Month: August 2016

Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, and declared veni, vidi, vici   —  I came, I saw, I conquered.  The imperialist Hillary Clinton conquered Libya, Khadaffi was killed, and channeling her inner empress, she said, “We came, we saw, he died.”  She was very proud of herself.  Don’t mess with this woman, or you can get hurt.

Khadaffi deserved to die for his crimes, but it wasn’t our place to participate in his murder.  Our job doesn’t include running around the world deposing strongmen.  He saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, and he gave up any idea of acquiring or building weapons of mass destruction.  But he was a dictator, and a brutal one, and there was great internal resistance to his rule.  Ah, yes, the wonderful Arab Spring, which produced so many beautiful flowers.  So Clinton pushed to oust him, without having any idea of what would happen when he was gone.  The chaos of Libya today, the presence of ISIS, and the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi are direct results of Hillary Clinton’s idiocy as Secretary of State.  The consulate in Benghazi which was overrun was there to begin with because we toppled Khaddafi, and unleashed chaos.  The death of Khaddafi, the implosion of Libya, and the deaths of Benghazi are all part of the Clinton package.

Would Donald Trump do something that stupid?  In Libya Clinton demonstrated that she’s an imperialist war monger, who prides herself on the deaths of her enemies.  She would be a disgrace to the oval office, just as her husband was.

David Goldman has a good piece on the 50 national security Republicans who denounced Trump.  These are the geniuses who’ve gotten us to where we are today.  A lot of them were all in on the Iraq War, and won’t admit it was the greatest American foreign policy failure since Vietnam.  At some point, Trump will need to tackle this issue head on.  Sanders voters are anti-war.  They need to be reminded, again and again, that Clinton voted for that war, and she did it for pure politics.  She’s the one we need to worry about on issues of war and peace, based on her record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.  She’s a foolish Wilsonian, chasing dreams of making the world safe for democracy.  Like Obama and her husband, she’s not so much interested in the American national interest as she is in human rights, or whatever is the crusade of the moment.  And she’ll wind up getting American soldiers killed because of her stupidity, as she did as Secretary of State.  She fights not for herself, but for God, and these are the most dangerous people once they take power.

Trump’s the opposite of Clinton.  He’s not an idealist, he’s a deal maker.  With him, it’s what’s in it for me?  As President, it would be, what’s in it for the United States, and its people?  He’s not a missionary, he’s a transactionalist.  I think he’s smart enough, and will have smart enough people around him, to make good deals for his country.  As long as he doesn’t get any casinos out of the deal.

It seems to me this election is boiling down to a very simple proposition.  Is Donald Trump fit enough, does he have a temperament, where he can be trusted to be President?  The American people will make that judgement for themselves, without any media filters, in the debates.  They’ll decide the election, unless something else does.

One of the first foreign wars we avoided was in the Middle East.  In the 1820’s the Greeks were rebelling against the Ottomans, and there was a great hue and cry to intervene on their behalf.  In response, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote, of his country, “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.  She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”  That, in a nutshell, is Jacksonianism, and was American foreign policy until Wilson, and what we need to get back to.  It was Wilson, with his wild eyed idealism, that set the stage for World War II.  Maybe Wislonialism should be rejected.

Wilson was the worst President in America history because he was one of the most consequential.  His foreign policy legacy is an unmitigated disaster, and his domestic policy started the destruction of the Constitution which continues to this day.  A man of unrivaled vanity and self-righteousness.

I’ve been reading Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger.  He’s a big fan of Bismarck, who was a truly remarkable man.  He wrote, “The best a Statesman can do is listen to the footsteps of God, get hold the hem of His cloak, and walk with Him a few steps of the way.”

 

In Reagan’s Army we just called it “the speech”, and we all knew what it was.  Called “A Time for Choosing” he delivered it in late October, 1964, and it made him the political heir of Barry Goldwater and the undisputed political leader of the conservative movement.  I was a political foot soldier for Reagan, and became a state legislator because I believed everything he said.

Ivanka needs to give such a speech.  I think it’s gotten to the point that she needs to step up and speak out for him.  She needs to look the American people, especially the women, right in the eye and assure them that he will be a Peace President.  That far from getting us into needless wars, like Iraq, he’ll keep us out of them.  The Democrats are Wilsonian idealists, on a mission to save the world, and make it more like us.  Trump would be President, in foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower.  He ended the Korean War through a show of strength, and kept us out of war for his entire eight year term.  The Democrats don’t fight wars for the national interest these days.  They fight because they’re idealists.  Kosovo had absolutely nothing to do with the national interest of the United States.  That’s why Clinton was attracted to it.  That made it more noble.  He was Like Ferdinand II of Austria, who actually believed Bellum non tuum, sed Dei esse statuas.  Wage war not for yourself, but for God.  This attitude helped lead to the Thirty Years War and the death of one third of Germany’s population.

I’m sure she’d do a great job, and would have an impact.  Soccer moms will love her.  She’s what they want their daughters to be.  Although, after Trump’s remarks today about “the 2nd Amendment people”  you have to wonder if there’s any point to it all.  Donny Deutsch on With All Due Respect called him a lounge act, and he’s right.  He likes to entertain people, and his crowds love being entertained.  What that has to do with running for President is beyond me.  But Ivanka’s speech could be a way to establish a public identity separate from her father’s.  The way it looks right now, being associated with his identity looks like a loser.  She should salvage her own reputation if she can.

It seems to me that these rallies are a self indulgence.  They’re something that he enjoys, is good at, and he draws energy from the crowd.  But they’re not working right now.  The press is waiting to pounce on everything that comes out of his mouth.  In order to entertain his crowds, he’s got to be a little outrageous.  That’s what they expect.  The Donald is not politically correct, and they want him to demonstrate that to them.  But these crowds are not a cross section of America.  At most they may represent a third of the country.  They’re not enough.  He’s preaching to the choir.  Maybe he should go to a black church.

We are a polarized nation, more so than any time in my life.  We will remain polarized if Clinton wins.  Except it will get worse.  Right after Romney lost, I was thinking about the possibility of Alaska seceding.  If Clinton wins, it will again be something to think about.  The country wasn’t ready four years ago.  We wanted to try and take our country back from Washington D.C.  What we got was Trump.

We do have Irish democracy to fall back on.  We just won’t obey their laws.  Here in California, I don’t pay any attention to their stupid gun laws.  A lot of people don’t.  We’re heading towards Atlas Shrugged.

I feel a darkening coming.  The sky darkens and the sun disappears.  But it’s not the end of times.  It’s just the moon.

Few have read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  He’s great writer, but it was a tough read, because it was so depressing.  The horrors of Soviet Russia are a stain on humanity, as much as the Holocaust.  But Solzhenitsyn was a Russian patriot, through and through, and he believed the eventual redemption of his country would come when it returned to its Christian Orthodox roots.  I’ll bet Putin’s read him.  And, I’d wager, he agrees.

We’re losing our freedom in this country.  The government is taking it from us.  This election should be about getting it back.  Trump talked about the loss of our economic freedom today, but I never heard him use the word.  Taxes take our freedom, not just our money.  Regulations take away our freedom.  I haven’t seen Trump speak very much, it’s true, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk about freedom.  Maybe it’s just me, and my libertarian view of life.  The people I saw at the Pence town hall in Carson City may not care about freedom.  But he’ll need more than them to win.  I’m not alone.  I have a hunch the millennials care about freedom too.

It was a good speech in Detroit.  It’s a start.  If he can do that for three months straight he’s got a chance.  All he’s got to do to win is convince people he’s normal, and not a nut.  Ivanka got a nice reception, which I’m sure was a high point for him.  Having her there may have helped him keep his focus.  He was completely under control, and his old friend Donny Deutsch, on With All Due Respect, said he could tell Trump didn’t feel himself.  He wasn’t enjoying himself.  Well, guess what?  Running for President, and being President, is hard work, and a lot of it’s not fun.

Ivanka is working closely with his economic team, and apparently enjoying it.  Her debut as a surrogate will be fun to watch.  I mean, come on, comparing her to Chelsea is just not fair.  A princess and a toad.  She’ll outshine her father to an almost embarrassing extent.  People will say, why can’t we have her instead of him?  Here’s the ticket.  Trump goes to Priebus and cuts a deal.  He drops out, Pence is named to replace him, and Ivanka’s the VP candidate.  What’s not to like?

I rarely talk politics to RP co-founder Darren, but today he said maybe people will go into the polling booth, look at the two names, shake their head, have a big laugh, and vote for Trump. His hunch is as good as mine.

My idea of Trump going to Moscow for the unveiling of the statue of St. Vladimir won’t work out.  It’s scheduled for Nov. 4th, some Russian  national holiday.  I’m sure Putin will be there to make some remarks.  No doubt he’ll talk about the legacy of the Saint, which is a Christian Russia, from his time until today.  Those would be significant statements, but I guess nobody in this country cares whether Russia is a Christian  nation or not.  Actually, in the big scheme of things, it’s very important.  Bismarck was asked what was the most important geopolitical fact in the world.  He said it was the fact that the people of North America spoke English.  A Christian Russia and a Christian America have a lot in common.  How many really Christian nations are there in this world?  Why aren’t we taking in Christian refugees?  And until I see how many Syrian refugees Saudi Arabia is taking in I don’t even want to talk about bringing any into this country.

I hate flying, but I’ve decided I want to go to Moscow some day.  I want to see that statue.

For what, precisely?  Our national interest, or the principles we believe in?  Which is it?

In Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, he says that in a multipolar world the key to peace is equilibrium.  It was the breakdown of the international balance of power that drew us into international politics and the wars of the 20th century.  After the First War, Woodrow Wilson and his ilk sought to replace the balance of power with international institutions like the League of Nations.  After the Second War we half heartedly tried it again with the United Nations, but the reality of the Cold War was a contest between two superpowers, so it was a bipolar world (in both senses of the term “bipolar”).

The 21st century sees the return of a multipolar world, and once again, the necessity of diplomacy to achieve international equilibrium.  This diplomacy begins with a mutual understanding with our long term adversary, Russia, the most aggressive of the great powers.  This is the key to equilibrium, and to peace.  It should be the next President’s highest priority.

Islam is not one of the world’s great powers.  It is economically insignificant, except for its oil.  This oil is one of the great prizes of the world, and we’ve been fighting over it since it was discovered, and we still are.  Three of the great powers, China, Japan and western Europe, are dependent on that oil, while the other two, Russia and the U.S., compete (or, are about to compete) with it for markets of their own hydrocarbons.  But, aside from Israel, the Middle East and its oil is not a vital national interest to the United States.  It’s up to China, Japan and Europe to keep the oil flowing.  They need it, we don’t.  It’s not ours, and it’s not our problem.

What is our problem is Islamism.  We’re as different from Islam as two peoples can be.  From our very first encounters with it, such as Mark Twain’s first best seller, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Promise, of 1869, we were repelled by their treatment of women.  Our first war was with Islam, and the Barbary pirates.   It was in order to fight them that the United Sates Navy and Marine Corps were formed.  We hated these people, and finally took them out.  When the first GI’s landed in North Africa (the 82nd Airborne among them) in 1942 they were completely disgusted by the men, and the way they treated their women.

Islam is a patriarchy taken to the extreme, and one of our core elements is a belief in the equality of the sexes.  In our culture, women have control over their own bodies.  In theirs, women are little more than chattel.  No wonder we don’t get along.  We’re Christians, which is a feminized Judaism.  Some Christians, such as Saint John Paul II, believe in Marianism, which is a supreme devotion to Mary, the Mother of God.  This is why we are completely incompatible with Muslim societies.

The war of the west against Islam is a war of civilizations stretching back almost 1500 years.  Hundreds of millions have died in this multi-century war.  And more are dying today.  Islamism today is a spasm, but in the past it was a real threat.  Some of the epochal battles in human history have been between Christian Europe and Islamism.  The Christian victories, led by Charles Martel, Don John, and John Sobieski, preserved our civilization.  We owe our way of life to their courage.

We’ve got business to do in the Muslim world, but we’re not going to war with it.  We’ve got a police action to conduct against ISIS, and then we’re getting out.  Though we might be back, if more policing is required.  It depends on their behavior.

With Islam, I believe in peace through separation.

It might have been.

2016 might have been a turning point in our political history.  I had it all figured out.  It hit me close to three years ago, when Obamacare was revealed as a fraud and a boondoggle, sold by a pack of lies.  We’d take the Senate in 2014 largely because of it, and ride our political momentum into this year, winning in an historic landslide, and turning the tide of the 100 year progressive experiment.  It would be another 1920, ushering in an era of economic growth and a return to constitutional principles through the use of Article V.  All the opposition had was a deeply unpopular and distrusted Hillary Clinton.   A piece of cake.

A year ago I didn’t really care who our standard bearer would be, as long as it wasn’t a Bush, and I wasn’t worried about Jeb.  At least I got that part right.  But as the eminent Richard Fernandez points out, what no one realized was just how royally pissed off people really were.  I wanted people to be pissed off, because I sure as hell was.  We had a lot to be pissed off about.  But this anger was so intense it turned into blind rage.  The establishment was a china shop, and people wanted a bull, and one came along.

Trump wants to make America great again by being smarter and making better deals, but that’s not good enough.  We need a radical transformation of the way this country does business.  Political corruption and crony capitalism are destroying us, and they are so embedded in the system that it will take years of hard work to turn things around.  True political leadership is called for, by people with the knowledge and skill to turn campaign sound bites into reality.  It’s a huge, team effort, and calls for a steady hand at the till.  This is very serious business.  Our country is at stake.

Based on his performance in Green Bay last night, Trump knows what he needs to do.  But who wants to bet he can keep that up until November?  Everyone says he doesn’t have a second act.  Well, everyone has been wrong before about this guy before.  It just pisses me off that I have to worry about it.

Maybe he figured out what his antics were doing to his brand, which is the same as his family.  Ivanka knocked it dead in Cleveland, but who even remembers it?  The Khan imbroglio blocked it all out.  Who wants to be associated with a brand, or a family, who, in any way, and for any reason, criticizes the mother of an American soldier who died for his country?   How many Trumps have made the ultimate sacrifice?

Trump has made history, but what will history say of him?   He was the one man in America who could lose an election to Hillary Clinton.  Quite an historic distinction.  We could even make Trump into a verb, meaning totally screwed the pooch.  As in, I Trumped up.

The fact that the consulting editor at American Thinker thought my previous post justified Russian aggression is instructive.  It’s apparently unthinkable to put yourself in Russia’s shoes, and look at things from their perspective.  In Alaska we’re very careful around bears.  Russia will always be as aggressive as it can get away with.  But that aggression is not directed at us.  We want to channel that aggression in a constructive direction.  Like south.

The yin and yang of American foreign policy has always, from our founding, been either idealism or practical realism.  Our national goal, at one time, was to make the world safe for democracy.  But our goal should really be to make the world safe for us, and worry about the rest later.   You can see democracy at work in Turkey today.  It’s not for everyone.  But clearly enunciating a policy of realpolitik is politically hazardous.  What Nixon said in private to Mao Tse Tung he could never say in public.  We’re a high minded people, which is all well and good.  I just don’t want American soldiers dying for our high mindedness.

I actually think Trump might understand this.  Which makes me even more pissed off.