A somber farewell to General Shinseki

A somber farewell to General Shinseki

Mike walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Regardless of his failures as head of the Veterans Administration, General Shinseki is a great American.

He was an average guy who, many times over, led from the front in extraordinary circumstances.

When he had a goodly piece of his foot ripped away in an explosion in combat in Vietnam, he could have taken the easy road.

Poor, poor, pitiful me! Where is my government handout?  I WANT others to pay my way, today and forever. I am a victim.

Instead, he sucked up who knows how much pain and suffering and carried on for our country. In a business that demands physical as well as mental excellence, General Shinseki gutted out the hurt of a crippled foot and led the way.

People criticized the Veterans of Foreign Wars for not condemning the General. That is because they knew the full measure of the man. Their decision was an example of courage under fire.

Why did he fail?

He was a fish out of water.

At its worse, the VA is a narrow-minded management-union shop with the usual corporate culture that believes it exists for the employees, not those it serves.

General Shinseki never grasped that reality.

He never understood that selfish organizational interests were not distractions to be overcome, but a cancer that could kill when threatened.

After all, the vast majority of VA employees served unselfishly. Regardless of political outrages, VA employees really do care. We cannot lose that truth.

And given that truth, how could General Shinseki have seen through the fawning “leaders” who said everything was fine (and out of earshot muttered: where is my pay raise/bonus)?

That was his failing. That is why he lost his job.

He saw the good and was blind to the bad. He gave too much weight to the employees and not enough to the veterans.

And sadly, too many senior VA mangers and union leaders, like the greedy everywhere, live for power, money and self-aggrandizement. They sold him down the river.

General Shinseki lived his adult life in the U.S. Army, in a culture that always put mission before self, that prized the values of duty, honor and service.

He proved incapable of grasping the self-serving mind-set of giant governmental bureaucracy and the technocrats “ate his lunch,” tarnished his honor, and most painfully of all, betrayed his trust.

He is gone and his reputation in ruins but this Marine salutes the General and to says hell with the VA mangers and union leaders who betrayed him.

Semper Fi,

Mike Walker

Weak...

Charles Krauthammer said Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier”that President Obama’s attempt to lay out his foreign policy vision during his commencement address at West Point was “literally pointless. It didn't have a point, it was a defensive speech.”

One day after he declared that all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan by 2016, Obama told the graduating cadets that "the landscape has changed" with the end of the war in Iraq. The president said that Wednesday’s graduating class would be the first class in nearly a decade that likely will not be deployed to a war zone.

“(While) I was worried about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak," he said, "just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail."

Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor, said the president’s speech was misguided.

“It was an answer to the chorus of criticism, even from his side of the aisle, that it's been a weak, leaderless, rudderless foreign policy, which it has been," he said. "I spoke to a member of Congress who was in the armed forces and he said there was a real pettiness and a personalization of this."

“This is a graduation speech for West Point," he said. "It was not a place where you -- you know, you want to be inspiring the future officers of America, it isn't a place to answer your critics or to go point by point against all the attacks on him. And he set out this ridiculous contrast between extreme isolationism on the one hand, and extreme, almost a caricature of intervention, on the other hand.”

In his speech, Obama also said there are those “interventionists from the left and right” who argue that “America's failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations… invites escalating aggression in the future.”

Obama said he believed there was no military solution to the ongoing civil war in Syria, but he vowed that the United States would continue to support the Syrian people.

Krauthammer said that characterization missed the mark.

“There's not a person in America who's asking for boots on the ground in Syria or in Ukraine. In those places, people said show some rhetorical support, show some serious economic sanctions on Ukraine, give these people, all they're asking for is the weapons to defend themselves, which Obama has denied them, and in Syria it's led to 160,000 dead," he said. "So, I mean, he sets up straw man, he makes the argument and I think it was a very weak and defensive speech.”

The Power and Limits of Indoctrination

The Power and Limits of Indoctrination
Steven Hayward, Powerline

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory “czar” and one of the smartest and most devious thinkers on the left, has a highly revealing Bloomberg column out this week reporting on the results of a study of the way China has attempted indoctrination in its school system.  This column and the underlying study (it’s an NBER paper, behind a paywall unless you have academic access) are useful as background reading for everyone who is rightly concerned about how Common Core standards will likely become the means of nationalizing a liberal school curriculum.  (What?  You mean you aren’t reassured by the promises from Washington that if you like your local curriculum, you can keep your local curriculum?  Why ever not?)

Sunstein reports that

recent curricular reforms in China, explicitly designed to transform students’ political views, have mostly worked. The findings offer remarkable evidence about the potential influence of the high school curriculum on what students end up thinking. . .
The crucial finding from the study is that the new curriculum greatly affected students’ thinking. They became more likely to count the Chinese political system as democratic. They displayed a higher level of trust in public officials. They were more skeptical of free markets, and more likely to reject the view that a market economy is preferable to any other economic system. . .

Sunstein, a leading advocate for increased government power across the board, is likely envious of China’s prowess at indoctrination.  There was, however, an interesting area where China’s indoctrination failed to work, and it is a highly curious exception:

Students didn’t become more favorably disposed toward environmental protection. They were not more likely to give the environment priority over economic growth, and they were not more willing to give up some of their income to protect the environment. . .
It is reasonable to speculate that in recent years, Chinese students have been concerned above all about economic growth and therefore were less willing to want to focus their attention on environmental protection.

“Reasonable to speculate”?  This tracks closely with a large body of literature on the “Environmental Kuznets Curve” that you won’t have social and political support for expensive environmental protection until you achieve a middle class standard of living for a nation.  And China is still a long way away from that point, with several hundred million people still living in deep poverty, with many millions more insecure about their rising but still fragile prosperity.  This is why China and India are unlikely ever to agree to the U.S.-Euro climate agenda.  Interesting that the Chinese can’t manage what seems to be easy to accomplish in American schools.

But you really don’t need to consult the economists on this one.  Just take in Aldo Leopold, who put it this way in A Sand County Almanac, “These wild things had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast.”

It’s tempting to give Sunstein a Green Weenie Award for this.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

DOWN MEMORY LANE: Remember when liberals said the VA was proof that socialism works?
John Hinderaker, Powerline

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto pulls together liberals’ endorsements of Veterans Administration health care. It goes beyond just claiming that VA medicine was top notch; liberals often claimed that the supposed success of the VA is proof that government is superior to the private sector. Taranto titles his post “Socialist Supermodel.” You should read it all, but here are a few highlights:

In January 2006, … former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wrote this:

I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system–it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.

The “secret” of the VA’s “success,” Krugman argued, “is the fact that it’s a universal, integrated system.”
***


Timothy Noah, then with Slate.com, proclaimed in 2005: “Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector. . . . The socialized medicine to which I refer is the complex of hospitals managed by the Veterans Administration.” His post, “The Triumph of Socialized Medicine,” was based on a Washington Monthly article by Phillip Longman, which carried the slightly more modest headline “The Best Care Anywhere.” And in 2009, Ezra Klein revealed that “one of my favorite ideas” is “expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans.”

Do you suppose these liberals, and others, will acknowledge how wrong they were about the VA, and consider what the implications might be for their government-knows-best philosophy?

Just kidding.

What Drives Vladimir Putin?

What Drives Vladimir Putin? 
Aggressors often attack weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. 

By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy, and a high rate of alcoholism.

Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way that he has wrecked most of Russia?

Doesn’t Russia have enough land for its diminishing population? Are there not enough minerals, timber, gas, and oil for Putin’s kleptocrats?

In the modern age, especially since Karl Marx, we rationalize the causes of wars as understandable fights over real things, like access to ports, oil fields, good farmland, and the like. Yet in the last 2,500 years of Western history, nations have just as often invaded and attacked each other for intangibles. The historian Thucydides wrote that the classical Athenians had won and kept their empire mostly out of “fear, honor, and self-interest.”

Maybe that was why most battles in ancient Greece broke out over rocky and mountainous borderlands. Possession of these largely worthless corridors did not add to the material riches of the Spartans, Thebans, or Athenians. But dying for such victories did wonders for their national pride and collective sense of self.

Why did the Argentine dictatorship invade the British Falkland Islands in 1982? The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges dismissed the entire Argentine–British dispute over the isolated, windswept rocks as a pathetic fight between “two bald men over a comb.”

Taking the “Malvinas” apparently was critical to restoring the Argentine dictatorship’s lost pride. In contrast, the descendants of Lord Nelson were not about to allow a few peacock generals to insult the honor of the British Royal Navy.

Doesn’t China have enough land without starting a beef with Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands? While there may be some oil in the vicinity, apparently both sides see these desolate mountainous islets as symbols of more important issues of national prestige and will. Lose the Senkaku Islands and what larger island goes next?

Saddam Hussein had enough land without invading Iran in 1980. But his impoverished Iraqis grew terrified of revolutionary Shiite Iran and he lashed out. Iraq also had enough oil without taking Kuwait in 1990. But occupying it made Iraqis proud at home and feared in the Middle East neighborhood.

The Obama administration has tried to psychoanalyze Putin as lashing out because of weakness. Or he is supposedly an unruly kid cutting up at the back of the classroom. Or he is acting out a tough-guy “shtick,” as President Obama put it.

Maybe. But it would be wiser to review the historical causes of war, especially why conflicts break out. Aggressors often attack their weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. They calibrate self-interest not so much in getting more stuff as winning greater honor, feeling safer, and instilling more fear.

Bullies such as imperial Persia, Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Stalin’s Soviet Union did not really believe that their peoples would starve without annexing someone else’s lands. Despite their pretexts, these empires all privately knew that they had sufficient living space.

These autocracies acted out emotionally satisfying ideas such as crushing an upstart weak Greece, or extending French culture across Europe, or reminding European states that the proud German Volk was as superior as it was underappreciated, or reassuring Russians that the New Soviet Man was at last safe, respected, and feared abroad.

Just as important, history’s aggressors embraced their fears and sense of honor because they thought they could get away with doing so scot-free — given the perceived loss of deterrence.

Putin, like Hitler in 1939, may be weak in geostrategic terms. But as long as he does not provoke an American and European collective response, he can assume that Russia is far stronger than any one of his next targets.

Like Hitler, Putin does not know exactly which future aggressive act will prompt an American and European reaction. But until then, he is willing to continue gambling that he can restore some more of the lost empire of the czars and commissars — and with it more Russian honor, influence, and pride — without consequences.

If history is any guide, these emotions are driving Putin to grab things that are not his. Putin acts now because in the era of failed reset diplomacy and recent empty American deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines, he feels the old U.S. deterrent is absent or dormant. And he will keep up his aggression until he senses that the increasing risks no longer warrant the diminishing returns of absorbing his neighbors.

We should stop trying to psychoanalyze Putin, arguing that he is really weak or is an adolescent showing off his machismo — much less that he has legitimate grievances.

Instead, Putin believes that the more he grabs from others, the prouder his otherwise-downtrodden citizens will become, the more respect they will earn abroad, and the less likely others will fool with him.

Until that is no longer true, Putin will continue.

— 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. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

THE FAILURE OF OBAMANOMICS IN THREE CHARTS

THE FAILURE OF OBAMANOMICS IN THREE CHARTS

John Hinderaker, Powerline

Democrats are spinning April’s relatively good jobs numbers as a victory for the administration. The reality, however, is that the current recovery is the weakest of modern times, as economic growth, after more than five years of Democratic Party policies, stands at near zero. The Senate Budget Committee offers the following three charts, which show how the Obama administration’s government-centric policies stack up against the Reagan administration’s free enterprise approach, which brought the United States out of a similar recession, but one that also included runaway inflation.

This one shows how slowly jobs have bounced back under Obamanomics. Click to enlarge:

This one shows how slowly gross domestic product has rebounded, compared to the Reagan years:

This one is perhaps the most devastating of all. It tracks labor force participation under Reagan and under Obama. Has anyone in history driven as many people out of work as Barack Obama? Certainly not in the United States:

If you are a partner in Goldman Sachs or a Washington lobbyist, the Obama administration has been a bonanza. But you probably aren’t. In all likelihood, if you need to work for a living, Obama’s presidency has been a tough time for you, if not a disaster.

The Truth Drips Out

Not that anyone was trying to be transparent...

The Truth Drips Out

By Victor Davis Hanson

For over a year and a half the White House successfully withheld communications between public servants, apparently in hopes that the death of four Americans in Benghazi would not become an issue in the 2012 election (at the eleventh hour CNN’s Candy Crowley did her best to ensure that goal by unethically becoming both moderator and advocate of Barack Obama in the second debate).

Even with the heavily censored and redacted recent releases of White House e-mails, one of the many messaging “goals” of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes (“To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy”) is the evidence that proves exactly what the White House so far has denied: the highest White House officials were in a pre-election frenzy to pressure almost everyone from the White House staffers to the CIA to massage the truth of how four Americans died in Benghazi in order to keep up a campaign-driven facade of a spontaneous video-driven riot, one that trumped the truth of a pre-planned terrorist attack, the possibility of which intelligence officers had on prior occasions warned about and were ignored. 

These heavily redacted talking points reveal three truths that won’t go away: 1) the administration has lied about the reasons they promulgated false information that they knew at the time to be false; 2) the false, campaign-driven narrative that it was not a terrorist attack reflected prior laxity that they knew at the time increased risk, (and hampered proper focus on the true perpetrators, whose prompt arrest and capture might have negated their false narratives); and 3) they jailed a minor parole violator while falsely alleging that a video he had made had led to the deaths of Americans from an impromptu riot.

Rhodes’s now-released memo also went out to some of those who have denied that there was any effort to peddle a false narrative, including press secretary Jay Carney. There is a creepy incestuousness to the entire debacle (Rhodes is a brother to the CBS president, the CBS that later hired Mike Morell, the CIA appointee who earlier “went over” the talking points with the White House staff, the CBS that pressured CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson on the content and choice of her reporting on Benghazi; Mr. Morell was later hired both by CBS and by a security firm, Beacon Global Strategies, involved with officials closely connected with Hillary Clinton, who was knee-deep in the Benghazi mess, and on and on).

Because untruth was at the heart of not just the cover-up, but also of the lax security and response that led to the deaths of the four Americans, this scandal, despite the collusion of the  White House, the CIA, and CBS, won’t go away.

At the very least, Mr. Rhodes should step down; he has been not been truthful and his immediate reaction to the disaster in Benghazi did not reflect his responsibilities to ensure national security, but rather a role as a political operative to suppress the truth. He was the coordinator of the White House messaging effort to prep official spokespeople—Jay Carney especially—and institutionalized a lie.

How in current and future crises, could he ever be trusted to coordinate a national-security response based on unpleasant realities on the ground rather than domestic political calculations?

Even with stonewalling, groupthink, legal maneuvering, media collusion, and lack of an independent prosecutor, more of the truth will drip out.