AMERICA’S HONOR

AMERICA’S HONOR

Scott Johnson, Powerline

In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a characteristically brilliant column by Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. Here it is:

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

Former football star Pat Tillman and Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham were killed on the same day: April 22, 2004. But as details of his death fitfully emerged from Afghanistan, Tillman has become a metaphor for the current conflict–a victim of fratricide, disillusionment, coverup and possibly conspiracy. By comparison, Dunham, who saved several of his comrades in Iraq by falling on an insurgent’s grenade, is the unknown soldier. The New York Times, which featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for 32 consecutive days, put the story of Dunham’s Medal of Honor on the third page of section B.

Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers–honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless–in our midst.

***

In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There’s something wrong with that.

What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn’t stop until all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his comrades time to establish a defensive line.

Yet their stories were not only about killing. Several Medal of Honor recipients told me that the first thing they did after the battle was to find a church or some other secluded spot where they could pray, not only for those comrades they’d lost but also the enemy they’d killed.

Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold.

Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety. Each time he succeeded, he prayed, “Dear God, please let me get just one more man.” By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75 GIs.

Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow-motion invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They couldn’t let their buddies down.

Big for his age at 14, Jack Lucas begged his mother to help him enlist after Pearl Harbor. She collaborated in lying about his age in return for his promise to someday finish school. After training at Parris Island, he was sent to Honolulu. When his unit boarded a troop ship for Iwo Jima, Mr. Lucas was ordered to remain behind for guard duty. He stowed away to be with his friends and, discovered two days out at sea, convinced his commanding officer to put him in a combat unit rather than the brig. He had just turned 17 when he hit the beach, and a day later he was fighting in a Japanese trench when he saw two grenades land near his comrades.

He threw himself onto the grenades and absorbed the explosion. Later a medic, assuming he was dead, was about to take his dog tag when he saw Mr. Lucas’s finger twitch. After months of treatment and recovery, he returned to school as he’d promised his mother, a ninth-grader wearing a Medal of Honor around his neck.

***

The men in World War II always knew, although news coverage was sometimes scant, that they were in some sense performing for the people at home. The audience dwindled during Korea. By the Vietnam War, the journalists were omnipresent, but the men were performing primarily for each other. One story that expresses this isolation and comradeship involves a SEAL team ambushed on a beach after an aborted mission near North Vietnam’s Cua Viet river base.

After a five-hour gunfight, Cmdr. Tom Norris, already a legend thanks to his part in a harrowing rescue mission for a downed pilot (later dramatized in the film BAT-21), stayed behind to provide covering fire while the three others headed to rendezvous with the boat sent to extract them. At the water’s edge, one of the men, Mike Thornton, looked back and saw Tom Norris get hit. As the enemy moved in, he ran back through heavy fire and killed two North Vietnamese standing over Norris’s body. He lifted the officer, barely alive with a shattered skull, and carried him to the water and then swam out to sea where they were picked up two hours later.

The two men have been inseparable in the 30 years since.

The POWs of Vietnam configured a mini-America in prison that upheld the values beginning to wilt at home as a result of protest and dissension. John McCain tells of Lance Sijan, an airman who ejected over North Vietnam and survived for six weeks crawling (because of his wounds) through the jungle before being captured.

Close to death when he reached Hanoi, Sijan told his captors that he would give them no information because it was against the code of conduct. When not delirious, he quizzed his cellmates about camp security and made plans to escape. The North Vietnamese were obsessed with breaking him, but never did. When he died after long sessions of torture Sijan was, in Sen. McCain’s words, “a free man from a free country.”

Leo Thorsness was also at the Hanoi Hilton. The Air Force pilot had taken on four MiGs trying to strafe his wingman who had parachuted out of his damaged aircraft; Mr. Thorsness destroyed two and drove off the other two. He was shot down himself soon after this engagement and found out by tap code that his name had been submitted for the Medal.

One of Mr. Thorsness’s most vivid memories from seven years of imprisonment involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found a grimy piece of cloth, perhaps a former handkerchief, during a visit to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it.

Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile which he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread unraveled from the cell’s one blanket, Christian stitched little stars on the blue field.

“It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn’t see him,” Mr. Thorsness told me. “Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it coming to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad off that even his voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks he immediately started looking for another piece of cloth.”

***

We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave.

Peter’s book on the living Medal of Honor recipients is Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, now republished in a third edition. Peter is the author, most recently, of Political Woman, the biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick published in 2012 by Encounter Books.

Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Phillips first reported Jason Dunham’s story in the Journal and then told it in The Gift of Valor. The story that Peter relates from Senator McCain is included in Senator McCain’s classic memoir (written with Mark Salter), Faith of My Fathers. The story that Peter relates from Leo Thorsness is included in Col. Thorsness’s moving memoir of his service and captivity, Surviving Hell.

Dry Rot in Academia

Dry Rot in Academia

Thomas Sowell, Jewish World Review

Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited — and then disinvited — to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech.

Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author of a very insightful book titled "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed."

In short, Jason Riley's views on race are different from the views that prevail on most college campuses. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. But that was before academia — and the education system in general — became virtually a monopoly of the political left.

Today one can literally go from kindergarten to becoming a graduate student seeking a Ph.D., without ever hearing a vision of the world that conflicts with the vision of the left.

Conservative critics who object on grounds that the views of the left are wrong miss the point. Regardless of whose views become a monopoly, education suffers. John Stuart Mill understood this back in the middle of the 19th century.

As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.

After being invited by conservative students to give talks at various colleges, Jason Riley has then been surprised at how little those conservative students have said during the question and answer periods after these talks. But a Wellesley student explained: "You get to leave when you're done. We have to live with these people until we graduate."

Even liberal professors can be adversely affected by the narrow groupthink that prevails. Without an opposition to keep them on their toes, they can develop sloppy habits of dismissing or even demonizing differing viewpoints, instead of practicing and teaching their students how to come to grips with opposing beliefs.

A well-known Harvard professor, for example, recently referred to Justice Clarence Thomas by remarking: "He'll say he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. I say I was in the right place at the right time."

It so happens that I first met Clarence Thomas back in 1978, when he was a young lawyer in Missouri. In all these years, I have never heard him say anything even resembling what has been blithely attributed to him by this Harvard professor.

On the contrary, Justice Thomas has attributed his good fortune to his grandfather who raised him, especially in his autobiography, "My Grandfather's Son."

When he was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court, he brought the nuns who had taught him in school, down in Georgia, to the ceremony in Washington, at his own expense, to let them know that what they had done for him was appreciated, and had not been in vain.

There is no reason why our Harvard professor has to agree with Justice Thomas' judicial philosophy or his social views. But, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it: "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts."

It was much the same story when a faculty member at the University of California at Santa Barbara referred to economist Walter Williams as someone "committed to the welfare of the top few."

It so happens that I have known Walter Williams since 1969. In all those years, I have never once known him to express the slightest concern for the welfare of rich people. But what I have seen repeatedly has been his expressing his concern for people who are poor, both in words and in deeds.

As an economist, Professor Williams knows that high tax rates on investors chase investments — and American jobs — overseas, where American working people cannot get those jobs. But, whether the academic in Santa Barbara agrees or disagrees with that analysis, it is no good for him, or for his students, to dismiss opposing views by misrepresenting them.

These are just a few samples of the intellectual and moral dry rot on the many campuses across the country where the groupthink of the left substitutes for education.

Thomas Sowell, a National Humanities Medal winner, is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

THE COLD WAR NEVER ENDED

According to Salon, "Lenin has never looked better."

THE COLD WAR NEVER ENDED

Steven Hayward, Powerline

A lot of conservatives have expressed shock and disorientation at the revival of enthusiasm for socialism, not to mention the shattering of the consensus for free trade, low taxes, open markets, freedom of expression, and so forth. It is clear—and I wrote a long memo about this at AEI about five years ago that I cannot now find—that we all made a major mistake in the early 1990s when the Cold War ended in thinking that the triumph of free markets and liberal democracy was permanent. (Anyone remember The End of History?)

Thus I was stunned to stumble across an unpublished lecture of Harry Jaffa’s from December 1991 which ends thus:

The defeat of Communism in the USSR and its satellite empires by no means assures its defeat in the world. Indeed, the release of the West from its conflict with the East emancipates utopian communism at home from the suspicion of its affinity with an external enemy. The struggle for the preservation of western civilization has entered a new—and perhaps far more deadly and dangerous—phase.

In other words, the Cold War never really ended. It just came home, and has by degrees been turning slowly hotter. All of the old impulses that found expression in Marxist formulae have been reborn in the dialectics of “critical theory” and oppression by “patriarchy,” etc., instead of capitalism. In the middle of the lecture, Jaffa explains:

[T]he revolutionary goal of the classless society of altruists has survived. It has survived, detached from any foundation in rational analysis, such as Marx claimed for himself. For what else is the movement for “consciousness raising,” but a re-named version of the demand for “socialist man”? What is the conflict between property rights and global environmentalism, but another chapter in the conflict between bourgeois man and socialist man? “Diversity” is demanded by those who will tolerate no deviation from the “politically correct.” And what is “politically correctness” but another name for “the party line”? It is Leninism/Stalinism without Lenin or Stalin.

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.