Friday, January 29, 2016



The Obama Administration Needs to Abandon Its Petraeus Obsession
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired General David Petraeus.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is now thinking of retroactively taking away one or two of Petraeus’s four stars. The potential demotion in rank, opposed by the Army, is intended as further punishment for the misdemeanor to which he pleaded guilty last year. Petraeus accepted two years of probation and paid a $100,000 fine for allowing his mistress, Paula Broadwell, to read classified information for research on the biography she was writing about Petraeus.

Carter apparently wants to ensure that Petraeus is treated in the same fashion as other miscreant generals and admirals who have lost rank. Yet there is no evidence that Broadwell (who enjoyed a military security clearance of her own) ever shared the classified information with anyone or disclosed it in the biography.

That does not excuse the bad judgment of Petraeus. But it does invite an obvious comparison with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She not only sent classified information over her unsecured e-mail to several individuals but remains untruthful about that fact.

To this day, we still do not know how many people received classified information via Clinton’s e-mails, or whether hackers tapped into her non-approved private server. By any sense of commensurability, the Obama Justice Department should charge Clinton in the fashion it did Petraeus. If she goes free, the Obama administration confirms the suspicion that there are no longer any security laws for government officials — particularly when they are powerful and their politics agree with the president’s.

Petraeus was not just any four-star general. He was the most effective and talented American general since General Matthew Ridgway, who saved what appeared to be a lost Korean War. Petraeus and his team promoted the so-called surge of troops into Iraq, and enlisted tens of thousands of Iraqis to join the American effort to defeat radical terrorists and insurrectionists.

Petraeus’s efforts saved Iraq — and thousands of American and Iraqi lives. Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with a mostly quiet Iraq. Petraeus’s legacy explains why Vice President Joe Biden claimed Iraq as possibly one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” Obama himself boasted in late 2011 that he was pulling out all U.S. forces from a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” Iraq.

That claim was true — until Obama’s politically driven skedaddle from Iraq created a vacuum to be filled by Islamic State terrorists.

Practically, it might not be wise for Obama to humiliate Petraeus, thereby revisiting the circumstances of the general’s strange exit from the Obama administration.

The media have rarely noted that the administration learned of Petraeus’s imbroglio sometime in the summer of 2012, right in the middle of the Obama reelection campaign. Yet Petraeus’s sudden, unexpected resignation as CIA director came just three days after Obama’s reelection. What exactly the CIA was doing in Libya, and what happened in Benghazi, are likewise murky.

The current puritanical frenzy with regard to our military is sacrificing battlefield talent. We never would have won World War II had we shared the administration’s present obsessions.

The hard-drinking and womanizing Admiral Ernest King was the architect of the brilliant comeback of the U.S. Navy, which had been crippled at Pearl Harbor. Less than four years later under King, it utterly destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy. The current puritanical frenzy with regard to our military is sacrificing battlefield talent.

General George S. Patton in 1943 slapped two soldiers in Sicily whom he thought were slackers, but who were probably ill. Yet the career of the reprimanded Patton was ultimately salvaged. He went on to save tens of thousands of American lives in Europe with his audacious armored drives and often brilliant encirclements.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower quite possibly had an affair with his chauffeur, Kay Summersby, in the midst of overseeing the Normandy operations. Should we now strip the long-dead Eisenhower of his fifth star, given that he may well have discussed confidential information with Summersby while overseeing an army of 2 million?

Iconic General Douglas MacArthur carried on an affair with an underaged Filipina actress, Isabel Rosario Cooper, while he was top U.S. commander in the Philippines in 1930. Should MacArthur have been relieved of duty before he led a Pacific offensive that liberated the Philippines from Japanese occupation?

Petraeus has lost his reputation. He resigned his job as CIA director. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor. He was fined. He was put on probation.

Enough is enough with Petraeus. It is time to move on for an administration that threw away a stable Iraq — once saved by the man it still hounds.


— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Election and In Praise of Iowa



The Election and In Praise of Iowa
Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

There has been a lot of talk about how Iowans are notorious about deciding at the last minute.

Great!

My father worked for NASA from the Mercury Project through the start of the Space Shuttle. 

When Astronauts were asked to work through a life-or-death decision if they only had ten seconds of oxygen left, the answer was: Think for nine seconds and then act.

That is Iowa. Hurray!

Semper Fi,
Mike

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Misreading Bernie's blather



Misreading Bernie's blather
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

 
The rise of Bernie Sanders is much more troublesome than most appreciate. 

Yes, he is a guy who has no chance of becoming president and I dismiss him for what he is: an eighty-year old ideological refugee of the Soviet past; an appealingly willful man joyfully wallowing in the mud of a tragic era. 

But at another level, that dismissal is a mistake.

We who have seen one-party socialism at work know it well. We know it is a stale, sterile and endlessly destructive system. We well know of the hundreds of millions of people who unjustly endured lifetimes of poverty and the millions more who perished under its bloody "enemy of the people -- enemy of the state" political madness.

Here is the danger: Many young Americans have no similar understanding.

Socialism collapsed twenty-five years ago denying them a frame of reference to gage the merits of our system.

The only political failures they are familiar with are ours and their concept of economic failure often begins with the Great Recession -- a failure of the democratic free market system. 

Socialism, on the other hand, is new, novel and to them, untried. 

In that experiential vacuum, socialism’s wicked past is swept clean and the young are presented with political-economic theory rich in simplistically false promises. Without an understanding of its past, it rises again as a dangerously seductive evil.

We are facing a horrible new version of Back to the Future and we ignore that reality at our own peril. 

Mike

Monday, January 25, 2016

Let’s hear it For the ‘Hawkish Upstart”


Let’s hear it For the ‘Hawkish Upstart” 

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

There isn’t much in the current political scene that brings a smile to my face, but the opening paragraph in this Politico article did:

Sen. Tom Cotton, the hawkish upstart who’s already made waves railing against the Iran nuclear deal and government surveillance programs, is now leading a new rebellion against a bipartisan effort to overhaul the criminal justice system — hoping to torpedo one of the few pieces of major legislation that could pass Congress in President Barack Obama’s final year.

Any guess as to where the sympathies of the author, Seung Min Kim, lie?

I should remind Politico that Groucho Marx took Freedonia to war because Ambassador Trentino called him an upstart.

Senator Cotton is waging a different kind of war in his effort to stop the early release of thousands of convicted drug dealers in the midst of a heroin epidemic:

GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support. 

“It would be very dangerous and unwise to proceed with the Senate Judiciary bill, which would lead to the release of thousands of violent felons,” Cotton said later in an interview with POLITICO. “I think it’s no surprise that Republicans are divided on this question … [but] I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do.”

Cotton reportedly received support at the lunch from Senators David Perdue (another “upstart” willing to stand up for law and order and the rule of law) and Jim Risch.

Their efforts may be having the desired effect on Majority Leader McConnell. According to Politico:

Last week, McConnell — who is often hesitant to press ahead on issues that divide his 54-member conference — indicated a breather of sorts on the bill, saying GOP senators would take some time to get educated on the measure. 
Those comments discouraged some supporters, since any major pause could spell doom for the bill this year. In a couple of months, the GOP-led Congress will turn its attention to its top legislative priority — budget and appropriations bills — while individual lawmakers shift into full campaign mode.


I doubt that, once in full campaign mode, Republican legislators will want to explain to their constituents why they are backing President Obama’s pet legislation — a jail break for drug dealers. As Senator Risch reportedly asked during the party lunch: shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?

Yes, it should, for reasons of public safety and political prudence.

BY THE WAY: Politico gets it wrong when it claims that Senator Cotton has “railed” against government surveillance programs. The Senator has been a leading opponent of attempts to undermine our ability to find out what terrorists are plotting.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Idiots and Facism


Gloves off, next!

Idiots and Facism
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,
 
OK, so here is another rant but it is short. New Rule: Politeness has failed. 

No longer will I courteously explain that communism and nationalist socialism/fascism are NOT polar opposites of the political spectrum.

From now on, my response to the espousers of this dribble is: “Only an idiot would hold such a position.”

By idiot I mean an espouser who is ignorant (willfully or otherwise) or both stupid and ignorant (I have yet to meet an informed fellow who mouths this rattrap of an idea out of pure stupidity).

Let us get this straight: If we were to make a Venn diagram (apologies to the ignorant) based on the set of characteristics of communism and nationalist socialism/fascism, the overlapping region would surely exceed 50%. The two philosophies are closely related – which is why they fought each other so desperately.

The real polar opposites are radical socialism (the "terrible two" above) and libertarianism.

If that belief system is added to the mix then it is unlikely that it would have much of any common area with radical socialism. 

Citing libertarianism has the advantage of providing clarity, accuracy and most of all HONESTY to the discussion.

The solution is ideal. Having been a hater of both forms of radical socialism, I never fit into the idiot’s model. But correctly add in libertarianism and I do. 

Believing in free markets and limited government, I would land somewhere on the side of the mean tending towards libertarianism.  

How wonderful!

We finally have a truthful model and the idiots be damned.

Semper Fi,
Mike

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Why The Islamic State Can Never Win



Why The Islamic State Can Never Win
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

The Islamic State will never win because is aims are fatally flawed. Why? The Islamic State’s strategy is based on the concept that there are no noncombatants in war.

This is an even more extreme and equally futile version of the radical nationalist socialist pathology that gripped tens of millions of people in the twentieth century and it will end just as badly for the Islamic State if not more so.

Making a blood enemy of every living being of a society you are opposed to must devolve into genocide. Equally true, both sides will realize that endstate, forcing an existential crisis.

The Islamic State, like the earlier nationalist socialists, wrongly define the struggle as a contest of wills – a test of faith – in which they are supremely confident in a moral-ethical superiority that must end in their victory.

The truth is that the Islamic State is composed of little more than some surreal “replicant” idiots of their 20th century radical socialist predecessors. Viewed through the lens of their paranoiac misogyny, they are literally dead men walking.

The doom of the Islamic State lies in misunderstanding tipping points. It believes that terrorism will lead to paralysis tipping point and that paralysis on the part of the enemy will allow them to achieve victory.

The truth is that the more successful the terrorists are then the more they close in on an unwanted antithetical tipping point, just as a mathematical function inexorably converges on its limit. If it ever reaches that extreme, the victims will realize that they are truly in a “kill or be killed” world and the Islamic State is a done deal – game over – end of days. 

The erstwhile victims, possessing vastly superior numbers, resources and willpower will eradicate the Islamic State just like a Venus flytrap erases every trace of the captured spider.