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

The Obama Administration Needs to Abandon Its Petraeus Obsession

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Election and In Praise of Iowa

The Election and In Praise of Iowa

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

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

Great!

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

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

That is Iowa. Hurray!

Semper Fi,

Mike

Misreading Bernie's blather

Misreading Bernie's blather

Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

 

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

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

But at another level, that dismissal is a mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

Let’s hear it For the ‘Hawkish Upstart”

Let’s hear it For the ‘Hawkish Upstart” 

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week, McConnell — who is often hesitant to press ahead on issues that divide his 54-member conference — indicated a breather of sorts on the bill, saying GOP senators would take some time to get educated on the measure. 

Those comments discouraged some supporters, since any major pause could spell doom for the bill this year. In a couple of months, the GOP-led Congress will turn its attention to its top legislative priority — budget and appropriations bills — while individual lawmakers shift into full campaign mode.

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

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

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

Idiots and Facism

Gloves off, next!

Idiots and Facism
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How wonderful!

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

Semper Fi,

Mike

Why The Islamic State Can Never Win

Why The Islamic State Can Never Win

Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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