Joe Biden in Context

Well, well, well . . . VP Joe has been sent out to be the attack Chihuahua, again. . .

Look, things are not fair. Ryan is young, athletic, smart, knowledgable, and has a full head of hair, and Joe, well, he . . . . Anyhow, the debate between Ryan and Biden just won't be fair. No, it's not right. In keeping with our Dear Leader's vision of the United States as the land of equal outcomes, I propose that Republicans make a special effort to help out ol' Joe as "he's been moving kinda slow . . . "

It is only fair that the Diplomad go first in this effort. A suggested spin for the DNC.

"By now we all have heard the Vice President's speech in Virginia in which he mentioned that the GOP sought to put black people 'back in chains.' We note the mock outrage from the Republicans on this comment, and roundly deny that the Vice President was implying that the Republicans would put black people in some sort of physical, metal 'chains.' The statement must be understood in its full context. The Vice President meant, and the GOP knows this, that were the GOP to win the November election, everybody would have to go shopping in 'chain stores' and eat in 'chain restaurants.'"

Just a thought . . . .

Ryan: A Serious Man

I will leave to those more qualified to analyze and spin the electoral impact of Governor Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his VP running mate. The masters of spin and parse will be out in force looking at whether the choice "alienates" single women, frightens senior citizens, or galvanizes the Tea Party into action. I am not going to get into that . . . much.

In terms of intellectual firepower, and track record of accomplishments in the private and public sector this presidential ticket, regardless of party, is the best one in decades and arguably ever.  This is a serious ticket. Voters will have before them a stark choice in November. On the one hand, the Democratic ticket consists of a failed, truth-avoiding, and corrupt incumbent President running with Joe Biden, one of the dopiest and least interesting hack politicians of our time. The GOP ticket consists of a successful job- and wealth-creating businessman and governor running with the single smartest and most competent Congressman on the Hill, the one man in the whole Congress who knows how a federal budget is put together and the impact it has on the country.  For me, there is no dilemma in making my choice.

The Democrats got nothin'. So they will double down on the sort of vicious assault on truth that we have seen over the past few weeks. The Democrat lie Gatling is already beginning to fire away: Ryan favors throwing the elderly off a cliff; he favors a federal budget to make the rich richer. More will come. Ryan can expect to have the most minute details of his life put out in public and subject to ridicule.  The President who refuses to divulge the most basic information of his own life, will spare no expense in having his minions dig up anything and everything that can be used or distorted. It will be disgusting and infuriating.

I hope that Ryan will give as good as he gets while sticking to the truth and coming back again and again to the failed Obama-Biden record, and the basic choice now facing us: do we want to continue marching down the road to stagnation, dependency, poverty, and a government-run society, or do we get back to the basics that have made America great. There should be no problem in making that choice, except that we have been busy developing a society of half-educated college graduates and cynics with no basic understanding of the economy or the world. We have people more and more removed from the process of wealth production and further and further into wealth consumption. That will be the challenge facing the Republicans and the future of America, to wit, to tap into what I believe is a still strong American ethos of work, saving, and investment, to make it clear that we do not have to become Greece.

America needs a little R&R after four years of B&O.

Obama's War on Truth

As we emerge from the summer doldrums, we see coming ever more clearly what we knew would come from the Obama re-election effort: an unceasing staccato of lies.

For all his exotic cool, easy smiles, and breezy charm, Obama is a product of the corrupt Chicago political machine. When I say that, I refer not just to the machine's well-known lax handling of money, e.g., Obama's real estate deal with convicted mobster Rezko, or its liberal attitude towards voter fraud, e.g., Obama's opposition to voter id laws. No. The real corruption of the Chicago way of politics is how it handles the truth, and the zero regard it has not just for the truth, but for the damage done to the political process and to real lives, real human beings, by the lies it spews. It is the politics of personal destruction on  steroids.

We see the machine at work in their "kill Romney" strategy.  The Obama machine tells lies, because lies are much better than the truth. The Obamistas only seem to tell the truth when they commit a "gaffe." The most prominent gaffe, aka inadvertent truth, is, of course, "You didn't build that!" Four words that revealed the ugly, angry hate-filled face behind the smiling mask. The truth is a disaster for the Obama campaign and must be avoided; to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, "They can't stand the truth." The Obama campaign is built around lies. Never mind the war on religion, the war on women, the war on the middle class.  It is a war on truth. The truth is that the Obama presidency is a disaster by almost any measure of the national interest. Endless and growing deficits; the imploding of the economy; the selling out of allies and the collapse of American influence abroad; the sabotage of basic American values by the promotion of dependence. The campaign cannot be about any of that. The campaign cannot be about Obama's record, it cannot even be about the secretive and deceptive Obama.

The Obama campaign has a Gatling gun loaded up with seemingly endless rounds of lies. They fire one lie after another on the assumption that, as Churchill noted, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Romney is a tax cheat; Ann Romney has never done anything in her life; Romney rips off workers and small companies; Romney uses death squad money; Romney is a murderer. As the victim gets ready to respond to one lie, another is headed his way. No time to respond to all the lies much less get to focus on the real issues at play. That's the Chicago way.


Whomever Governor Romney picks as VP running mate, better be ready to have his life turned upside down. The Chicago machine will stop at nothing.

This is going to get very nasty.

For the sake of our country and for the sake of just plain decency, Obama must be defeated in November. 

The Drug War Summed Up

Going through 34-years of old photos, I found this one. I have another one somewhere that is clearer, but I haven't found the right shoebox, yet.

The picture is of a large plane (DC-3? Not sure) resting at the bottom of a lake in Central America. I took the picture from a helicopter while on an anti-drug operation many, many years ago--the shrubbery at the bottom of the frame is a marijuana plant we "captured" in a raid earlier that day and were taking back as evidence.

Seeing this plane in a lake made a huge impression on me; it drove home the futility of the "drug war." The narcos used big planes on one-way missions. They could afford to throw away aircraft and still make huge profits. You can't make war on the law of supply and demand . . .

Mars and Hiroshima

It seems almost appropriate that NASA's rover "Curiosity" should make its spectacular landing on Mars, named for the god of war, on the 67th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, perhaps the single most spectacular and consequential military action in history. Both events are the result of a uniquely American capability: the ability to put together and execute in a brilliant fashion large, extremely complex, and technologically dazzling operations with long term consequences not only for America but for the world.  For those who hate America and for those who don't, the message is simple: never underestimate the United States when it comes to doing the difficult or even the "impossible." America has an unparalleled ability to carry out large even awe inspiring military and engineering/scientific projects, e.g., the building of the Panama Canal, the D-Day invasion, the Manhattan Project, the moon landing, the invasion of Afghanistan, and now the Mars landing.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber, the "Enola Gay," dropped the world's first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Nobody knows how many people died in the attack; estimates range from a "low" of 65,000 to about 250,000. Whatever the number, it was part of the "terrible arithmetic of war" in which whole cities in Europe and Asia were turned into rubble, including the March 9-10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo in which perhaps over 100,000 people died.

I remember being at the UN building in New York on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. An exhibit had been put up in the lobby to commemorate the event. I joined the small group of European tourists who were being addressed by the UN tour guide, also a foreigner. The young man discussed the bombing as if it were an isolated event, no context. It was as if one day Harry Truman woke up and decided to drop a couple of atomic bombs on Japan.  Seething, I remember asking him where the exhibit was for the attack on Pearl Harbor since without the attack on Pearl Harbor there would have been no attack on Hiroshima. His only reply was, "That's the American version." 

Was the atomic bombing justified? Yes, it was. Truman made the right call. The US naval and air campaign against the Japanese homeland, unlike the Allied bombing of Germany, seriously deteriorated Japan's industrial capacity. The strategic bombing of Japan had by mid-1945 probably cut Japanese industrial production in half. Japan was clearly going to lose the war but its leadership had no intention of recognizing that. As the American invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa showed, the Japanese were brave, tough, skillful, and determined defenders of their home islands. American military planners looked at the casualties from those two campaigns and extrapolated to what it would cost to invade Japan proper. The US military estimated that there would be at least one million American casualties, plus hundreds of thousands of other allied dead and wounded, and perhaps twenty to thirty times that many Japanese casualties in the case of an invasion. Such a campaign in Japan might take one to two years, would result in the total devastation of Japan, and produce a legacy of hatred and bitterness that would last a hundred years or more.

One alternative to an invasion was the slow strangulation of Japan via a naval blockade and a continuous bombing and shelling campaign. That, too, would have resulted in the deaths of millions of Japanese, and a war that would have dragged on for perhaps years.

Dropping the atomic bomb was the only viable option. We should note, of course, that even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, important elements within the Japanese military tried to prevent the Emperor from making his broadcast accepting the Allied terms.  The atomic bombings allowed for a peaceful occupation and rebuilding of Japan, and within the parameters of the "terrible arithmetic" it was the least horrible of the horrible options available.

This is a day to stand in awe of science and the power it has to scare us and to amaze us. It is also a time to reflect on what real leadership, skill, and teamwork look like and can produce.

Obama and the Damage Done

As noted before, I began my career in the Foreign Service during the Carter presidency, and ended it during the Obama presidency: two horrific bookends.

Jimmy Carter should not have been president. He was incompetent beyond belief; angry about America's success in the world; wanted us to get our comeuppance; and was and is a mean, reptilian and graceless little man.  Being out of office has made him even angrier, meaner, smaller, more anti-American, and more anti-semitic. He was and remains a repellent creature; if anyone ever could make me ashamed of my country, he could. I can't forgive him for that.

He caused the United States a considerable amount of damage.  His economic policies were almost non-existent. He, in fact, never seemed to have an interest in the economy except to the extent that our dire economic performance during his term seemed to fit his view that we were being rightfully punished. He wanted Americans to live small, and see the future as a bleak struggle for atonement for past sins. His foreign policy was disastrous. The USSR and its vassals were on the march throughout the world, including in Latin America and the Caribbean, with virtually no resistance from the United States. His administration gutted our intelligence and covert capabilities; our military was a hollow shell; our international alliances were badly frayed; terrorist organizations and states, with Soviet-bloc support, operated openly in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America; and the insane Imams of Iran turned a major ally into a major enemy.

Along came Reagan. He laughingly rejected the Carter premise that America deserved its "punishment" and that we could do nothing about the economy, the decline of American power, and the rising might of the Soviet empire.  Reagan waved off the honking flocks of "intellectuals" who called him out-of-touch and dangerous. He connected with the American people and the great traditions of our country.  He slashed taxes and our economy turned around; he took seriously the Constitution's main role for the president: national defense.  Our military might came roaring back; he outmaneuvered the Soviets and brought them and their vast evil empire to their knees. It was a masterful performance.  Reagan managed to fix most of the damage done by Carter--the Iranian disaster, however, continues to haunt us over three decades later--and he restored faith in America as the indispensable nation in the world.

We now are saddled with another abomination as president: one worse than Carter. The damage Obama has done to our economy and global standing, while immense, can be relatively easily fixed. The real damage he has done is more pernicious and perhaps permanent. He has participated fully and deliberately in undermining the essence of what it means to be an American. Let me explain.

Anybody remotely interested could know Carter, what he had done with his life, and what he advocated. He had an easily accessible public record.  Obama, of course, is the most secretive and closed off president we have ever had. Only after years of badgering did he even release his birth certificate. We are not allowed to know about his education except that, like the absurd Elena Ceausescu, he is "brilliant." How did this self-admittedly mediocre high school student, from a relatively modest background, growing up in remote Hawaii and Indonesia as part of an apparently very dysfunctional family, manage to get into three expensive and "elite" universities? How did he come to their attention? Who vouched for him? Who paid? Did he claim to be a foreign student? What were his courses and grades? Who were his friends and teachers? In a celebrity obsessed world where we know everything about Tom Cruise and Britney Spears, we know next to nothing about the man who encumbers our presidency.

His political rise is shrouded in mystery. After Harvard, he suddenly moves to Chicago. Why? He becomes a "community organizer" there, and rapidly rises in the corrupt and crony-filled Democratic machine. He becomes the darling of gangsters such as Rezko, close friends with known terrorists and hate-mongers, and presto he is taking down opponents right and left and soon is in the White House.  We can't ask anything about it all. To do so risks charges of racism. His ascendency is a liberal Hollywood fable and it must remain unquestioned and unexamined. He is our anointed leader. He is our Athena.

This is the first bit of damage he has done. It is now considered by the majority of the media and the other honking "intellectual" geese as off-limits to question Obama's life, his claimed achievements, or note the contradictions in what he has said and what he says now. Free speech is no longer so free. If you question the President, you are a racist, insane, a danger to democracy, hate the poor or all of the aforementioned.  If you still hold the same views that he purported to hold up to a few weeks ago, e.g., the traditional definition of marriage, and failed to "evolve" when he did, then you are a hopeless homophobe; your business should be banned and ruined, and your employees bullied. This is not unlike Orwell's 1984, "We have never been at war with Eastasia . . . " You must keep up with the changes in Dear Leader's views. He will tell you when you can favor gay marriage; when you can raise closing Guantanamo; when the war will end; when the deficit must be cut with more spending. New Think is here.

Obama has become the incarnation of a troubling trend in our country that has accelerated over the past 40 or so years. He has become the head of what passes for modern progressivism: the alliance between tax-supported university faculties, lawyers, government bureaucrats, journalists, NGO "activists," and Hollywood. This alliance has promoted the politics of envy and resentment, and launched a sustained attack on traditional American values. Our country is now filled with the half-educated idiots who emerge from our universities with no real knowledge but with feelings of entitlement and resentment. We should stand in awe of people with PhDs regardless of whether what they say corresponds to the reality we see, because they know what's good for us. They are the "experts."

One should not underestimate the power of Hollywood in forming what passes for thinking by these impressionable morons. What many of our youth, and foreigners, think they know about America and American history, comes from movies and TV shows. Hollywood bombards us with the viewpoint that rich evil conservative white men (RECWM) are behind all of our troubles, and those of the world. Our heroes should be the brave lawyers who sue corporations; the brave journalists who expose the nefarious plots of the RECWM conspiracy; the brave activists who stand up to the "violent" gun nuts of the Tea Party; the gutsy abortion clinic workers who live in fear of their lives; the brave public servants, e.g., cops and perky assistant district attorneys, who protect us from the RECWM who, of course, are what all of us fear to encounter when we are in a dark parking lot.

Obama has captured this movement and its view, and represents and promotes it better than anybody else in living memory. Unlike Carter, Obama is not incompetent in promoting his hatred for America's traditional values and in embedding it into our institutions, e.g., the ruinous Obamacare, the rapid expansion of the federal dole, the insistence on apologizing for our successes, the disastrous "stimulus" spending, the glorification of the "victim" culture, promotion of envy and cynicism, and denigration of individual effort and success ("You didn't build that!") That is the real threat posed by what Obama represents. Overcoming that threat will take years of sustained effort. It begins, of course, with voting Obama out of the White House next November, but does not end there.

The Media: They Just Can't help Themselves . . .

Tea Party backed Rafael "Ted" Cruz has won a surprisingly large victory in the Texas GOP Senatorial primary, beating his rival by some 13 points.  He is a smart, tough, conservative Hispanic who will win the Senate race next November quite easily.  So what does the Los Angeles Times write about? That Cruz might not be eligible for President in 2016!

Whoa! He hasn't even been elected to the Senate and already he is ineligible to run for President!

The LAT piece claims that since Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada while his father, a Cuban refugee, worked in the oil business, he is not a "naturally born citizen," even if his mother was a US citizen--which she was. Amazing the stuff they will come up with to try to destroy a rising GOP star. The liberals have to destroy women and minority conservatives above all others; not to do so would give the lie to their narrative that the GOP is the party of rich white guys. Look at the hatred directed at Palin, Bachmann, West, Rice, Cain, Rubio, and now Cruz.

On top of everything else, the LAT forgets the real reason Cruz will not be the GOP candidate in 2016: President Romney will be running for his second term.