A Primer In Strategy

Take notes...

A Primer In Strategy

Col Mike Walker

There has been a lot of talk about military strategy lately and much of that focused on ISIL – too much in my opinion – but that is not the issue at hand.

The problem is that the discussions are just plain goofy.

Tactics, opinions, management techniques, what have you, are debated as strategy. They are NOT and selling them as such is a sign of failure. So here are some basics for all the “armchair quarterbacks.”

Military strategy begins with an “endstate,” or where you want to be when the fighting ends. That must come from the big boss.

Once that is grasped, the next job is to understand the enemy, in this case, ISIL. In its simplest form, ask: What is its aim, its resources and over what battlespace is it fighting?

While identifying ISIL’s strengths and weaknesses are important, understanding its motivations and endstate are more so and that demands hearing things you may not want to hear. In other words, go in with your eyes wide open.

Cold calculating objectivity is the ideal. Any other approach is both dishonest and dishonorable to the American men and women who execute the missions.

Next come the stepping-stones to get from where you are to where you want to be: the endstate. These are called “strategic objectives.”

The final step in developing a strategy is to identify the lines of operations needed to obtain the strategic objectives and endstate. Unfortunately, lines of operation do not combine to follow a linear course but form a complex multi-dimensional network of nodes and pathways.

As a rough rule, a comprehensive strategy against ISIL would include a number of lines of operations aimed at security, governance and economics.

In competent militaries, it is understood that nothing goes exactly to plan unless you are walking into a trap. The adage is “expect the unexpected.”

To cope with uncertainty, sub-plans, called “branches” and sequels” are developed, refined and added to as needed.

Dealing with uncertain complexity requires a unified political-military vision both within our ranks (civil and military) and with our allies. It is a demanding task as executing each line of operation requires detailed planning and that is where tactics comes in.

Tactics realize strategic objectives and make the endstate possible. Unlike strategy that is driven by the endstate, “mission statements” drive military tactics.

Tactical plans deal with things like the use of naval, air and ground forces, the conduct of cyber-warfare and unconventional operations like psychological warfare or special operations. They also include less conventional plans like training allied security forces or carrying out humanitarian operations.

The job of the big boss and his staff is never tactical.

Their job is to design and assess metrics that measure the effectiveness of the boss’s strategy, i.e. are we nearing the endstate or was the identified strategic objective attained as planned?

If yes, carry on. If no, where are we lagging? Along which line or lines of operation? Then comes the “why?” with the really big job for the boss and his staff: What needs to be done to get on back on the road to our endstate?

Five signs of trouble for the big boss:

Are the metrics working? Do they tell us where we are and where we are going? If not then the staff is failing.

If there are no “branches and sequels” to deal with the unexpected or they prove inadequate then the staff is not doing its job.

As a corollary, good bosses can deal with bad news, what they hate are surprises. If the boss is surprised then his subordinates failed.

If the staff is getting into tactics then you have a malfunctioning staff. If the boss ever needs to “go tactical,” fire the subordinate commander and get back to being a strategist immediately. If members of the boss’s staff “go tactical,” fire them and get strategists (by the way, strategists are a lot harder to come by than tacticians).

If the endstate is not clearly understood by all participants – from top to bottom – then the strategy will fail…at that point hope for blind luck.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Looking At The Wrong Threat: Iran v. ISIL

Looking At The Wrong Threat: Iran v. ISIL

Col Mike Walker

All,

Below is a response to a question posed by a knowledgeable colleague: Which is more dangerous, Iran or ISIL?

The simple answer is that Iran is the greatest threat to the United States in the region.

Iran is an aggressive and revolutionary regime with a global vision: It wants to destroy and replace the current "unjust" world order.

 

To the Ayatollahs, the heart and soul of the unjust world order is the United States (hence the "satan, " evil" etc rhetoric). 

 

We are the number one enemy and will remain so as long as the Islamic theocracy remains in place.

 

Kind-hearted people want to believe that Iran only wants its rightful place under the sun. That is why our attempts to reach detente with Iran fail over and over again and will continue to fail.

 

In addition to having us in their crosshairs, Iran is the greater threat not because they are more “evil” but because they are more competent. Iran grows in strength and influence and capabilities. The Sunni extremist factions (al Qaeda, ISIL, etc) are to be feared as efficiently savage murders but for little else.   

 

Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon, making that poor country a potential Iranian vassal state. As if to make their point, Mohamad Chatah was assassinated by pro-Iranian terrorists on 27 December 2013, a few days after his open letter to Iran was published. The letter can be found at: 

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304483804579286723620835720

Teheran declared Bahrain the 14^th province of Iran. They have strong influence in Iraq. The most lethal IEDs used against Americans by Sadr's forces (Mahdi Army) were designed and often manufactured in Iran.

 

Assad in Syria now owes his rule to the Ayatollahs -- that is why Turkey and the Sunni Arab states won't fully support U.S. policy in Syria. We have backed off our demand for Assad's removal and that foolish policy strengthens Iran and weakens our regional allies.

 

Iran backs the Houthi in Yemen, further destabilizing the region. Iran hates the Saudi form of Islam so the Saudis may go into Yemen if they see it becoming an Iranian satellite.

 

Now lets move on to Iran's international maneuvers.

 

Morocco broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2008 because MOIS/VEVAK was using fake NGO and cultural organizations to destabilize the regime there. 

Iran continues to build its intelligence and covert operations capability in the Western Hemisphere as an attempt to bring the struggle closer to America.

 

Iran aided and abetted our enemies in Afghanistan and was barely foiled in a plot to place a bomb at the JFK Airport in 2007 that resulted in a life sentence for Abdul Kadir, the former-head of clandestine Iranian intelligence operations in Guyana. Kadir received direction from the Iranian embassy in Caracas, Venezuela. 

In April 2009, a Canadian of Iranian ancestry was arrested for trying to illegally ship a number of pressure transducers to Iran, which he had originally purchased in the US. The transducers are needed in making nuclear weapons.

 

More recently, on 25 May 2013, Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman released a study detailing the Iranian regional terrorism network in Latin America built on his previous 2006 investigation that indicted seven Iranians and one member of Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community Center in Buenos Aires that killed eighty-five people. 

Nisman was apparently murdered last week just as he was issuing a report on illegal Iranian attempts to escape justice.

 

On 30 May 2013, Manssor Arbabsiar was sentenced to a 25-year prison term in Federal Court for his role in the foiled Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and detonate bombs at the Saudi Arabian and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. 

 

The Ayatollahs have both the will and ever-growing means to attack the United States. That makes them the dominant threat in the region.

 

Having written that, I do not propose an aggressive military policy against Iran, only a containment policy against a real and active threat.

 

Semper Fi,

Mike

Why Obama Needs to Pretend the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists

Why Obama Needs to Pretend the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists 
The administration makes a desperate and indefensible claim. 
By Andrew C. McCarthy

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night.
In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend:

1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to intimidate people and change policy), and (c) a national-security threat to the United States. The law that covers this is Sec. 1189(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, from the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s here, and it’s just the first few lines — even a president who routinely ignores the laws he is sworn to execute faithfully should be able to make some time for it, maybe on the plane ride between the golf course and the Saudi palace.

2. Obviously, even if it were true, as posited by Messrs. Schultz and Earnest (speaking for President Obama), that the Taliban is concerned only with Afghanistan, not with the global jihad, that would be irrelevant. They easily fit the definition of a foreign terrorist organization. 

3. Of course, it is not true that the Taliban is concerned only with Afghanistan. The administration’s risible claim to the contrary is part of its campaign to bleach the Islam out of radical Islam. Islamic supremacism, the ideology that fuels jihadist terror, is a global conquest ideology. Obama wants you to believe that there is just a dizzying array of small, disconnected, strange-sounding, indigenous “insurgent” groups that are not joined by any unifying ideology — the Afghan Taliban (not to be confused with the Pakistani Taliban), Hamas, Hezbollah, the Haqqani Network, Boko Haram, al-Nusra, Ansar al-Sharia, the sundry jihadist franchises that invoke al-Qaeda’s name (in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Islamic Maghreb, in the Indian subcontinent . . . ), and so on. You are not to see them as a united front against the West, but instead as animated by strictly parochial political and territorial disputes. The strategy, a disingenuous elevation of semantics over substance, is designed to minimize the global jihadist threat to the West that has intensified on Obama’s watch and has undeniable roots in a supremacist interpretation of Islam.

4. You need not take my word for it when it comes to the Taliban’s ideological connection to the global jihad. Instead, just look at what they do. What did the Taliban do when they ruled Afghanistan? They willfully allowed their territory to be used as a launch pad for attacks against the United States (the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa, the 2000 bombing of the Cole, and the 9/11 atrocities). And after 9/11, when, by simply handing bin Laden & Co. over to the United States, they could have stayed in power and avoided an invasion of the Afghanistan they are said to be preoccupied with, what did they do? At enormous cost to themselves, they tried to shelter al-Qaeda. In the 14 years since, they have continued to abet the global jihadist campaign, and have reveled in making war against the United States — a war they now understandably think they will win.

5. The Taliban’s continued alliance with al-Qaeda’s global jihad is of a piece with Hamas’s self-proclaimed incorporation in the Muslim Brotherhood’s global ambitions, and with the forward-militia role Hezbollah plays for Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary state that exports its Shiite version of jihad. All of these actors perceive themselves as enmeshed in a civilizational struggle against the West. We can’t erase that by pretending there is no animating ideology, pretending that they can be pacified if we satisfy their local grievances.

6. This business of distinguishing “insurgents” from “terrorists” is nonsense. An insurgency is just a domestic uprising (in the sense that the insurgent is from the country in which he is rebelling). When insurgents use terrorist tactics they are domestic terrorists. It may make Obama feel better to say that his pal Bill Ayers was an “insurgent,” but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a terrorist.

7. The most disturbing facet of the “insurgent” canard is that Obama is buying the logic of such Islamic supremacists as the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They claim that Hamas and Hezbollah are not terrorist organizations (as American law designates them to be) but domestic political organizations that engage not in terrorism but in “resistance” — a righteous fight against “injustice” and “occupation” in their homelands.

8. Obama, of course, is not approving of the Taliban’s tactics and goals. But he wants you to see them as domestic insurgents because progressives believe insurgents should be negotiated with and brought into a political settlement — and to the extent insurgents go overboard in their aggression, progressives believe they should be prosecuted in the civilian justice system, not fought militarily like wartime enemies.

9. In the United States, Obama is operating in a political environment where the public — based on longstanding prudential American policy — believes we should not negotiate with terrorists because that encourages and legitimizes their savage methods. Similarly, the public strongly believes international terrorists are enemies who must be defeated, not defendants who must be indicted. Obama knows he is negotiating with, intends to settle with, and eventually will leave Afghanistan to the tender mercies of, the Taliban. Therefore, the administration is desperate that you not look at the Taliban as terrorists.

10. But they are terrorists.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Expanded International Economics Riddles

From the riddler, Col Walker...

Q: How do Venezuela and Cuba increase their national wealth?

A: They don’t.

Q: How do liberal democrats in the United States increase revenues?

A: Find people who know how to grow the American economy and tax them to death.

Q. How do you deal with a stagnant or falling standard of living in Russia?

A. Invade a neighbor.

Q: How do you increase national wealth in Greece?

A: Demand that the Germans and French work harder.

O Cruel Fate

Wanna dance?

O Cruel Fate

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Well, my how the mighty have fallen. I have long witnessed the emasculation of the American male and sometimes for the better, but this week proved we have gone off the deep end.

The French undergo a terrible attack and find their spine. Our response?

The senior American leadership passed on attending an international display of strength and solidarity because of …well…security concerns.

Our guys were a bit more afraid than, say, fifty other world leaders and a million unarmed civilians. 

Gee.

And then to add injury to insult, our Secretary of State goes hat-in-hand and with hugs and kisses (literally) to apologize. To make amends, he brings a symbol of American resolve.

A new weapons system to kill terrorists? No. A military leader to coordinate efforts against violent Islamic extremists? Not quite. A proposed military pact of mutual support? Sorry!

He brought James Taylor to sing, "You've Got A Friend."

It is pretty had to look like total wimps (and in France of all places) but we accomplished the near impossible.

Profiles in Courage? I think not.  Jack Kennedy, we really miss you. 

Ich bin ein "stay at home man."

Semper Fi,

Mike

BEDFORD FALLS OR POTTERSVILLE?

BEDFORD FALLS OR POTTERSVILLE?
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Novelist Anne Morse has written a sequel to Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Her novel is called Bedford Falls.

NRO has posted an interview with Morse. Like the classic film, her novel, she says, reminds us of our obligations to family and community — the “little platoons,” to borrow Edmund Burke’s phrase.

The Morse interview reminds me that nine years ago, I wrote a Weekly Standard column called “Bedford Falls or Pottersville? What kind of a country you think you live in can affect your eagerness to defend it.”

Since we’re in the midst of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, I thought I would republish the piece:

In his end-of-the-year column, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne included this message from an irate conservative reader: “Most liberals and some Democrats hate this president and will do anything to bring him down, including siding with terrorists against the president.” Noting that the same sentiment was expressed in different forms by many readers, Dionne lamented that “when big chunks of the country begin to view their political adversaries as something close to traitors, we have arrived at a very dangerous time.”

But is it baseless to suspect that the left-liberal ethos impels some adherents towards ambivalence about the struggle against terrorism? History suggests that the issue is worth investigating. After all, the old American left felt ambivalent–or worse–when it came to the foreign policy struggles of its day. 

Chunks of the left opposed American involvement in the struggle against fascism until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. And even after becoming disillusioned with Communism, elements of the old left failed to buy into the Cold War.

Many adopted the posture of the influential literary critic Edmund Wilson. As Joseph Epstein has pointed out, Wilson described our conduct towards the Soviet Union as “panicky pugnacity” borne not of our virtue but of “the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.”

The “new left” of the 1960s and 1970s rejected such world-weary moral equivalency and rooted openly for Communists. The standard chant of that era’s student left was “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win.”

These leftists now have a stake in our society, and neither they nor their children have to worry about being drafted. Moreover, bin Laden and Zarqawi may cut less appealing figures, both personally and ideologically, than Uncle Ho, Chairman Mao, and Fidel Castro.

Thus, there’s no reason to believe that very many leftists root for, or sympathize deeply with, the enemy. But we shouldn’t summarily dismiss the possibility that some leftists today feel ambivalent about the country they once considered criminal and that, always craving sophistication, they may have adopted something like Edmund Wilson’s cynical view of America’s latest conflict.

Consider the statements and actions of some of today’s left-liberals. The most obvious example is Michael Moore. As Michael Barone reminds us, Moore has hailed the Iraqi terrorist insurgents as “Minute Men” who deserve to win, and on his website has called Americans the stupidest people in the world.

By hitting the daily double of anti-Americanism–cheering for the enemy and denigrating his countrymen–Moore became a hero to the left and an ally of liberal Democratic politicians. According to Barone, about half of the Democratic senators attended the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s popular distillation of his views on the war against terror. And at their national convention, the Democrats honored Moore with a seat next to former president, and kindred spirit, Jimmy Carter.

But it is not just their fondness for Moore that suggests a deep ambivalence about this country on the part of many liberals. Isolated incidents of prisoner abuse caused Senate minority whip Richard Durbin to compare the United States to Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Recent revelations about warrant-less electronic surveillance of calls from foreign al Qaeda operatives to the United States have spurred comparisons to King George III.

Those who perceive America as being one New York Times story away from deserving comparison to some of history’s most odious regimes must believe that the country is teetering on the brink of evil. 

What if one were to take the left’s moral worldview seriously? If the country is on such tenuous moral ground, as they proclaim it to be, then the highest priority–more urgent than dealing with an enemy that successfully attacks us only once every several years–is to make sure that the country doesn’t spiral into something truly evil. 

Thus, while most Americans find it unobjectionable that we use water boarding, or electronic surveillance of calls to the United States, to obtain information about al Qaeda plans, those who consider America morally ambiguous cannot accept such tactics. To do so, the familiar protest goes, makes us too much like the enemy. This incarnation of moral-equivalency-think is as potentially debilitating in the war on terror as Edmund Wilson’s version was during the Cold War.

The other imperative for this crowd–also more urgent than the war on terror–is to move the country away from the brink of evil to higher moral ground. This means enacting the left-liberal agenda–government guaranteed healthcare for all, higher taxes on the rich, gay marriage, and so forth. 

But to advance down that road, Republicans must be vanquished. For some liberals, E.J. Dionne notwithstanding, it follows that they must do nearly anything to bring the Republicans and their president down, and that accomplishing this constitutes a higher priority than combating terrorism.

Many modern liberals seem unable to say what kind of country they live in. Most of the time, they speak as if they inhabit Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls–a dull, nosy, and somewhat puritanical, but basically decent place where George Bailey and the forces of good fight to a stalemate with Mr. Potter and the forces of evil.

Deep down, though, they fear they live in Pottersville, minus the fun. The defense of Bedford Falls, for all of its flaws, would be a top priority; the primacy of defending Pottersville is less apparent.

Nine years later, my only amendment to the column is that, disillusioned by the failed Obama presidency, many more liberals now think they live in Pottersville.

Cuba No-Gooding

Cuba No-Gooding

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Recognizing the radical socialist dictatorship in Cuba is not a big deal. After all, we recognized Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin's Communist Russia. Hitler, Stalin and Castro. Big whoop!  Maybe the Administration can retroactively recognize Pol Pots' Khmer Rouge regime as well? 

Is this a shameful decision? Yes, but that's reality. 

Will things get better in Cuba? Not a chance. Before the President leaves office, this thing will stink so bad that it will make the Putin "reset" that resulted in the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine look not all that bad.

As for human rights, this United States Marine will not forget nor forgive Castro's butchers. I will neither forget nor forgive what happened to Marine Captain Jeb Seagle. 

Who is Jeb Seagle, you ask? 

It is name you will never hear uttered by the "Hate America First" leftists but it is a name with an important story.

In 1983, as Fidel's minions moved to enslave Grenada and his local puppets ineptly and recklessly grabbed half a dozen American medical students as hostages, a rescue mission was launched and Captain Jeb Seagle was in the thick of it.

Below is part of the story, told in his citation for the Navy Cross, a medal for valor in combat second only to the Medal of Honor:

SEAGLE, JEB F. Captain, U.S. Marine Corps (Reserve) Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 261 (HMM-261), 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit Date of Action: October 25, 1983 Citation: The Navy Cross is presented to Jeb F. Seagle, Captain, U.S. Marine Corps (Reserve), for extraordinary heroism while serving as an AH-IT (TOW) Cobra Attack Helicopter Pilot with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron TWO HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE (HMM-261), Twenty-Second Marine Amphibious Unit, conducting combat operations on the Island of Grenada on 25 October 1983. While conducting an armed reconnaissance mission in support of ground forces, Captain Seagle's aircraft was hit by multiple anti-aircraft artillery projectiles and forced down behind enemy lines. Having been knocked out by the blast, Captain Seagle regained consciousness after his fellow pilot had flown the aircraft to impact and found that his aircraft was on fire and burning out of control. As Captain Seagle exited the front cockpit of the Cobra, he saw that the other pilot had been critically wounded and remained helplessly trapped in the aircraft. With complete disregard for his own safety, Captain Seagle courageously returned to the aircraft which was now engulfed in flames and pulled him out. As unexpended ordnance began to cook off all around them, Captain Seagle carried the severely wounded pilot well clear of the danger. Now exposed to heavy enemy small arms and machinegun fire and faced with certain death or capture, Captain Seagle ignored the danger and remained to attend the wounds of the injured pilot by wrapping a tourniquet around his severely bleeding arm. Realizing that enemy soldiers were approaching, Captain Seagle fearlessly distracted them away from the helpless pilot and ultimately sacrificed his own life in an effort to buy time for the rescue helicopter to arrive. By his extraordinary courage, uncommon valor, and loyal devotion to duty in the face of danger, Captain Seagle ensured his brother-in-arms was rescued; thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service. 

Here is the tragic rest: Shortly after saving the life of gravely wounded Captain Tim Howard (who subsequently lost arm), Captain Seagle was captured by Cuban soldiers.

Since the mid-1970s when Communist Cuban soldiers began serving in Africa, their savagery became a thing of horror stories. 

Captain Seagle fared no better. Within minutes after his capture, he was dragged down a dirt road, pushed down on his knees and executed by the Cubans.

We are now dubiously reproaching ourselves over the Geneva Convention* edicts regarding the treatment of prisoners but that does not matter south of Florida. There is no such uncertainty in Cuba as that document only has a purpose when it is set afire to light a cigar -- POW rights be damned.

Now we will recognize these bums. So be it. 

The "Hate America First" Club will celebrate but as for this Marine: To hell with the Castro dictatorship.

Semper Fi,

Mike

* News flash: KMZ and his fellow monsters have no legal Geneva Convention rights, those rights are reserved for combatants in war -- not terrorists who intentionally target the innocent for death.

Let a Hundred Coburns Bloom

Let a Hundred Coburns Bloom 

The retiring Oklahoma senator knew how to fix what’s wrong with America.

Mike Brake, NRO

Here in Oklahoma, the news that Senator Tom Coburn will be retiring early from his second term has still not entirely settled in with most folks. For ten years we awoke each day knowing that our state’s voice in Washington would be one of principled reason and absolute integrity.

It’s not that our other senator, Jim Inhofe, or our House members, like Tom Cole and Frank Lucas, are lacking. They are all solid conservatives, as is former congressman James Lankford, whom we elected in November to replace Coburn in the Senate. But as conservatives across the nation have recognized for years, there’s only one Tom Coburn.

Which raises the question: What would America look like if the United States Senate had contained 100 Tom Coburns for the past decade?

Well, none of them would be running for president. One of the most endearing things about Senator Coburn was and is his total lack of personal ambition. From his first election to the House in the GOP sweep of 1994 until the day he announced his retirement, he’s been about one thing: service.

A hundred Coburns, or even 51, would have long since passed a balanced-budget amendment and enforced it. The pork flowing out of Washington would have dried up years ago. The deficit, which mushroomed to some $16 trillion under the first Obama administration, would be closer to $10 trillion and falling.

Canadian oil would already be flowing south through the Keystone pipeline. That, coupled with more sensible federal regulatory policies, would probably have dropped gasoline prices to around a dollar a gallon. We could have told the OPEC thugs to go pound sand.

A Coburn Senate would have sustained and even expanded needed defense spending. And any report on the CIA’s work in the War on Terror would have said “Thank you!”

Taxes? They’d almost certainly be lower and much simpler. We might even have achieved that eternal dream of most Americans, a tax return on a postcard.

Russia would be less belligerent. Vladimir Putin would know not to mess with a strong and confident America, and so would the other bad actors, from North Korea to Iran. Yes, presidents set foreign policy, but a Coburn Senate would have added some spine to even a weak-kneed Obama administration.

The federal judiciary would be much more inclined to make rulings based on law and constitutional principle. It is unlikely that we’d have a “wise Latina” grinding liberal ideological axes.

A Senate of Coburn clones would waste a lot less time on resolutions designating Thursday as Earle T. Woonsocket Day and spend more time debating the issues that matter. The dead air on C-SPAN would be filled with substantive debates, with minimal grandstanding. Imagine what it was like for some senators to follow Tom Coburn on the floor for the past decade!

In short, a Coburn Senate for the past ten years would have made us a stronger, safer, more prosperous people.

I have been privileged to know Tom Coburn casually and to respect him entirely since he first blossomed as a new congressman two decades ago. When he was still undecided about seeking a second Senate term in 2010, I stood in line at a political function to tell him what everyone else there was clamoring to say: “We need you in Washington!”

Alas, we won’t have him there in 2015. Oklahoma, the Senate, and the nation will be poorer for his absence, as we were and are richer for his ennobling service.

— Mike Brake is a longtime journalist, writer, and editor in Oklahoma. He was a speechwriter for Governor Frank Keating.

“White Privilege” and the Destruction of the Democratic Majority

“White Privilege” and the Destruction of the Democratic Majority

Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Not all that long ago, the Democratic Party looked to have cobbled together a near permanent majority coalition (“near” as bad governance will do in anyone). 

Not so anymore.

Today there is not a single Democratic Senator, Governor or Democratically controlled legislature from Texas to North Carolina, the fastest growing region in the United States.

The respected and likeable two-term Democratic Senator from Louisiana just became the latest candidate to get shellacked in the 2014 Mid-Term Elections.

Why?

Like the Republican Party that shifted right with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the Democrats are now shifting further left as seen in Elizabethan populism but perhaps best captured by the destructive extremism known as “White Privilege,” a reckless position held to not by truth but by a religious-like belief that is impervious to reason. 

The result is middle class flight from the Democrat establishment the likes of which has never been witnessed.

To understand just how out of touch the "Party of special interests" has become, read the 1995 editorial by former-Democratic Senator Jim Webb:

http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/economic-fairness-social-justice/in-defense-of-joe-six-pack

The Bill Clinton-Jim Webb mainstream wing of the Democratic Party is on life support and too many Democrat Party elites are more than willing to pull the plug.

Happy Holidays,

Mike

A Denver Doofus Political Dance

A reasonable kind of guy... education, a whole industry based on hate...

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Professor Charles Angeletti of Denver’s Metropolitan State University forced his class to take a “satirical” pledge demeaning the United States.

See: http://collegeinsurrection.com/2014/12/colorado-college-prof-forces-students-to-recite-anti-american-pledge-of-allegiance/

“Satirical” implies a sense of tolerant humor. Yeah Right. OK, Charlie, here’s a similar little chuckle:

“I refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America but only to the left-wing “Hate America First” ideology for which it really stands and what needs to be one statist authoritarian Nation under anti-religious know-it-all elites, endlessly divisible, with politically correct group-think and tolerance for all. *

*Except white males or individuals who believe that America has done right by them or anyone else – ever – and (in the immortal words of Professor Gruber), especially ignorant and too stupid to understand YOU!”

 

Can anyone imagine the Good Professor using that “satirical” version of the Pledge? 

Of course not! 

His "pledge" is not intended to be funny and thought provoking; it was done to shock and insult with the goal of proselyting his students.

Regards,

White Male Mike