Barry's dilemma, the world is watching!

What would the Penguin do to take over Gotham?

Of course, the fish eater was much more transparent!

Why Obama's rhetoric doesn't work...
Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard


Since he first appeared on the national stage in the summer of 2004, Barack Obama has stood for national unity. He has said he believes in compromise. He has advertised himself as a post-partisan president who will bridge the divide between liberals and conservatives. During the campaign, Michelle Obama went so far as to say that her husband would fill the "hole in our souls." The country is "fed up," the president said in his July 25 address to the nation, "with a town where compromise has become a dirty word."

Whether Obama truly believes in national unity, or simply says these things for political gain, is irrelevant. Let's assume Obama wants to be a statesman of import who leads the whole country, not just a political party. If that's the case, why does he consistently undermine his calls for unity by pitting one group of Americans against another?

Consider the president's speech this week on the debt ceiling. I can't remember a more transparently cynical attempt by a president to position himself for reelection. On one side, Obama says, are himself, the majority of Americans, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom support a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction. On the other side are "a significant number of Republicans," the "wealthiest Americans," the "biggest corporations," and all those who want to "place a greater burden on working families."

In just a few words, Obama divides the country by party, class, and aspiration. The message of his speech is not that reducing spending will enable all Americans to thrive. In Obama's world of zero-sum politics, one group prospers at another's expense. In the name of fairness, Obama seeks to lead the majority ("middle-class families") against the minority ("millionaires and billionaires").

Obama not only subverts his stated purpose of unity. He threatens his larger purpose of reelection as well. For much of our history, Americans have shown distaste for class-based populist appeals, whether on the right or the left. They have consistently preferred a consensus model of politics in which "a rising tide lifts all boats" and the divide between rich and poor is less important than the American dream of self-improvement. The message that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America" helped Obama win the White House in 2008. His abandonment of consensus politics for coalition politics may help him lose it in 2012.

From Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt, NRO

Come On, Man, Write It Down Before Somebody Forgets It    It sounds like an Onion story: [Chuck] Todd asked Carney about the White House's reluctance to release its plan to deal with the national debt and raising the debt ceiling. Carney acknowledged the White House was playing games. "We're showing a lot of leg," he said. When Todd pressed for details -- "Why not just release it?" -- Carney seemed surprised. "You need it written down?" What a difference two years makes. In the spring of 2009, with Republicans in the minority in the House of Representatives, the White House and its Democratic allies were demanding specifics. The House GOP had to produce an alternative budget, the White House demanded, in order to show that they were serious about governing. To paraphrase the CBO, they can't score a lot of leg. Guy Benson is left incredulous: Yes, actually, wedoneed "something printed." Since his unmitigated failure of a budget was unanimously defeated in the Senate, this president has refused to offer a specific plan of his own on virtually anything at all. Instead, he talks about "visions" and "contours" and "frameworks" -- and tries to blame his opponents when his poor leadership is exposed. Over the last five days, the president has (a)undermined a bargain with John Boehner by introducing an unacceptable eleventh-hour condition, (b) rejected "out of hand" a bipartisan compromise that he found to be politically unpalatable, and (c) delivered a speech that painted his opponents as the intractable extremists. In light of this behavior, it's entirely reasonable for Americans to wonder what, precisely, Barack Obama's proposed solution might be. Today, the White House dismissively waived off that question as a GOP talking point and condescendingly inquired if the journalist who dared to ask it was capable of taking notes. I'll close with an unsolicited word of advice, and a friendly reminder from the CBO director. The advice: When you're already plumbing new depths of unpopularity, dialing up your arrogance isn't a winning strategy. Even David Brooks finds it unseemly. At Pajamas Media, Bryan Preston sees this as another manifestation of the legendary Obama work ethic: Yes, Jay, the American people elected your boss in the hope that he might occasionally do his job. Show his work. Demonstrate a little competence once in a while. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is. As we blogged yesterday, Obama's bizarre reticence to lead is as much a headache for his own party as it is for the GOP. Maybe more, since Reid et al just can't come out and blast him the way they would a Republican president. So Congress sidelined him over the weekend, but as long as he's the president he can't really be sidelined: He has to sign something. And agitate against whatever is heading for his desk before he signs it,of course.

Sen. Rubio: "We Don't Need New Taxes, We Need New Taxpayers"

Watch the video... http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/07/sen_rubio_we_dont_need_new_taxes_we_need_new_taxpayers.html  

Extract... 

"Our total debt is about to reach the size of our entire economy. That's kind of the framework in which we're operating in when we discuss this. Now, I actually think we're closer to some sort of agreement on this, Sen. Ayotte, than a lot of people realize. 

"I've heard the term thrown around in the last couple days, a 'balanced approach' to dealing with it, and I think there's agreement that there has to be a balanced approach. I certainly have always said that you cannot simply cut your way out of this problem. You have to have a combination of cuts and growth, growth and revenues to government. I think the debate is, how do you accomplish these two things? And I'm not going to focus so much on the cut part of it today. I want to focus on the revenue part of it because that's the part the president and some of my colleagues here have focused on over the last day, this idea of getting more revenue or this new term, 'revenue enhancers,' which is Washington talk for more money to the government.

"And, according to the president, some in his party, most in his party I should say, the idea is simple that...in America that are making a lot of money, more money than maybe they should be making, and they just need to pay more in taxes. And if these people pay more in taxes, then all of these problems will get a lot easier to deal with. That's kind of the viewpoint they bring to this debate.

"Yesterday, we saw, and I know tomorrow the majority leader, we'll be voting here on the floor on something the majority leader has offered up, something called the 'sense of the Senate,' which people watching at home may wonder, 'What is that?' Well, that basically means what's on the Senate's mind. The 'sense of the Senate,' this thing that we're going to be voting on tomorrow, is basically that you've got a bunch of people in this country that make over a million dollars, and that these people need to do more to help with the debt. That's basically the 'sense of the Senate' that there's going to be a vote on tomorrow -- very interesting things.

"So, I looked at it because ultimately this is a serious issue. So, let's explore this with an open mind. Let's not be doctrinaire, let's not be blindly ideological. Let's look at this from a common sense perspective, this idea that all these millionaires and billionaires, if they just paid more taxes, these problems would be solved. Let's analyze it. This is all about math. 

"And here's the fact: the fact is it doesn't solve the problem. First of all, if you taxed these people at 100 percent, basically next year you said, 'Look, every penny you make next year the government's going to take it from you,' it still doesn't solve the debt. Not only does that not solve the debt problem, but I looked at a host of other -- a great publication that came out today from the Joint Economics Committee, our colleague Sen. DeMint chairs it. And it kind of outlines some of the tax increases being proposed by our colleagues in the Democratic Party and the president to solve the debt problem. And you add them all up, you add all of these things up -- the jet airplanes, the oil companies, all of the other things they talk about -- you put them all together in one big batch, and you know what it does? It basically deals with nine days and 23 hours worth of deficit spending. Nine days and 23 hours of deficit spending. That's how much it solves. So all this talk about going after people that make all this money, it buys you nine days and 23 hours. Let's round it off. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. It buys them 10 days of deficit spending reduction. That's what all this stuff rounds up to.

“So, here's the bottom line: These tax increases they're talking about. These so-called revenue enhancers, they don't solve the problem. So what do we do then? Because clearly we have to do two things.

"One, we have to hold the line on spending, if you keep digging yourself in the hole, the hole is going to bury you. But the other thing is, how do you start generating revenue for government so we can start paying down this debt? And that’s what the debate should be about.

“We already know these taxes they're talking about don't work. So, here's what works. Here is what I would suggest works in a balanced approach, using the president's terminology. Let's stop talking about new taxes and start talking about creating new taxpayers, which basically means jobs. Now, here in Washington, this debt is the number one issue on everyone's mind, and rightfully so. It is a major issue. But everywhere else in the real world, the number one issue on people's minds are jobs. And I'll tell you every other problem facing America -- a mortgage crisis, home foreclosure crisis, this debt problem -- all of these issues get easier to deal with if people are gainfully employed across America. 

"And the impact that unemployment's having across this country is devastating. We hear about unemployment in facts and figures. They give us numbers, Sen. Ayotte, 'Oh, X percent people are unemployed.' Well, there's stories behind every one of those people. You know who a lot of these people are that are unemployed in America? They are people that have done everything they've been asked to do, and they've done it right. Maybe they served their country overseas, maybe they went to college and got a degree and now came back home. Maybe they worked for 10 or 20 years and did a really good job at work, and now, you know what, they can't find a job. Or maybe they were lucky enough to find a job after losing their original job, but it pays them half as much, and they work twice as long. 

"That is the real face of unemployment in America, of people that are hurting. And our job here is to do everything we can to make it easier for them to find a job, not harder. And I think that's what we have to do when it comes to a balanced approach and when we talk about revenue.

“We don't need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. And then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. And that's what we should be focused on, and that's what we're not focused on. 

“So you look at all these taxes that are being proposed, and here's what I say. I say we should analyze every single one of them through the lens of job creation, issue number one in America. I want to know which one of these taxes that they're proposing will create jobs. I want to know how many jobs are going to be created by the plane tax? How many jobs are going to be created by the oil company tax that I heard so much about? How many jobs are created by going after the millionaires and billionaires the president talks about? I want to know: How many jobs do they create?

“Because I'll tell you, and I'm going to turn it over to Sen. Ayotte in a second. I'm interested in her perspective on this as a job creator, as the spouse of a job creator who runs a small business, as someone like me who just came off the campaign trail. Let me tell you something. I traveled the state of Florida for two years campaigning. I have never met a job creator who told me that they were waiting for the next tax increase before they started growing their business. I've never met a single job creator who's ever said to me I can't wait until government raises taxes again so I can go out and create a job.

"And I'm curious to know if they say that in New Hampshire because they don't say that in Florida. And so my view on all this is I want to know how many jobs these tax increases the president proposes will create because if they're not creating jobs and they're not creating new taxpayers, they're not solving the problem."

Michael Barone

Being There 

Obama is not so much Jimmy Carter 2.0 as the second coming of Chauncey Gardiner.

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown two days before Abe’s birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR anymore.

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, to Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama’s advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There.

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”

“First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Barack Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97–0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.

Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. “We don’t estimate speeches,” Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

Evidently “first we have the spring and summer” was not enough.

Then Obama deputed Vice President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to handle negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Biden apparently did a good job of letting everyone set out their positions and interact.

But last Thursday two influential Republicans, Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Jon Kyl, left the bargaining table and said that they wouldn’t return until Democrats dropped demands for tax increases. After all, if the Democrats hadn’t been able to raise taxes on high earners when they had large majorities in December’s lame-duck session, what makes anyone think this more Republican Congress will raise them now?

Cantor said it was impossible to make progress unless Obama got personally involved. Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid said the same thing. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh from making a bipartisan compromise on public-employee benefits, offered succinct advice: “First, the president can show up.”

Well, Obama has agreed to do that Monday. But while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.

That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.

As for Libya, Obama pretends we’re not involved in “hostilities” and has been content to “lead from behind.” Another sop to the antiwar Left.

Sometimes it seems he’s president of the AFL-CIO, not the U.S.A. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee’s attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation’s No. 1 exporter.

And don’t forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural-gas pipeline from Canada.

On all these issues, Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.

That doesn’t sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Jimmy Carter. More like “then we have fall and winter.”

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2011 The Washington Examiner.

We need a leader with a vision, not a reaction to polls or election cycles...

I have been a member of two unions over the course of my working life.... that's 17+23 years, and never have felt that I could trust "the brotherhood"... example, I have worked at two schools in the district that I work in. Both were hotbeds of union activity. Active members (presidents, etc) were both long-time friends and relatives of mine. There is one basic question that I have  continually brought up, "Can you give the membership an accurate accounting of our $900 per year individual union dues?" They never have! Several years ago they faked it by sending out an expenditures list that was horribly vague, rather than be viewed as an answer to a "brother's" question, it was more a slap in the face.... as in, "Shut up, you don't know what's good for you like we (the central committee) do!"

And what's with the Teamster Union setting up shop in police departments (thirty years now)... and the correct images of Chicago politics and the fox being let loose in the henhouse...

I have remained a member out of misguided obligation. This year with the help of a friend wrote a letter to the union redirecting my dues to the Unity Home (a surprising California law allows this).... but, its time for me to take a stand and simply quit the union! I'm almost ready to retire... Somehow I have to make up for all of my years of turning a blind eye to "the brotherhood"...  so, beware my brothers and sisters, I'll work to reduce your influence.... next!

Twilight of the Unions

Scott Johnson, Powerline

In "The union-owned Democrats" (the Washington Post's headline) and "Union owned and operated" (NRO's headline), Charles Krauthammer devotes his weekly column to compiling the notable services that Barack Obama has performed on behalf of his paymasters in organized labor. "Instructive cases all," Krauthammer comments, "demonstrating how those who lose popular support -- Democrats at the polls, unions in their declining membership -- can subvert and circumvent the popular will by judicial usurpation (Wisconsin) or administrative fiat (Boeing)." It's a story that reeks.

Mark Hemingway provided a comprehensive look at the phenomena in a recent Weekly Standard cover story. Hemingway deduced that the violent spasms of the union struggles we have witnessed in recent months represent death throes. He characterized the situation as "Unionsdämmerung," the twilight of the unions. I think that Hemingway makes a powerful case, but that there should probably be a question mark next to the title.

Hemingway covers a lot of territory in his article and reminds readers of stories that may not have registered in the rush of news this spring. Here Hemingway supports the thesis of his article with a union leader's own assessment of the prospects:

Unions themselves are deeply pessimistic about the future. Until last fall, when he left the SEIU, Stephen Lerner was director of the union's high-profile campaign for reform of the banking and finance industries. He's not just any other union official​--​according to Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein, Lerner is "considered one of the smartest organizers, if not the smartest organizer, working in the labor movement right now. .  .  . At a time when a lot of people in labor have become, if not resigned to their fate as a marginal force in American life, increasingly confused as to how to reverse it, Lerner has a lot of fight left in him."

So how does the labor movement's smartest organizer propose to save unions from irrelevancy?

According to audio of Lerner speaking at a recent closed session at Pace University that was leaked on the Internet, Lerner thinks the labor movement has to "destabilize" the country. There needs to be a mass strike on paying mortgages, student loans, and, bizarrely, local government debt. (How local governments are expected to continue paying the salaries and pensions of unionized employees after defaulting on their bonds is unclear.)

Lerner expressed the hope that this would force banks into insolvency. They would then have to renegotiate all their mortgages and loans. It would also "bring down the stock market," depriving the rich of their wealth. Lerner approvingly cited the fatal and destructive riots over austerity measures in Greece and solemnly invoked the famous Cloward-Piven strategy​--​a theory cooked up decades ago by two leftist sociologists that urges forcing the government into a crisis so as to address economic injustice.

Finally, Lerner announced the first target of this campaign​--​JPMorgan Chase. Why? "So a bunch of us around the country think, 'Who would be a really good company to hate?' We decided that would be JPMorgan Chase."

Hemingway quotes Lerner: "Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do." Krauthammer himself intimates the ultimate failure of the favoritism and corruption that are propping up the unions. Along with the other evidence adduced in his article, Hemingway deepens this qualification of the events depicted in Krauthammer's column.

Oops, I've always wondered about all of this as well... how many times can that same phrase be used until everyone knows that something is not right with those who should know better and use it at every turn? BH

Unexpectedly!

Scott Johnson, Powerline 

Michael Barone elaborates on Glenn Reynolds' theme: why is it that after two years, bad economic news is still "unexpected?"

As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.

"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."

"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."

"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.

"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.

Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.

Barone lays part of the blame, at least, on the fact that legacy media are cheerleading for the Obama administration:

It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.

I think that is correct. Nowadays, agenda-driven journalism is about the only kind we have.

Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.

All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Employers aren't creating any more jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.

Do you remember when Democrats accused Presidential candidate George W. Bush of "talking down the economy?" It was a silly charge then, and journalists' efforts to "talk up the economy" today are likely to be equally ineffective. Irrational exuberance is not as easy to generate as some journalists may have believed.

Another must read contributed by Mike Walker, USMC Colonel (retired)

Comments on a dubious e-mail

All,

You are familiar with all manner of bunk communicated via e-mail.  Received the same probably spurious e-mail from two friends today but felt it was worth sending on a few words in reply.  It dealt with Israel, the New York Times, and Islam.  In a nutshell, it posited that the problem facing Israel is Islam. 

Is Islam the primary ‘problem’ facing Israel?  I argue no.  Anti-Semitism is more accurate but still wanting and neither term explains the essential support of the political left in the West.  We need to look carefully at some of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict to get a better understanding.

During the first decades following the birth of the State of Israel the bordering regimes and organizations fighting to destroy Israel were overwhelmingly both secular socialists and Arab nationalists.  This, over time, made them attractive to the western left especially after the Cold War put Israel squarely in the western camp. 

That is the critical fact in understanding why so many in the left in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere are so vehemently anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian today. 

Starting in the 1970’s, the violent radical left (Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, Japanese Red Army, etc) were all brothers and sisters in arms against Israel.  The RAF trained in the Middle East (to include Saddam's Iraq) under the sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups and they coordinated their attacks (recall the hijackings carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization designed to free RAF prisoners in German jails).  The Japanese Red Army was actually formed in Lebanon not Japan and its leader was also a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Their shared opinion on religion was that it was an archaic opiate of the masses à la Marx.  Islam played no role for the radical left, Arab or otherwise, yet the goal, the destruction of the State of Israel, remained unchanged from that of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

These radicals have long been romanticized as heroes by too many on the left both here and abroad.  That means that a pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli policy is de rigueur in those circles today.  If you are an authentic leftist then you must oppose the State of Israel and you must take up the Palestinian cause. There are, however, contradictory forces working away at the ranks in the left that make this issue more controversial and offers a hint to a different outcome in the future.

The main contradictory force came to life with the rise of the Islamic theocracy movement that began in Iran in 1979 under the Shi'a ayatollahs that sent shock waves throughout the Islamic world.  This gave rise to bin Laden as a leader in a Sunni counterrevolutionary movement and re-legitimized the Sunni theocracy philosophy preached by the Muslim Brotherhood.

It created an endless friction point for the far left that abhors the concept of God, religion, and the male-dominated culture associated with radical Islam.  This works to weaken the decades-old and unquestioning support of the Palestinian cause and rejection of the State of Israel by the left.

The second is the inescapable fact that there are millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians at the same place.  Neither is going to go away and somehow both need a state.  That is the legitimate argument that strengthens the left in its anti-Israeli crusade yet causes a dilemma regarding the fate of the citizens of Israel except for the most extreme and genocidal of their brethren.

The final force at work is the old adage 'My enemy's enemy is my friend.'  Both the hard left in the West and the Islamist radicals hate the capitalist democratic system.  As it stands today, both are more than ready to hold their respective noses and grasp the hand of the other in common cause against the free-market West.  But that begs the question, what will happen if the common enemy is removed?  As Hobbes put it, life during that ensuing civil war will be nasty, brutish, and short.

It is true that Islam plays a greater role today than at any other time in the ranks of those bent on destroying Israel but as the historical record shows it has never been a necessary and sufficient condition to seek that destruction.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired) 

The death of UBL has led to a spate of misinformation regarding the relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Basing decisions on misinformation at this point would be a tragic and far-reaching mistake.

First, let us go over the history between these two organizations.  Al Qaeda was led, until this week, by UBL.  The Taliban is led by Mullah Omar.  The current alliance between the two began in earnest when Mullah Omar invited UBL and al Qaeda into Afghanistan from the Sudan within months of the Taliban taking control of Kabul in 1996. 

The leaders of the two movements were indivisibly joined in the tradition of that region, i.e. the feudal intermarriage between the two families to cement the alliance.  Most reliable open source reports cite the fact that a daughter from each family married into the other’s family.  They are joined together in blood on many levels.

In May 1998 al Qaeda declared war on the United States during a conference hosted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  In 1999 al Qaeda began detailed planning and training for the 9/11 attacks from camps provided to them by the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

By 9/11 2001 al Qaeda was an official unit in the Taliban Army in Afghanistan and was designated as 055 Brigade.  In other words, the fighters in al Qaeda and the fighters in the Taliban were seamlessly integrated in common cause against us on the battlefield from day one. 

The Taliban alliance with al Qaeda is a strong today as it was on 9/11.

Second, we need to understand how important personal leadership is to movements like this.  When Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was killed in 2006 the organization carried on normally for a few months.  But after the previously planned operations were completed AQI began to falter.  New and well-coordinated operations did not easily follow and the organization soon faded as a viable threat to Iraqi sovereignty.  

A fair portion of this collapse was due directly to the loss of the ‘great leader.’  It was not simply a case of a key billet that urgently needed to be filled as is the experience in the Western or Eastern military tradition where the army is bigger than any one person.  It was a hole that could never be filled.  In organizations like al Qaeda the leader often is the organization.  This is especially true when the heart and soul of the organization is so deeply based on faith in God as are the al Qaeda and Taliban movements. 

The inescapable question now facing every true believer in al Qaeda is why did God kill UBL?  That leads almost immediately to asking why has God forsaken us, why are we being punished, what did we do that was so wrong?   The death of UBL is not simply the loss of a key or even the key leader; it represents a shattering of the previously unchallenged belief that UBL was the righteous arm of God.  Clearly he was not. Great personal piety is no excuse for merciless and compassionless murder of innocents.

The death of UBL has caused a crisis of faith in the ranks that al Qaeda will probably never recover from.  A similar fate probably awaits the Taliban should Mullah Omar meet his just deserts.

Finally, let us go over what we do not know.  We do not know that UBL was only a figurehead or symbolic leader.  We do not know that he was an active leader running operations directly from his compound in Pakistan.  We will, however, know which assumption is true shortly. 

Open source reports claim that significant amounts information in the form of documents and electronic storage media were captured.  Reportedly, he had several "thumb drives" whose information was so sensitive that he carried them on his body at all times. 

If that reporting is largely true then that information will be exploited by the intelligence community and we be able to assess just how involved UBL was in al Qaeda operations.  Perhaps more importantly, we will find out how deeply UBL was or was not involved in operations conducted by the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami Faction in Afghanistan. 

If he was an active member of the enemy’s Afghan operational leadership then that could have a profound effect on both the Taliban and Haqqani Network (or less likely, on Hekmatyar's) spring offensives now underway in Afghanistan as those plans may now be compromised.

My bet is that UBL was actively involved.  Too many intelligence and operational leaders underestimated UBL too many times in the past.  The assumption that he was a mere figurehead may become one more miscalculation on our part in understanding the threat we face on the battlefield.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Mike Walker and Mike Ramirez combine to warn us... are we listening? Mike Walker is a retired USMC Colonel and Superintendent of Business Services for a California school district.

What happened to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report?

Why are we playing partisan games over the Obama and Ryan plans when a very good plan was already submitted?  It was not a creature of political bloodletting.  Is that why it was ignored in hyper-partisan Washington?

Gee, it was comprehensive, balanced, and bipartisan.  It was the product of a very talented group of Americans even for those jaded by Washington shenanigans.  More importantly, why are we waiting?  We need to act and we need to act now.  Here are two stories from the “trenches” of the governmental budget crisis in California. 

A Local Lesson

Our school district, like almost every district in California, has been hit with the largest budget cuts since the Great Depression and will likely surpass those cuts in the coming months.  Some of us learned that acting early to cut expenditures is everything in an on-going fiscal crisis like the one in California and one America is facing in Washington DC.  Yet amid this unprecedented crisis we are not laying off employees this year.  Many are asking why.  It is because we were amongst the school districts that acted early to reduce expenditures. 

When we eliminated around 25 positions for the 2009-10 school year it reduced expenditures by about $1.5M per year.  For the upcoming 2011-12 school year that yields a total expenditure reduction of $4.5 million. 

Comparable school districts that did not act in 2009 but put off the reductions until 2011 are still facing the same $4.5 million problem.  Ours is already fixed.  Their problem is not.  They now have to eliminate about 75 comparable positions to get the $4.5 million reduction for 2011-12. 

That is now gutting their educational program.  We will have the equivalent of fifty more professional educators serving the same number of students next year and we met the same $4.5 million goal.  The delay taken by our peers was a terrible miscalculation.  The lesson is that putting off painful cuts does not lessen the problem it exacerbates it.

A State Lesson. 

A few weeks ago the California State Legislature passed a little over $10 billion in cuts to expenditures in order to help address a $26 billion deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year.  If they had made the exact same cuts starting with the 2009-10 budget, something many in and out of Sacramento had proposed, then the immediate crisis would be over and California would be looking at a $4 billion surplus on 30 June 2012.  Instead, Sacramento, like a lot of California school districts, resisted making timely cuts.  Instead of taking painful yet prudent cuts when first confronted with the crisis they dithered and delayed thereby creating a nightmare scenario in the here and now.

Learn from our mistakes.  If we want America to wait until the budget cutting is truly savage in its consequences then do what most did in California, keep playing politics and kicking the can down the road with accounting gimmicks. 

If we are serious about fiscal responsibility then we should start by pulling together simply as Americans and implement the Commission’s plan now.  There will be plenty of time to have a debate, politically driven or not, over the Obama and Ryan plans later.

Regards,

Mike