforcement.

As a matter of deduction, I know who attacked me – that man despises me – he gave me a look of total loathing at a Brigade picnic after Desert Storm. His wife, a bimbo akin to Madame Secretary, wanted to be the Army’s queen of family support. My husband deployed from Germany to Desert Storm – a lot of family support issues arose. My personal letters to my husband’s company commander during Desert Storm, to keep him abreast of some of the crap that was happening, would have been very embarrassing to that brigade commander. Let’s just say I have a snarky bent to my writing. I believe those letters ended up being submitted with the after action reports commanders write.

A few years after we left Germany, I was made aware of “some letters some wife wrote during Desert Storm” making it to the Dept of the Army, causing a big stink after Desert Storm. The woman who informed me of this was a paid family support person at the stateside post we were at. She informed me that she was close friends with that Brigade commander’s wife. She also trashed my battalion commander’s wife, who had just left this post and who also stood up to that brigade commander’s wife. All of this sounds like petty wives stuff and it is. After my meeting with this paid family support person, I became persona non grata at wives meetings and got the cold shoulder. Then by the time impeachment rolled around, my husband was ready to retire after serving over 24 years in the Army and he btw likes this brigade commander and he never listened to me about the “wive stuff” during Desert Storm. After I was attacked and knowing who attacked me and knowing that I had no political contacts, no other online contacts where I mentioned politics, and am a homebody type person, I wondered why this man would attack me and how any of this could happen. Many times afterwards. I would walk behind my back yard fence and look at that brand new tree stand, positioned to look into my back yard, and wonder how this could happen. And during that ’98 Operation Desert Fox, there was that retired general – on TV supporting it and considering his precipitous retirement that in and of itself seemed quite amazing. To this day he is a reliable shill for the Dems.

The cutesy names (code names perhaps) btw, would assuredly allow many people familiar with the Army goings on at that time to identify who exactly these people are, if I am ever able to prove this. Without having concrete proof in hand, I can’t name names in the wide open. A few years ago I had hoped I could find a real journalist to begin quietly investigating my story. I can’t prove it with crowdsourcing, that’s for sure. At this point, just consider this venting, but thank you for reading my story.

The link is http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430235/hillary-fbi-investigation-i-cant-control-what-republicans-and-their-allies-do

“Great, great, great” or “sex, sex, sex”, matters not in the least, but the followers begin repeating the same phrases and with careful cultivation a mass media manufactured opinion cascade took hold.  For how that works, check out Stella Morabito’s blog: http://stellamorabito.net/2016/01/13/what-if-there-was-an-opinion-cascade-about-pet-rocks/

Yesterday, I dumped a lot of comments at National Review on Andrew McCarthy’s article: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430286/donald-trump-andrew-mccarthy-foreign-policy-novice?target=author&tid=900151 and I posted some comments on another article,  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430329/donald-trump-supporters-dangerous-argument .  This effort of Trump to convince his followers not to watch Fox news or Megyn Kelly or the attacks on various conservative pundits, who did not come along for the ride on the Trump train, runs counter to our American values.  We need to encourage more public debate of issues, but that requires not only the freedom to get on that soap box, it requires the willingness to sit down and listen to dissenting opinions – a discussion is a two-way street.  An exchange with a poster, bragging  about not reading the articles at National Review, but just showing up to bash the writers and bash anyone who was against Trump alarmed me:

SmashingYoungMan
I think you’d be shocked at the number of people who are doing exactly what I’m doing. I doubt 10% of commenters read all of Kevin’s screeds, if any of it.

susanholly
Saying you don’t read a column and showing up to comment on said article seems so Trumpish, like not preparing for a debate or dissing people who can talk coherently about policy. Boycotting writers like Kevin Williamson or Charles Cooke, who are some of the most talented political writers in America is your loss. C,mon, this is ridiculous. I doubt I ever agreed with more than a couple things Christopher Hitchens ever wrote, but he was brilliant, his writing was a joy to behold and I learned about many opposing views, along with being gifted with truly wonderful literary references. Same goes for Maureen Dowd, who is an outstanding writer. Bragging about this decision to close yourself off from opposing opinions does nothing to make America great again, it speaks to a closing of the American mind. That happened on the left with draconian speech codes and hate speech and PC, yet now the Trump supporters are trying to shut down writers who don’t support Trump.

The effect of a political climate where spirited, yet civil debate turns into this sort of mob effort, to shut up opposing views, bodes poorly for our republic, but if at the highest level of our political process, a mass media manipulation campaign was orchestrated and carried out to include sabotaging the opposing party’s primary process, can our republic survive?  I can not prove what happened to me, but in our electronic age, assuredly the electronic connections exist that could prove connections between that Bill Clinton phone call to Donald Trump shortly before Trump announced his campaign and every contact, IF they exist between Clinton operatives and Donald Trump.  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are of a piece – they, in clinical terms, are sociopaths – successful, smart, but at their core, both believe the rules don’t apply to them, so now we have the two most overblown egos in America fighting for the same job.  From experience, I can tell you that Donald Trump, impulsive, vulgar, ruthless is a man barging ahead, but Hillary Clinton is a woman who believes it is her destiny to be the first female President.  And women manipulate and scheme and connive, so in this match-up, despite all Trump’s bluster, Hillary Clinton will win.

I believe in the rule of law and The Constitution of the United States and I believe the FBI should be investigating this!

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Small things for small minds

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A couple days ago I witnessed another small, hopeful sign that actual paper books will not die out.  My 10 year-old granddaughter asked if I would buy a book for her from amazon.com.  Now, I did give all four of my granddaughters Kindle Fires for Christmas, so I assumed she would want the kindle book.  Happily, she told me that she really likes her Kindle Fire, but that when it comes to books, she prefers actual books.  The paperback version cost a dollar less than the kindle book and since it was a Prime item, it should arrive today, with free shipping.  My 13 year-old granddaughter also prefers to have actual books and she and her 10 year-old sister love keeping their bookcase in their room neatly arranged with their growing collection of books, stuffed animals and other knick knacks.

In other tech news from the homefront, where the technologically clueless, like yours truly, encounter and attempt to understand the brave new computer world, recently I’ve been watching my granddaughters use a program from school that they can access on any PC – Wixie, an online authoring platform.  It amazed me how easily they could import photos, graphics, record narration, draw their own pictures and rearrange their page designs with blocks of text.  Of course, one of my sons tried to burst my bubble and tell me that it’s just a kid version of Power Point, but regardless, thinking back to writing journals and trying to assemble my own scrapbooks and booklets as a kid, well, this Wixie program won me over completely.  The girls have used their Kindle Fire tablets and their school Ipads, which they can bring home, to take their own photos and import them into these journals they’ve written and they’re creating professional looking journals that make my blog look paltry.  My 10 year-old granddaughter just won the 5th grade essay contest for the school district with her story on the Holocaust, that she put together using this Wixie program.

Small things for small minds the techno-types will scoff, but it’s really nice that the technology designers keep creating new programs which even idiots like me can easily use.  And when I get confused, I’ve got four granddaughters who can show me what to do, a habit developed in the 80s,  when my own kids were mere toddlers and I handed them the remote to figure out first the VCR player and later the DVD player.  Now, if I could only get my smartphone to connect correctly to the bluetooth in my car.  My old phone connected with no problem, but even following the car manual instructions, this new phone isn’t connected properly – incoming calls come through on the car’s bluetooth and if I make a call from my smart phone from inside my car, the car’s bluetooth turns on, but I can’t use the bluetooth controls on the steering wheel to initiate a call.  Perhaps, I need to hand my phone to my granddaughters and tell them to figure it out.

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February 26, 2016 · 9:11 pm

Imminent Danger Will Robinson

Update:  The link: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/02/cars-lined-up-out-of-town-as-hordes-attend-trump-rally-in-exeter-nh-fox-news-barred-by-fire-marshal/ , which I mentioned in, More alarming tidbits, seems to have been removed from that blog and I checked the The Last Refuge blog, alternately known as Trump Polling Update Central, and can’t find it there either.  The revision of “history” blitz will begin shortly, where the term “virtual reality” takes on more ominous meaning – time to start screenshoting everything.   Of course, the link may reappear shortly to make me look like a nut or liar, but as of 10:39 am EST it is gone.  I urge all of you to do the same.  There’s a much larger plot afoot in America, that goes well beyond Hillary and Bill’s desperate actions, to use any means necessary, to seize the White House.  Ruthless and determined, foreign enemies have worked their way through every corner of American society and power, through decades of concerted and relentless infiltration operations and they are ready to move.

Call this wild conspiracy theory if you choose, but when you see the agitprop moves rapidly progressing  from the lame White House “narratives” to full scale mass media manipulation of our news, on a scale you never imagined, just remember that I warned you first.  On both the political left and right – groups, pundits, websites and entire news networks have been set up to play you, the American people, as mindless idiots.  YUGE foreign fronts are in place to deceive you and throw gasoline on the partisan divides, that they’ve worked for decades to put in place.  I am not alone, trust me, there are many Americans dedicated to protecting America from all enemies, both foreign and domestic, who  saw these threats years ago.  They are all law-abiding, loyal American patriots, not crazy militias and not fomenting any violence whatsoever, in fact, they intend to follow the rule of law, expose the TRUTH and make sure all of these enemies get rounded up as expeditiously as possible! That is our mission!

Update: The gateway pundit link is working at 10:27 am EST, 2/15/16 – I admit to a typing error in that link, but I had gone to the actual site that day and could not locate this story and also to The Last Refuge blog.  It’s very curious about the numbers game with these Trump rallies in the beginning and who he had organizing them, and the effort to fill these venues, plus who did the crowd estimates.  A lot of effort went into hyping his support and the YUGEly overestimated polls.  The Last Refuge blog, a site that made it’s name by dissecting the black grievance industry in America, and one that attracted a lot of overt racists and bigots, in my opinion, quickly became his online polling update center.  I visited that site often trying to understand crowdsourcing, as a possible means to use to expose my impeachment story.  Of course, the proof I need is held by the people who orchestrated the attack on me and not through crowdsourcing.  Over the years, I’ve explored trying to contact real journalists, I’ve relayed my story with names, dates and details to a few men with the connections within the Army to get at the facts, I explored politics chat rooms, comment sections on various online sites, facebook and finally I started this blog.  This blog was started at the urging of a friend, who told me that I have good ideas and should write my own blog.  A few weeks into the blog – an epiphany struck that perhaps this blog could serve as my force multiplier to tell my story.  Yes, I wrote my story in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner and used “cutesy names” (pseudonyms for my own protection), and in that annoying third person for a personal story, but hey, the truth is that third person gave me a little emotional distance, because I still wake up often with nightmares.  I just wanted to be honest and acknowledge an error on my part with the link above.

Life for me since ’99 is an effort at keeping fear at bay and trying to still live my life.  It’s a struggle not to become like Alex Jones and see a conspiracy behind every corner, but assuredly for that retired general to show up here and attack me, when the only outside activity I engaged in was that Excite message board on impeachment, left me no doubt there were other people who sent him (a conspiracy).  My husband was ready to retire from the Army and I was at home taking care of my family.  Someone sent that general and the attack used to try and silence me was not cheap. It’s a lot like the Elizabeth O’Bagy story – I stumbled upon some inconvenient facts there too and wrote about them on my blog and then posted my information at a popular blog, in their comments section.  During impeachment, I stumbled upon some foreign infiltration and wrote about it in those impeachment threads, making me wonder if thatwtich2016 and their political sideshow was only a much smaller part of  why I was attacked and a concerted effort was made to have me locked away permanently in a state mental hospital.  During those 18 days in that mental health facility,  I could bath, dress, talk coherently, take care of my own personal needs and still had time to listen to just about every other female patient in that mental health facility for 18 days – but they wanted me locked away permanently…

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Filed under American History, Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics, The Constitution, The Media, Uncategorized

On America’s side

“The side I’m on is that of America.  And for very, very positive reasons.”  – Minta Marie Morze

 

A couple weeks ago my 10 year old granddaughter, a very bright student enrolled in the gifted program at her public school, mentioned something she learned at school, which I told her is not correct and what she learned really plays into the problems plaguing America and it also speaks to our future.  My granddaughter said, “America is a democracy.”  Reflexively, I corrected her and said, “No, America is a republic!”  Thus began a stream of back and forth, because as of yesterday she told me that her teacher still says, “America is a democracy.”  I told her again that her teacher is mistaken, because assuredly, America is a republic, set up as a constitutional federal republic.   However, watching the demise of federalism and the reliance on pop culture and public opinion polls to silence dissenting opinion, I’m wondering if America has descended into that hellish, brutish state where on the whims of ginning up anger and use of slick mass media manipulation (propaganda) to sway the mob,  the only thing that matters is the “majority rules”.

On polar ends of the American electorate, this fraying of trust or even understanding of this basic fact crops up in ever disturbing ways.  On the political left, they’ve got  angry mobs taking to the streets to compel justice by force and college bullies silencing opposing views with rules imposed by fiat, “I disagree, so you can’t speak!”.  In the Presidential run they’re wading in a shallow geriatric pool with a dyed-in-the-wool socialist resonating with disenfranchised Democrats and a pathological liar, riding on her gender and spewing paranoid vitriol about some imaginary dangerous right-wing conspiracy out to do her in, and by extension do in the American people too.  She sees a vast right-wing conspiracy around every corner.  Her answer to every problem in America is another federal program, to encroach evermore deeply into the lives of American citizens.

Freedom for local communities and states to manage their own affairs falls to the ever-expanding beast that crushed the very breath of liberty out of not only local and state governments, but out of individual American citizens.  We’ve become a people conditioned to bow to the popular opinion poll on issues, as manipulated by mass media propaganda.  When the left wants to sway Americans to a particular view – big bucks go to various activists and groups (many Soros funded) and the propaganda blitz ensues – Hollywood makes movies and TV shows promoting that view and mainstreaming it into the culture, “experts” hit the airwaves extolling it, and then the media reinforces the idea with polling data, much of it dubious, selling this view as popular and reporters will grill the outliers, who dare speak up against that view, lecturing that the majority of Americans believe the now carefully manufactured and manipulated view.  It’s a type of insidious brainwashing and peals the death of liberty and The Constitution.

Now, on the political right, the use of mass media manipulation has rarely been understood, let alone used, that is until the Trump campaign, which is using the Carville/Begala playbook, as I’ve stated repeatedly.  That’s what I see – Bill Clinton’s perfect triangulation lining up, if Hillary can avoid an indictment.  This post is not going to be a regurgitation of my own conspiracy theory, but here’s the link to my thoughts on that.  Assuredly, as I’ve stated many times, I will not ever vote for Donald Trump, because his campaign highlights the capitulation on the right to accepting manufactured hype about polls over principles.  The heart of conservatism,  weak though it beats, will not survive if it succumbs to the reality TV culture and slick mass media manipulation of Donald Trump, who rambles on about his poll numbers endlessly, but does not hold to conservative principles or even basic civility.

On the right then who, well, Ted Cruz promised to be a principled conservative who would take on Washington and he has stood up against the Washington insiders, but in the process his personal style engendered absolute loathing among his fellow senators, on both sides of the aisle (read Charles Krauthammer’s very astute assessment).  Do I agree with Cruz on the issues?  Absolutely, but here again we get to reports, many which Trump helped spread, that Cruz is so despised that many GOP establishment people would rather support Trump, whom they know is not conservative,  to destroy Cruz, who is.  In a less polarized era and where pop culture celebrity didn’t carry more credence than ideas and republican principles,  most of the other GOP candidates, admittedly with both pluses and minuses in my view, would still be able to gain some traction.  Every single GOP candidate running against Trump offers more coherent policy, offers complete sentences and thoughts,  and from this Mom and grandmother, displays better manners.  Trump may be mega-rich, but he behaves like a boorish jerk!

With Trump monopolizing the media cycle, with the aid of the mainstream media selling people on polls over principles,  none of their messages even get noticed as the GOP’s Paris Hilton spews mostly incomprehensible gibberish.  In fact, Paris Hilton actually marketed a clearer campaign message in her cute video (see above) with easily understandable policy positions, but disgruntled GOP base voters project their hopes and beliefs onto the blank canvas that is Trump’s “making America great again”, because assuredly if you write out Trump’s rambling speeches and comments, there’s a lot less there than you’d imagine and a whole lot of conflicting ideas, beliefs, proposals, all overshadowed by the relentless repetition that he is winning in the polls (popular).   He’s created this aura of “inevitability”, which now is reaping a snowball effect, as more and more GOP kingmakers are weighing their options and opting to throw in with Trump, despite reservations that Trump is even loyal to the Republican party – they are willing to toss the reins of their party to a man who converted less than a year ago and has spouted conflicting gibberish, all based on he’s a winner and great at making deals.   Trump is already working out deals with those despised GOP establishment folks his supporters want destroyed.  Trump admitted he talked to Mitch McConnell last month – so yes, the backroom cronyism moves full-speed ahead.

That’s the gist of Trump’s campaign, because I dare anyone to actually make lists of Trump’s statements on various topics to include the incomplete sentences too, compare how they line up for consistency, try to discern core principles, then look at what he said with whom he was speaking (he’s a chameleon and can cozy up to Bill Clinton as easily as Rush Limbaugh on the golf course).  Finally, when you’ve done that honest assessment, devoid of how you feel, analyze how many times he repeated his poll numbers and stated he is winning and look at how many times he said that to divert attention from an issue or question he did not answer.  It’s a deliberate media manipulation tactic and it’s one perfected by the American political left, not GOP political operatives.

Here are a a few other oddities with the Trump campaign, from someone who has followed presidential campaigns since I was 8 years old in 1968.  Trump wrote about not liking to shake hands in one of his books – he has a germ thing and doesn’t want dirty people touching him.  Has he ever done the usual shaking hands that’s par for the course in politics?  From what I have seen he flies in, does his rallies and flies back out, then does his “connecting” with voters via late night Twitter attacks and the cable news circuit, not up close and personal.  His campaign started with Roger Stone as his campaign manager.  Stone quit or was fired in August, when the Trump/Megyn Kelly dust-up happened.  Oddly enough, Stone is still out there speaking for Trump and no other visible campaign advisers or spokespeople emerged until November, when this former Tea Party activist, Kat Pierson, started hitting the airwaves as the Trump spokesperson.  Stone, according to Wikipedia, has a book due out January 26, 2016 – “Jeb! And the Bush Crime Family”.  Note that since Stone quit or was fired he seems uneasy and nervous whenever he appears on TV defending Trump – something smells off to me, but hey I’m a woman and we roll with that female intuition thing.

Another thing I noticed is that the Trump camp sure compiled massive opposition research, which Trump and his campaign advisers (whomever they really are) dump these nasty stink bombs at the most strategically brilliant times.  For a novice politician, who can’t even spit out coherent political policies, the political astuteness of both content and timing of these attacks seems quite incredible.  Any GOP competitor rises in the polls – boom, the Trump campaign dumps a full payload.  The Trump campaign even seems to be feeding opposition research to The Last Refuge blog, which has become Trump Polling Update Central, and when Mark Levin came out criticizing Trump for attacking Cruz, yesterday that blog ran this hit piece of opposition research asserting the son of Levin’s fianceé works on the Cruz campaign.  For Trump, who isn’t much on the details, his campaign is more effective than the Dem operatives who launched that Bush DWI stink bomb years ago.  The irony of The Last Refuge blog is they no longer welcome opposing opinions from actual conservatives.  It’s Trump or the road, and they ran this hit piece on Levin, which appears to be opposition research (sleaze to damage Levin’s credibility) provided to them by the Trump campaign.  If Trump ends up exposed as a fraud, there will be a lot of very angry populist mobs, with so many conservatives investing so much hope and belief in Trump, so hope I am wrong about Trump being a fraud, as this could get very ugly, very quickly.

National Review orchestrated a “Stop Trump” campaign, ostensibly to save conservatism.  My friend, Minta, sent me an email last night stating:

“This new issue of National Review is a big problem, but not for the reasons someone might think. The general view around here is that instead of the authors writing a manifesto about what Conservatism is, and what it means, they look as though they are attacking one person. They could have achieved the better result by supporting someone like Cruz. I love the authors of the Nat’l Review this time, but they are risking looking like elitist snobs. Where were these manifestos when Lois Lerner wasn’t indicted, when the IRS was going after the Tea Parties, when the military was being dismantled, when the VA was shown to be anti-military?”

Minta got it exactly right, the Trump supporters get angry when other conservatives disagree and conservative stalwarts like George Will end up screamed at by populist pundits like Bill O’Reilly, another speaker for the little people, who also is  a friend of Trump’s, so when Trump doesn’t articulate his positions clearly, O’Reilly helpfully fills in the blanks on what Trump meant and does character references for Trump too.   In this environment, Trump’s supporters are emotionally invested in Trump, in the same way Obama supporters became cultish in their belief that one man could singlehandedly transform America.  They want a Messiah or a strongman, not a President, with clear CONSTITUTIONAL checks on his/her power.   I want less government control and less power in Washington’s hands, especially after President Obama’s imperial presidency.   Herein is why I don’t think Cruz will ever gain much traction – his fellow GOP establishment peers in Washington want him annihilated and Cruz talks like an elitist Harvard lawyer.  Cruz has nowhere to go to attract voters, if he moves to the middle he loses the conservative base voters who stuck with him, the GOP establishment is throwing in with Trump and moderates will never gravitate to Cruz, with his hardline conservative record and on top of that he comes across as an elitist Harvard lawyer who talks down to the little people.  He is not someone your average Joe would want to have a beer with.   Rubio, Christie, Kasich all have more personal appeal frankly.  They come across as nice people.  Jeb is doomed by his last name, Carson hasn’t been able to convey he’s a viable Presidential choice and Fiorina, smart, does her homework, but she always comes across too scripted and worse than that she usually seems angry and uppity.  She does not convey much personal warmth.

Trump has severely damaged the entire GOP field with his scorched earth campaign style, so it’s hard for me to envision any of them being able to repair that damage by November, but this is the season where anything is possible.  And on the bright side, for this conservative, at least the Democrats have an even worse mess on their hands.  Whatever happens, the larger question of,  “Are we a democracy, where angry mobs silence dissent and popularity polls rule over principles or are we a republic grounded in The Constitution?” may become the defining issue of the 2016 campaign.  In the meantime I am looking for some good books or sources to explain Our Republic to my 10 year-old granddaughter, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Uncategorized

No crows in sight

With the 2016 presidential race well under way, foreign policy “strategies” get tossed about, but so far no candidate has offered a clear policy or worse demonstrated a clear understanding of the threats facing America.  While the GOP candidates jostle to outdo each other on sounding tough, Hillary offers more of the Obama failed policies and Sanders doesn’t even have a foreign policy.

My frustration with the foreign policy “experts” centers squarely on the cherry-picking of events, intelligence and “expertise” to bolster domestic partisan political views rather than dealing with what General Mike Flynn referred to as it’s time to “get real”.  In order to “get real” it’s way past time to look at American foreign policy actions and then assess how those actions actually fared in achieving the strategic objectives.  Another big problem rests with the experts themselves, whose careers and reputations become intricately linked to the policies, leading to myopic clinging to bad policies or policies that worked in the short term, but also instigated large scale, long-term blowback.

For instance, President Reagan armed the mujahadin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union and thwart Soviet expansion.  Certainly, the Soviets were thwarted, but those radical mujahadin evolved into Al Qaeda.  Too many Republicans try to  ignore or gloss over that nexus of arming radical Salafist nuts, to later find those weapons and training used against the US.  The Clinton administration spent the 1990s trying to minimize and trivialize  the threat Al Qaeda posed, preferring to turn a blind eye to increasing radicalization and targeting of Western and US interests around the world.

In Bosnia the Clinton administration embarked on choosing a side in a bloody civil war and chose to arm Bosnian Muslim radicals, while the Western press propagandized the combatants, turning some into saints and some into evil incarnate.  No clear US national security interest ever surfaced for US intervention, just a lot of feel good humanitarian claptrap.  Atrocities  were committed by not only the Serbs, but by the Bosnian Muslims too.  In the intervening years, arming and aiding the Bosnian Muslims has allowed radical Islamists and Iran to use Bosnia as a European training ground and smuggling corridor into Europe.  John Smith, wrote a piece on this yesterday, “Clinton’s Bosnia Adventure Goes South”. John Schindler, at the XX Committee blog, had a piece on this a few weeks ago.  Schindler has researched the Bosnia misadventure extensively, penned a book on the subject, but he also offers many free links to information at his blog: “Operation CUT: Bosnia versus the Islamic State”.

After 9/11, the US embarked on a “war on terror”, which took several strategic paths, but none of them achieved a decisive defeat of “terror” or defeat of the Islamist terrorists waging that war.  Throughout the GWB years, adminsitration officials endlessly announced the death of Al Qaeda #2 or #3 or “high-ranking”, all to no avail, because this decapitation strategy doesn’t work to degrade or defeat Islamist terrorist organizations.  John McCreary’s Nightwatch printed a very insightful comment on this approach 11/7/13.

“It also highlights a degenerative leadership pattern resulting from the US program of leadership decapitation. First, there is always someone waiting for the chance to be leader. Second, the new leaders are less experienced and wise than the men they replace. Third, the new generation of leaders is more extreme and theologically rigid than its predecessors. Finally, the new leaders tend to be unknown to intelligence relative to their predecessors. Decapitation is not a permanent solution to an insurgency or an uprising.”

The Obama administration continues this decapitation strategy, without any positive strategic outcome.

President Obama decided to try a novel and extremely foolhardy approach to extract the US from the stuck military occupations of the Bush administration.  Yes, partisan politics aside, the ouster of Saddam Hussein was a strategic mistake.  It destabilized the region even more and emboldened Iran.  Enter President Obama and he compounds the errors with catastrophic blunders – announcing a withdrawal date before he even got troops on the ground in Afghanistan for his ballyhooed surge, that never materialized.  The Taliban hunkered down to wait us out and they sit poised now to seize control of Afghanistan after we leave.  In Iraq, Obama decided to pull out too and created a power vacuum, which the Islamic State capitalized on setting up a pseudo-state.

From the minute the glorious Arab Spring hit the news, an endless cycle of feel-good, fairy tale “democratic” beliefs replaced sound, hard-nosed strategic analysis.  In Egypt, the US supported the ouster of a staunch US ally, all to champion the Muslim Brotherhood, which US officials, from the President to his intelligence gurus James Clapper and John Brennan, to his clueless Secretary of State, with her MB affiliated top aide by her side, proclaimed as a mostly “secular” organization.  Of course, that was a lie, mayhem in Egypt ensued and the Egyptian military restored some semblance of order, albeit  within an autocratic military regime state structure.  In the process of tossing aside Mubarak, US credibility plummeted, because now all leaders in that region know the US can not be trusted.  In that strategic blunder, President Obama cavalierly created an existential threat to Israel, the US’s closest ally in the region.  Israel had to rethink it’s entire national security strategy when the Sinai security framework disappeared.

Moving on, the Obama administration and many GOP leaders, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham jumped onto the Arab Spring bandwagon too.  Libya became another strategic disaster – the US displaced a strongman dictator, who had been cooperating with US anti-terrorism efforts, all to support some imaginary moderate rebel “freedom-fighters”.  That these rebels turned out to be Al-Qaeda-affiliated and Islamist radicals should surprise no one, because here again the intelligence contained these facts, but politicians chose to believe the myths.  In the case of Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received updates of unvetted information from her long-time friend, Sidney Blumenthal, who was promoting his own business interests and her own privately-funded intelligence operative, Tyler Drumheller.

Who was the US arming in Libya?  And where did the US send those weapons it was gathering up at Benghazi?  Well, the likely answers are radical Islamists (you know, the types who are ideological bedfellows of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State).     The action then moved to Syria, where the Obama administration and many Republicans decided it was in US national interest to oust a dictator and create another power vacuum.  The balanced weighing of vetted intelligence again fell to the “experts” outside of the US intelligence apparatus.  In Syria, the Obama administration, many top Republicans, neocon pundits and the media all relied on one young woman as the fount of knowledge on the Syrian rebels – one Elizabeth O’Bagy.  How this one young woman became the go-to definitive source that both Secretary of State, John Kerry and GOP leader, John McCain relied on defies reason.  How did this one young woman become THE source the US government was relying on???

In Syria, more of the same, the Obama administration had the CIA arming “moderate” Syrian rebels, although all of these rebels are Islamists and none of them indicates a willingness to respect ethnic and religious minorities, but these are the “moderates” the Obama administration chose to back.

GOP candidates like Rubio, still tout the neocon talking points and the one that irks me the most is the charge that if only Obama had intervened sooner in Syria civil war, then things would be different.  Why in the hell and by what reasoning is it in US national interests to jump into the middle of a civil war in a country that is not of vital national security interest to the US?  This same humanitarian argument is the same one President Clinton used in Bosnia.

And here’s where we are at – none of the candidates on either side wants to actually sit down and objectively assess the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to US foreign policy.  Every strategy comes with unforeseen, unpredictable blowback and consequences.  Ignoring these unpleasant realities, to prop up partisan, not quite strategic talking points, leaves us falling further and further afield of  comprehending the reality on the ground and of being able to choose a better path forward.  We are lost in the land of false narratives, faux experts and fallacious reasoning.  Surveying the 2016 field, as far as the eye can see,  it’s very unlikely any of the 2016 candidates will be able to cut through the crap and as JK advised, “learn to be a crow and seek the golden nuggets” from the pile.   The 2016 field appears to be all magpies and mockingbirds – no crows in sight.

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