Gates: Obama “double-crossed” me on defense budget

Gates: Obama “double-crossed” me on defense budget

Ed Morrissey, Hotair

When Barack Obama ran for office, Bret Baier noted in his “Rising Threats – Shrinking Military” special report yesterday, he promised to be a new kind of Commander in Chief. At least on that score, Obama kept his word, but that hasn’t worked out well for either America’s military or our foreign policy. However, one of the men who ran the Department of Defense told Baier that Obama “double-crossed” him on budgets, and now worries that the US may have been left more vulnerable than ever in an era of non-state terrorism:

One of the signs of the president’s new approach is his deep budget cuts. Numerous defense programs have been scrapped, and the troops are being cut back—the Army’s active force threatens to drop below pre-World War II levels. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells Fox News, after he worked hard to cut hundreds of billions from the Obama military budget, he was then told to cut hundreds of billions more.  Gates fears less money today will mean more American blood later.

President Obama isn’t just making the military smaller, however–he’s changing its very essence. He’s introduced numerous policies designed to further social justice within the ranks, such as regulations to allow women to serve in combat.  But military experts are concerned that all these new rules end up doing is lowering standards and destroying morale. They worry that fighting efficiency is being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. … But how has this lighter footprint worked out? “Fox News Reporting Rising Threats – Shrinking Military examines how Obama’s policies have played out on the world stage:

▪ Russia, where the administration made conciliatory gestures, after which Putin’s forces became more aggressive and took over Crimea. ▪ Iraq, where Obama decided upon a precipitous withdrawal of U.S. military presence, after which the formerly pacified nation descended into chaos. ▪ Syria, where Obama threatened but then failed to take action, after which the region continued to grow into one of the most dangerous spots in the world. ▪ Libya, the one place where America did take action in a UN-approved military intervention, after which the nation split apart and become a breeding ground for terrorism.

The Hill picked up on an exchange between Baier and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
who claimed to have been crossed up by Obama:

In a Fox News report Friday that explored the president’s approach to the military, Gates said Obama had promised him that there wouldn’t be any “significant changes” in the defense budget for a while. 

When asked by Fox whether Obama kept to his word, Gates replied, “Well I think that began to fray. ‘Fray’ may be too gentle a word.” 

According to the report, Gates was told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget after already having slashed it. 

“I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates said. “After all those years in Washington, I was naïve.”

Baier also talked with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who has been much more public about his unhappiness with the man who appointed him to that position:

“Frankly, the United States of America is in a less strong position today because of the readiness and the size of our armed forces,” Flynn said.

“I think he sees the military actually as something that is more dangerous to the world,” Flynn added. “I think that he looks at the United States military and sees it as a threatening application around the world, than actually as a useful tool.”

I’m not sure why either man would be surprised by this. Obama ran his 2008 campaign on the idea that the US military presence was largely unneeded and a net negative in most instances. Does no one remember “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” as Obama’s take on the war in Afghanistan in 2007? Or Obama poo-poohing the notion that Iran was dangerous because they weren’t as large as the Soviet Union? His policies on both follow exactly from his 2007-8 campaign mindset, and so does the disastrous foreign policy that has transformed the Syrian-Iraqi desert into the first terrorist quasi-state, and Libya into the next one.

With this mindset, it should surprise no one that Obama saw the DoD budget as ripe for slashing, and retreat as the best policy for the world. To have thought otherwise requires a higher level of naïveté than even Gates allows himself here.

SECRECY IS THE ROOT OF THE CLINTON EMAIL SCANDAL

SECRECY IS THE ROOT OF THE CLINTON EMAIL SCANDAL
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

The Washington Post has published a lengthy article by Robert O’Harrow, Jr. called “How Clinton’s Email Scandal Took Root.” Much of the article covers ground familiar to those who are following this saga. However, the story is still worth reading.

For one thing, it illuminates Clinton’s motive for using a private device. O’Harrow writes:

The scandal has pitted those who say Clinton was innocently trying to find the easiest way to communicate against those who say she placed herself above the law in a quest for control of her records.

I doubt that, for purposes of determining whether Clinton violated the law, it matters whether her motive was convenience or a quest for control of her records. However, O’Harrow’s piece, without saying so, shows that her motive was control, not mere convenience. It makes this clear in two ways.

First, O’Harrow shows that security officials emphasized to Clinton and her staff on multiple occasions the security risk associated with using her BlackBerry. For example, not long after Clinton became Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell wrote: “Any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and exploiting calendars.”

Clinton told Boswell that she “get[s]” this. However, she continued to use her private BlackBerry.

Clinton also continued to use her private BlackBerry and her home brew server after she issued a June 28, 2011 memo urging State Department employees to “avoid conducting official Department business from you own personal email accounts.” The memo was a response to reports that Gmail accounts of government workers had been targeted by “online adversaries.”

Because Clinton and her top staff were well aware of the serious risk of using private email accounts, it seems unlikely that they assumed these risks for a reason no more substantial than convenience. To do so would be wanton even for Hillary Clinton.

Second, Team Clinton’s response to the idea of the Secretary getting a government-issued BlackBerry linked to a government server leaves little doubt that Clinton’s main motive was secrecy. In an email to key Clinton aide Huma Abedin, State Department official Stephen Mull wrote:

We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replace personal unit, which is malfunctioning (possibly because of her personal email server is down.) We will prepare two version for her to use — one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests).

(Emphasis added)

Abedin replied: “let’s discuss the state blackberry. doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

A government-issued BlackBerry would have been as convenient to use as a personal one. That’s why Clinton requested one. However, it would have been subject to FOIA requests. That’s why, once this became clear to Team Clinton, the idea didn’t “make a whole lot of sense.”

Based in part on this email exchange, Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, has said in open court that legitimate questions have been raised about whether Clinton’s staff was trying to help her to sidestep FOIA. Use of private email was an important part of that scheme.

It seems clear, then, that Clinton wasn’t using a personal BlackBerry tied to a private server for reasons of convenience or because she and her staff were “BlackBerry addicts.” She was using the device to keep her records secret.

This is the root of the Clinton email scandal.

Fed Up With Politically Correct Anti-Semitism

Fed Up With Politically Correct Anti-Semitism

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Apartheid, the policy of segregation and discrimination directed against a class of people pioneered in South Africa, is part and parcel of the Palestinian state ruled by Hamas. 

The key difference between Hamas and its white South African predecessor is the degree to which Hamas is willing to use violence to establish an apartheid-based Palestinian state.

Under Hamas, the major targeted populations are Shi’a Muslims, Christians and Jews. While the Shi’a and Christians are and will continue to be largely be delegated to the status of Blacks in apartheid South Africa, Jews are slated complete ethnic cleansing up to an including mass extermination.

Hamas is not simply anti-Israeli or even anti-Zionist, it is infected with a full-blown strain of anti-Semitism that would make Hitler’s Nazi adherents beam with delight.

When I reflect on the racism of the Hamas Palestinian regime while hearing its supporters scream and shout about the so-called apartheid policies of Israel at so-called institutes of higher learning in the United States, I realize just how dishonest and disgusting these hate-speech mongers really are.

(and in the interest of full disclosure, I am Roman Catholic of primarily Irish descent)

Mike

Free Public College Tuition Is Bad Policy

Free Public College Tuition Is Bad Policy

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

Five Reasons Why Free Public College Tuition Is Bad Policy

(or Sander’s State Universities Suck)

A. It Economically Punishes the Less Well Off to Enrich the Better Off

In the United States, Washington politicians always claim that large-scale programs can be done on the cheap and they have a tax plan to pay for it. They never do. Costs always exceed the projections and the taxpayer is left holding the bag.

So if we listen to “The Bern” where we will windup is with a huge government expense that economically benefits the college graduates that make up 24% of the work force and which, on average, already makes more money than non-college graduates (people in their late 20s and early 30s working in jobs that require a college degree make about $17,000 more per year).

Think about the social injustice of that: Government taxation to redistribute money from less wealthy hard working families, the majority of Americans, to give that money to a wealthier class of citizen.

That is shameful!

B. It further destroys the essential distinction between citizens’ needs and wants 

I believe it was Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson of MIT who opined that the heart of economics is to try to wisely allocate scarce resources in order to satisfy unlimited human wants. Free public tuition ignores that concept.

If students have no skin in the game – no sense of cost – they are stripped of the economic knowledge critical in identifying what they need. There will be no governor or brake on the college cost engine. What students need will become invisible and all that will be left is their wants.

This will end with rising costs driven by people who, at the time that costs are being incurred, will be recklessly shielded from the consequences of their choices. 

C. It will further exacerbate the Oversupply of College Graduates

Given that current studies show that as many as half of all recent college graduates are filling jobs THAT DO NOT require a 4-year degree then a free college education as a “right” is wrongheaded. 

It punishes individuals and damages our nation’s economic health. 

From undergraduate degrees to law school diplomas, America is producing too many graduates. Encouraging even more students by creating a perverse incentive of no cost is a profound disservice to our students and society as a whole.

Think of the immense waste. While it is true that on a macro or national level, immense resources were misallocated, the real damage was done on individual level. 

The average college graduate incurs about $30,000 in debt. If they are among the millions who will land in a job that does not require that degree, they have paid a stiff price but that is only part of the cost. 

They also forewent the opportunity of having gotten that job four years earlier and in the act, lost four years of making a salary while running up a big debt. Just to rub salt in the wound, they also forfeited fours years of experience that would have made them a more attractive worker and open to possible promotions and salary advancements.

It is patently stupid, irresponsible and economically suicidal to intend for every American to go to college. That is a misguided “want” no society should pay for.

History is replete with examples of emerging nations that over produced college graduates. They became economically stunted and often were unstable. On the other hand, developing nations that made high school graduation the priority became politically stable accompanied by growing standards of living.

A high school diploma provides for an essential education. It creates the workforce that gets the job done, that makes America go, that opens the door to a productive life.  That should be our focus.

D. It will destroy Private Religious Colleges and Universities

Many if not most socialists agree with Marx that an ideal society is one purged of religion. The socialist Sanders has hit upon an ideal way to advance that objective. Think about it:

Why pay +$100,000 to graduate from Notre Dame when Purdue is free?

Why pay to go to USC when you can go to UCLA without charge?

Why go into debt for Duke or Wake Forest when UNC costs nothing?

Who needs SMU or Rice or Baylor when you can get a free ride at UT or A&M?

This is a twisted policy. Some of our best schools (not just in America but also in the world) will be given a death sentence.

(BTW, public universities are the prime driver in overproducing graduates. Private colleges do a better job.)

E. Say goodbye to local control over public colleges and universities 

As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, sooner or later politicians in Washington will start to tinker with the system. It's the new golden rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. 

If you like the unbounded expansion of Title IX then you will love Bernie Sanders State Universities. The politicians may first start with curriculum or admittance rules and will expand and expand and expand their meddling. That is the way of Washington.

Mike

Bush Did Not Lie About Iraq's WMD

Bush Did Not Lie About Iraq's WMD
Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

If you really have the guts to hear the truth then watch this:

https://www.prageru.com/courses/political-science/did-bush-lie-about-iraq

I was assigned to a CIA-directed group working on Saddam's WMD and deployed to Iraq in 2003. We were always trying to keep one step ahead of Judith Miller who arrived in Baghdad almost as fast as our troops liberated the city.

Everything she says is true.

And if you want my take based on those experiences then read the attachment:

Minimus Opus

Semper Fi,

Mike

Deporting Millions of Illegal Immigrants or Playing Doctor Frankenstein

Deporting Millions of Illegal Immigrants or Playing Doctor Frankenstein

Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

With such lousy details and lack of vision, this is looking like "I like it!" but it is very bad policy.

Here is some food for thought:

1) Even conservative legal experts agree that each and every illegal immigrant must be provided due process in the courts before being deported. That will take years (decades with the current court system) and cost $ billions. How long and for how much?

2) A wall is just a fancy speed bump without a massive 24/7/365 enforcement army (learned in the Marines the difference between an obstacle and a barrier). How many $ tens of billions will that cost to build and operate? I am willing to pay but be honest, tell the truth. Let the American people know the real bill that the politician's mouths are writing.

3) There are about there are at least four million essential jobs that Americans no longer deem acceptable. 

Do you know anyone who says: “Yeah we’re really proud of our son Jim, he will graduate from high school next year and we hope he can start as a seasonal farm worker,” or how about “Our daughter Susan is such a joy, we are so excited that she landed a position as a maid at the local motel”? 

Why spend $100’s of millions or $ billions to deport millions who must be invited back? Why can’t we enact the guest worker program to make the problem more manageable and at a fraction of the cost?

4) Even if "The Wall" undertaking is accomplished, over 40% of the illegals (that once included two of the 9/11 attackers) arrived legally and disappeared into America. What is the plan for that?

5) Organizing mass arrests by the Federal Government is a road no American should go down.

Creating an all-encompassing national law enforcement architecture intended to penetrate every city, town, village and farm in America and arrest and detain millions -- a Washington-directed search and arrest machine with unlimited reach -- scares me 10x or even 100x more than illegal immigrants.

Once that government program is erected it can never go away. Even if it were dismantled later (a near impossibility for Washington), the blueprint will live on.

This is creating Frankenstein’s Monster.

If you think Lois Lerner’s attacks on Conservatives were abusive and helped undermine our civil liberties, imagine what a future "Lois Lerner" could have done if (instead of ordering an audit) she possessed the power to arrest and detain as many Americans as desired at any place and at any time?

You may be happy when the illegals are rounded up but what if the future “Lois Lerner” types later decided to outlaw handguns and turned on the “national police” apparatus to make it a reality? What if they wanted to criminalize types of speech and arrest offenders? What if they declared whole groups of Americans (leaders of the Tea Party?) as class enemies and decided to detain them? 

By going to such an extreme solution would we not have sowed the seeds for a future of extreme abuses?

Why risk it?

If Conservatives think they can control this" monster" and keep the far left from using against good Americans in the future they are sadly mistaken.

Stop this now and in its entirety.

Our founders feared and detested the concept of a national police arm. They deliberately omitted it from the Constitution. They were right: Whatever the ill, the “Gestapo-esque” cure will surely be worse than the disease.

Mike

A Trump wave is on the way

A Trump wave is on the way

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USAToday

As plebes make the Donald increasingly acceptable, expect elite Trump supporters to come out of the closet.

In America, Donald Trump — who many of the experts thought had no chance — is dominating the polls. In Britain, meanwhile, much of the public seems to be mobilizing in favor of exiting the troubled European Union — a British Exit, or Brexit.

Writing in The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill puts this down to a class revolt on both sides of the Atlantic. And he’s right as far as he goes, but I think there’s more than just a class revolt. I think there’s also a developing preference cascade. O’Neill writes: “In both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics. And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.”

Well, that’s certainly true. Both America and Britain have developed a ruling class that is increasingly insular and removed from — and contemptuous of — the people it deigns to rule. The ruled are now returning the contempt.

But while there’s a class component here, it’s not as strong as some might suggest. Trump does well among college and post-college educated voters, too, and the Brexit is suddenly developing support from the sort of political class leaders who used to be pro-Europe. The difference is that the upper-class types have been less willing to show it.

In both cases, it may be that the lower classes are expressing their views more openly because they have less to lose. Express the “wrong” opinions in British or American politics or academia and it’s the (figurative) gulag for you; if you work at a fast-food place, the consequences are generally less steep. But when enough ordinary voters express an opinion, the elites may feel safer, too.

In his terrific book, Private Truths, Public Lies:The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Timur Kuran writes about the phenomenon he calls “preference falsification”: People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.

This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it — but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I wonder if that’s not what’s happening here.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Novelist Bret Easton Ellis, for example, recently tweeted: "Just back from a dinner in West Hollywood: shocked the majority of the table was voting for Trump but they would never admit it publicly.” What he describes is preference falsification — but if people stop hiding, it will become a cascade. And Ellis himself has started that process with this tweet. Meanwhile, confronted with PC nonsense, college students have started chanting ”Trump! Trump!” (Law professor Ann Althouse has been predicting this cascade for weeks.)

Likewise, in Britain, both London Mayor Boris Johnson and mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith have come out against staying in the EU. On this news, author Jim Bennett emailed me: “Are we seeing a preference cascade for Brexit? Although many are already for it, of course, mostly they have been either old-line Tories or working-class marginal malcontents. Boris and Zac are part of the rich, well-connected, cosmopolitan London set which has always been presumed to be Europhiles. Watch this phenomenon.”

It used to be, of course, that the lower and middle classes were stuffy and constrained by social convention while the freethinkers at universities and in the ruling class got to experiment with unconventional ideas. If their experimenting got enough success, then it might eventually filter down to ordinary people. (The sexual revolution worked this way, more or less).

But now it’s our ruling class that is hidebound by political correctness, and it takes movement by the masses to give it permission to express a controversial view. That’s a major change, and it’s one that the ruling class isn’t likely to appreciate much. But having subjected itself to the chains of “acceptable” opinion, what can it do?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

Political Silliness

Political Silliness

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Recently heard someone claim that socialism is "the greatest" because it provides public roads and schools, fire stations and the like.

Good grief!

Every society provides for the common good. That is not called “socialism,” its called governance! 

Socialism came into being in the 19^th century and its central theme is state control over the means of production. Socialism is about placing tremendous economic power in the hands of a small bureaucratic elite.

Conversely, societies acting for the common good (in a myriad of forms) have been around for all recorded history and before. 

A Chinese emperor erected the Great Wall in the 3rd century BC for national defense. Another emperor had the Grand Canal built during the 6^th and 7^th centuries to enhance commerce and food transportation. 

The Roman kings built roads and bridges in the 8^th century BC. The Roman Republic did likewise in the 2^nd century BC and the Roman Empire continued in the same vein for the next five centuries. 

The form of government and economic system were and are irrelevant. 

Democracies, oligarchies, meritocracies, dictatorships, even theocracies, tribes and primitive clans act together to some degree or another for mutual benefit.

For socialists to claim “sole credit” for public works is anachronistic nonsense (and for you brilliantly educated socialists, that is not a reference to spiders).

Saying you support funding for firemen or a new bridge no more makes you a socialist then it makes you a theocrat or imperialist or monarchist or a republican. 

Societies did quite nicely in providing for the common good for serval millennia before the creation of a socialist philosophy and will do equally well in the future in its complete absence -- probably better.

I guess tricking the poorly informed works with a lot of people.

For those of us with a modicum of common sense and empowered with a reasonable education, the socialists' claim comes across as a dishonest con job.

Which is one more reason to reject its stale and tired tenets. Tell the truth.

Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!

Mike Walker

Meridian, Idaho

America’s Balkan Values

America’s Balkan Values
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society.

The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites.

One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. And three, racialism must remain defined as a one-way bias.

The problem with the first criterion is multifold. America today truly is a multiracial, intermarried society in which the old rubric “white” no longer equates to “of European descent.” Obama’s racist former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright appears whiter than many Americans of Mediterranean heritage.

Lots of Americans of various hues are de facto classified as white, either by themselves or by the government that refuses to make them eligible for affirmative action. Over the years I had hundreds of students who were clearly non-white in appearance, first-generation Americans of Arab, Armenian, and Punjabi background, who did not qualify for any racial set-asides. The vast majority of them were as dark as or darker than third-generation Mexican-Americans who did.

Many whites of European descent are indistinguishable from so-called Latinos. Certainly a Sicilian-American can look more “Latino” than someone of Mexican or South American descent. If Ted Cruz took his mother’s name, no one would know that Ted Wilson was Latino. If George Zimmerman had used the name Jorge Mesa, the Trayvon Martin confrontation never would have made front-page news. Such a rigged system cannot even defend its own biases. Accordingly, it retreats toward the subjective category “diversity” to make up prejudice and its remedies, in ad hoc fashion, on the basis of career and political expediencies.

 The Latino Marco Rubio could claim ancestry from anywhere, while former presidential candidate Bobby Jindal appears clearly of Indian ancestry. In our sick racial-spoils system, Rubio qualifies as a minority and Jindal does not. Is the reasoning that Rubio will encounter more white-generated prejudice than the darker Jindal, or that Rubio’s ancestors in Cuba suffered more than Jindal’s in India?

Much of the liberal press has ridiculed Rubio and Cruz, either because their appearances and Cuban ancestry do not quite make them authentic “Latinos” or “Hispanics,” or because their conservative politics disqualify them as deserving minorities and instead make them seem ungrateful to their liberal benefactors. In this unhinged way of thinking, a quite dark Clarence Thomas, who grew up destitute in the old Jim Crow South, is not as authentic an African-American as Barack Obama, who is of half-Kenyan ancestry and was raised by his upper-middle-class white grandparents and schooled at Honolulu’s most exclusive prep school. Make Obama right-wing and Thomas left-wing, and journalists would question Obama about everything from his prep school to his name change at age ten.

In truth, government efforts to racialize Americans — mostly for the benefit of tribal careerists — have failed and have left behind utter chaos, rank opportunism, and dangerous cynicism.

Government efforts to racialize Americans have failed and have left behind utter chaos, rank opportunism, and dangerous cynicism. Eager for government-promoted racial advantages, and aware that appearance is no longer necessary for socially constructed racial status, a number of white careerists have reinvented themselves as minorities to gain job traction. Senator Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law School’s first “Native American” faculty member on the basis of her grandfather’s high cheekbones and unsubstantiated family lore. Ward Churchill, with beads and headband but without an earned Ph.D., became a “Native-American” tenured campus activist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Rachel Dolezal teased her hair a bit and reinvented herself as the president of the local NAACP chapter in Spokane. Shaun King altered his patois, claimed he was black, and became a national spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement. Note well: None of these people claimed that their ancestry was really Italian, Punjabi, Jewish, Korean, or Arab. Apparently, invented “diversity” status of that nature would not win career advantages.

So who is deserving of special set-asides? Take the case of multimillionaire Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who fled Mexico’s censorship and came to America to establish a lucrative career under the singular protection of the U.S. Constitution as a self-appointed advocate against supposed American nativism. Has America been so unkind to Ramos that his children will have to have special help getting into college, while the progeny of an out-of-work coal miner in West Virginia or an Armenian farmer in Chico cannot qualify?

Sometimes just changing names is all that is necessary when politically correct race is in doubt. When children are unsure that the state knows their racial IDs — and since the government has not yet issued yellow, star-shaped DNA badges — they must amplify their tenuous heritage through language. (We forget that Hitler’s problem in the racist Third Reich was that he had built a career on demonizing Jews as parasites and then discovered that most Germans could not distinguish German Jews in their midst without Nazi-issued lapel badges, often the work of genealogists and pseudo-race-studies hacks in the university.)

So a Susan Smith with a Mexican grandmother becomes Susan Lopez-Smith, while a German-American would not become Susan Schmidt Wilson. A Rick Smith becomes Ricardo Smith, and with that change gains a hundred or so SAT points as a bonus. As a general rule, the more exotic the name, and the less white and less American it sounds, the more one’s career is aided. Certainly, a prep-school kid called Barry Dunham or even Barry Soetero would not have the career trajectory of Barack Hussein Obama. A Barry cannot claim to be the victim of American nativist prejudice; a Barack can.

But even nomenclature goes only so far. One can lose even specially crafted minority profiles by the wrong politics. Were Obama to have a political revelation and turn conservative, his half-black status and exotic Middle Eastern/African names would be the stuff of ridicule. He would suffer the fate of a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio and be branded as a sellout opportunist — in a way that he currently is not, despite all the time spent on tony golf courses, Martha’s Vineyard vacations, and Hawaiian junkets, and despite the Goldman Sachs campaign gifts.

Someone raised in poverty who rejects the liberal creed is stamped inauthentic while someone far better off but solidly leftwing is approved of as legitimate. The noted philosopher, scholar, and economist Thomas Sowell was raised in utter poverty in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s. Somehow he is not deemed a proper representative of the pre–Civil Rights black experience, while the college-dropout and racial provocateur Ta-Nehisi Coates is, despite growing up in relative middle-class security during the age of affirmative action. Coates writes autobiographies damning white America for problems in the black community; Sowell offers data to urge self-help and inner reflection. One is useful for claims on government assistance, the other antithetical to that effort. Thus Sowell is considered not really black. “Ta-Nehisi” sends a tingle up the leg of a white liberal in a way that “Tom” does not.

The wealthy and mostly white cultural elite set up this Byzantine racial-spoils system, and it understandably reflects their prejudices and moral emptiness. The wealthy and mostly white cultural elite set up this Byzantine racial-spoils system, and it understandably reflects their prejudices and moral emptiness. They assumed that their own class privileges and insider leverage would allow themselves and their offspring to navigate around minority set-asides quite easily. Certainly on their own academic merits, the huge Kennedy clan did not all qualify for Ivy League admission. Had an Appalachian kid sent in the same test scores and GPAs as Al Gore, John Kerry, or the Kennedys, he would surely never have been admitted to any Ivy League college. Having a Latino name is valuable for getting an edge into Yale, but still not as valuable as having a grandfather who was a Wall Street–groomed government adviser or an alum mom who helps run Citibank.

The architects of affirmative action also envisioned racial rubrics as a form of personal medieval-style penance. By bestowing some of their own privileges on selected minority categories, liberal grandees helped assuage their own guilt over their de facto apartheid and material privilege. Wealthy white liberal America, the engine that drives racialization, usually does not live, go to school, or engage in leisure activities among those minorities it selects for racial advantages.

Hollywood may agonize over the racial and ethnic makeup of its Oscar nominees, but Malibu is for the most part a lily-white fortress, where affirmative action does not translate into subsidized public housing for the poor on the Pacific Coast beaches. Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire progressive activist, but that fact only empowers him to stealthily buy up his neighbors’ homes to form a de facto moat around his compound.

Of course, the old liberal wealthy white American class was politically savvy and self-interested, and so it glued affirmative action onto its own progressive politics. Those who bestow advantages demand obeisance in return. Nothing enrages a wealthy white liberal more than when someone of minority status, after receiving an affirmative-action edge, evolves into thinking that the entire race-based system of classification is rotten to the core. A black “turncoat” becomes a pariah in a way that even redneck gun owners or the Palins do not. It is fair game to slander Ted Cruz as an inauthentic Latino, while the Left believes that Barack Obama, of equally half-minority status, is a trailblazing minority candidate. The media quiz Cruz on his Spanish-speaking ability, while they would not the non-Spanish-speaking Julian Castro, the current liberal heartthrob.


Considerations of class are anathema to the racial-spoils system. Who would approve of the children of dirt-poor whites in rural Tulare County gaining an edge over the offspring of Jorge Ramos or Eric Holder? For the 0.01-percenter white liberal, poor whites conjure up Duck Dynasty and Ice Truckers, strange folk who can be used to represent untoward white privilege, but who lack, on the one hand, the romance of the minority poor and, on the other, the cultural tastes of the white elite. Much of the left-wing hatred of evangelicals and the NRA is due to the perception that these are cultural hubs of tastelessness, whose disparagement is cheap, easy, and of some value in broadcasting liberal credentials to minority elites. Sexist attacks on Bristol Palin are hip, but not so questions about how Chelsea Clinton somehow became worth $15 million.

Finally, racial prejudice is a circular firing squad now. Blacks lament the lack of Oscars but not the racially disproportionate NFL, NBA, and their commensurate MVP awards. In sick 21st-century America, lamenting the lack of black Oscar nominees logically leads to calls for an all-black Oscar alternative, where no one but blacks (not even Latinos) can be nominated. I suppose the theory is that blacks can spot authentic African-Americans, perhaps borrowing the one- or two-drop rule of the Old Confederacy. Putting de facto quotas on Asian-Americans for college admissions is okay; after all, such bias won’t hurt successful, grade-grubbing Asians, who are too enamored of capitalism even if they espouse liberal politics. Wondering why the meritocratic NFL is vastly disproportionately African-American is taboo; wondering why meritocratic UC Berkeley is disproportionately Asian-American is politically correct.

The Latin American experience is far more racialized than is even the European. Mexican immigrants tend to display biases against blacks that other groups do not, and they have a sophisticated color-coded self-screening that is unknown in el Norte. For truly despicable racist caricatures of Barack Obama or Condoleezza Rice, consult what the Arab world and the North Koreans have spouted. Jeremiah Wright was an anti-Semite of the Farrakhan stripe. Strip away liberal indemnity insurance, and Obama’s “typical white person” is or is not as racist as Joe Biden’s description of Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Because the race industry is ideologically driven, its rules are logically inconsistent and ultimately incoherent.

The termite-ridden foundations of the racial-spoils temple are crumbling, as they have dissolved earlier in our 19th- and early-20th-century past. Soon the entire rotten edifice will collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions and illiberal prejudices.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

Classified Emails

Classified Emails

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Just a short note on this subject. 

The comment "They were not classified when I received them" has two meanings and the distinction is important.

Meaning 1: The email was classified at a later date or ex post facto.

Meaning 2: The classification was stripped away/removed by the sender.

Both meanings imply a defense for the person who received the email as does Meaning 1 for the sender. 

The key question will be: Would a reasonable person have known the contents needed to be protected to a degree that was impossible with a private email server.

Meaning 2, however, is a wrong on the part of the sender if proper handling and/or declassification procedures were not followed and opens them to severe penalties up to including a lengthy term in Federal Prison.

Mike