Month: August 2016

Donald Trump should apologize to the Khan family, and all the Gold Star families in America, for the loss of their son’s and daughter’s lives in a pointless and stupid war.  He should pledge to the Khans, and all parents of American service men and women, that as President he will never follow such a disastrous path to futile war.  The wars for democracy, human rights, and nation building are behind us.  As President, Donald Trump will achieve peace through strength, and intelligent diplomacy.

As Trump himself has pointed out, NATO is obsolete, and the post war architecture of Europe needs to be redesigned.  NATO is the embodiment of the Cold War doctrine of containment, devised by George Kennan in response to Soviet aggression in the post war period.  But Kennan saw containment as a temporary strategy, to be replaced by a more permanent and less belligerent alignment of forces.  But the French, in particular, resisted, insisting on the deployment of American combat forces in Europe in order to hold the Germans under control.  Eisenhower supported NATO, but believed it would outlive its usefulness in ten years.  When, in his farewell address, he warned of the danger of the military-industrial complex, he was telling us that peaceful coexistence was the proper American foreign policy in the long term.  If we had won the Cold War on his watch, Eisenhower would have scratched NATO in a heartbeat.

A peaceful world begins with peace with Russia.  Today Russia resembles Germany after World War I, except it’s armed with nuclear weapons.  Like Germany, Russia has suffered a humiliating  loss in competition with the United States.  At the post war settlement in Versailles, all the major peoples of Europe were given a homeland, and the right to self determination.  Thus, Poland became a nation state again for the first time since 1772.  But there were just too many Germans who, if united, would naturally dominate Central Europe.  So some were given to Czechoslovakia, others to Poland.  Hitler wanted the Germans of Europe to be part of Germany, and started World War II to get them back.

With the breakup of the USSR a quarter century ago, tens of millions of ethnic Russians were stranded throughout the former Soviet Republics, most notably in Ukraine and the Baltics.  Russia is in a demographic death spiral.  World War II resulted in such a catastrophic loss of Russian lives that it has yet to recover.  Those Russian soldiers died fighting the Nazis, and our feeling at the time was, better them than us.  The entire world owes a debt to these heroic men, and their country.

Putin wants all the Russians he can get, and that’s his principle foreign policy goal.  The United States should act as arbiter in this dispute between Russia and its neighbors, and when the results of the arbitration are implemented, all American combat forces should permanently be withdrawn from Europe.  We would have greater leverage over the Russians as their friend and ally, rather than their enemy.  Russia and Putin are no threat to Western Europe.  Its military is overrated, and a united Europe is in no danger.  Why, precisely, would the Russians invade Western Europe?  To steal their gold?

But Russia isn’t authoritarian, and occasionally brutal in suppression of dissent?  As it always has been.  And as Nixon and Kissinger would say, so what?  The  most important American diplomatic success of the 20^th Century, the opening to China in 1972, began with these words from Richard Nixon to Mao Tse-Tung.  “What is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy.  What is important is its policy toward the rest of the world, and to us.”  Call it realpolitik, or America First, or cold blooded nationalism, it’s how you stay out of unnecessary wars.  And for America, in its splendid oceanic isolation, there’s very rarely a necessary one.

Russia and the United States should enter into a strategic partnership with Russia in the Middle East, with the clear understanding that the security of Israel is a paramount goal of American policy.  Working together, Russia and America can rid the world of the scourge of Islamic terror.  The Russians, with their immunity to media criticism, are particularly valuable allies in this tough and dirty business.

Vladimir Putin is determined to reunite Russia with its Christian Orthodox roots, and presents himself to the Russian people as a believer, making numerous pilgrimages to the holy places of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Russia has been a Christian nation for a thousand years, since Vladimir Vladimirovich’s namesake, and possible forebear, St. Vladimir, or Vladimir the Great, decreed it.  A monumental statue of the patron saint of Russia is due to be unveiled near the Kremlin.  The statue depicts St. Vladimir with a giant cross in his right ahead, thrust aggressively aloft.  Donald Trump should be there to mark the occasion.

The United States is on the verge of becoming, with Russia, one of the great energy exporting countries of the world.  This represents yet another opportunity for America and Russia to work cooperatively.  Eventually, Alaskan oil and gas will be exported to our friends in the Far East, Japan and South Korea in particular, strengthening our geopolitical ties to these important Pacific allies.  An energy summit, of sorts, could be held in Kodiak, Alaska, home of the Russian Orthodox Church of America.  Given his faith, Putin would be delighted to attend services at Kodiak’s beautiful Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Church.  His Alaskan co-religionists are mainly Aleuts, most of whom proudly bear Russian names.  In speaking to them, Putin could speak to the people of America about his desire for peace between our two peoples.  He could end by leading a prayer to Herman of Alaska, the patron saint of North America, a great man, a great Russian, and a saint.

 

[This article was rejected by the American Thinker since, in their view, it justifies Russian aggression.]

 

 

 

If you believe, as I do, that the use of Article V is the key to the restoration of constitutional government in this country, enemy number one is Dr. Evil, George Soros.  His organizations are leading the fight against us now.  The Eagle Forum has dumped its founder, Phyllis Schlafly, in part because of her embarrassing and irrational opposition to Article V.  The John Birch Society remains opposed to us, but their influence is very narrow.  Which leaves George Soros and his brood of vile leftists.

His plan is to flip Republican state legislatures, in order to get them to repeal existing Article V Balanced Budget Resolutions.  His principal target, so far, appears to be Colorado.  See here for details.  If he flips one Senate seat, and holds the House, a move will be made in the next session of the Colorado legislature to repeal an Article V Resolution which was passed decades ago.  This would be a defeat which the Article V movement would find difficult to withstand.  Week after next we’ll have a conference call sponsored by the Heartland Institute to discuss this problem.  It’s serious.

Johnson and Weld are having a town hall in Reno tonight, and I thought about driving back over Sonora Pass so I could ask a question about the Transfer of Public Lands.  But it’s about a four hour drive, so yesterday  I called up Demar Dahl, an Elko County Supervisor, and a leader in the TPL movement since Sagebrush Rebellion days.  He thought it was a good idea, and will try to get a Nevadan to ask the question.  We might even get some press.  Babbie and I drive through Demar’s district on the way to and from Montana.  It stretches from Wells, a dreary town on Highway 80, north to Jackpot, on the Idaho border.   He ranches this land, which is hard to understand, it’s so dry and desolate.  I’ve got to stop in and meet this guy next time we drive through there.  An American original.

In politics, the neatest trick is to use your opponent’s attack on you against them.  Political jiu jitsu, if you will.  The best example was when John McCain was challenged on his American citizenship when he first ran for Congress.  He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and he answered the guy by saying that as a Navy brat he’d moved from place to place so much that the one place where he’d actually spent the most time was the Hanoi Hilton.  McCain won big.

I submitted an article to the American Thinker today on how to use the Khan attack against not the Kahns, who were surrogates, but against their principal, Clinton/Obama.  Sergeant Khan would be alive today if Hillary Clinton, among many others, had not joined the rush for war in the Middle East.  It was, in some sense, an even worse geopolitical mistake than Vietnam, and that was pretty bad.  The Khan son died a hero in a stupid and pointless war which has Hillary Clinton’s finger prints all over it.  Her vote was strictly political.  It had nothing to do with the merits, the pros and cons of sending young Americans off to fight and die in some distant hell hole.  She was thinking of her political future, and what was the smart vote.  She’s an execrable woman, and if Donald Trump allows her to become President he will go down in history as the worst American politician since Aaron Burr.

Being a hard ass with the Russians gets you nowhere.  Kissinger worked out a deal with Brezhnev, in private, to allow a huge increase in the number of Jews who were allowed to emigrate.  But Scoop Jackson and the neocons wanted a bigger number, and they wanted it in public.  Brezhnev was furious and scaled back what he’d agreed to with Kissinger.  The first great neocon diplomatic foul up.

I am, in fact, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.  I converted from Catholicism in 1970 or so.  It wasn’t doctrinal so much as liturgical.  The Catholic Church no longer had Mass in Latin, and I hated hearing the beautiful Latin phrases of my altar boy youth recited in banal English.   The Russian Church services were very elaborate and traditional, and they appealed to me.  Deep down in my bucket list is a visit to Moscow, and its great cathedrals.

Of course, I have to admit that I did have it figured that being Russian Orthodox would go over well, politically, in Alaska.  But that wasn’t the main thing.

I can imagine the scene, based on what my Uncle Fritz told me, of the 82nd Airborne meeting up with the Russians in Berlin.  The Russians had won the war.  Everybody knew that.  But the help they got from men like those in the 82nd was greatly appreciated.  Warriors meeting warriors.

When the old man goes off the rails, sometimes it’s up to his daughter to sit him down and straighten him out.  This is Ivanka Trump’s role in the life of her father, who, despite his faults, she loves dearly.  He loves her beyond words, and wants her to be always proud of him.  This is the only intervention which matters.  If he’s capable of doing it, he’ll do it for her.  I’ve developed an unusual admiration for Ivanka.  My granddaughter is twelve, and I see her in Ivanka.  And I’m crazy about my granddaughter.

The world today is the same as it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.  Anything can happen, because nobody knows anything.  What is laughable are predictions about 2020.  Trump will have ruined the Republican Party beyond repair, some say.  Just like Barry Goldwater ruined the Republican Party four years before Nixon got elected.  Nobody saw Trump coming, and yet we’re supposed to believe they can see four years from now?  Stop, please.

Don’t lie, don’t quit, and don’t apologize.  That’s how John Wayne tried to lead his life, as his father instructed.  That’s pretty much how I’ve tried to live mine.  But sometimes you do something so stupid you have to make an exception, and admit you screwed up.  That’s what Trump did with the Khan family.  But he’s too insecure to do it, and will pay the price.

I read pieces by neocons like David French at NRO, and I can’t find any meat.  Fearmongering is all they’ve got, and doomsday talk.  These people are Russophobes, or something.  Russia is an authoritarian, and occasionally brutal state, run by a man with no affection for democracy.  As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger would say, so what?

We’re getting out of NATO.  I can feel that wind start to blow.  The Russians today are like the Germans after World War I.  At Versailles, one of the principles was national self determination, which gave the Poles their own country for the first time in 140 years.  All the nations of Europe were given their country, with their people.  Except the Germans.  There were too many of them, so they split them off into parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Hitler wanted those Germans, and the land they lived on, and started World War II to get them.

The breakup of the USSR has left tens of millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics like the Ukraine and the Baltics.  Russia is in a demographic death spiral.  In order to avoid virtual extinction, Putin wants all the Russians he can get, regardless of where they live.  This is especially important because of the continuing effects of the great loss of life in World War II.  He poses no threat to Western Europe.  He just wants his Russians back.

America should offer to arbitrate this dispute.  And when the results of the arbitration are implemented, we pull all our troops from Europe.  Putin knows the impossibility of occupying Western Europe.  And his military is far overrated.  He has no overwhelming advantage.  And why, precisely, would Putin want to invade Western Europe?  To steal their gold?

I liked the crowd over at the Pence town hall in Carson City.  These people aren’t traditional Republicans, or conservatives.  They’re with Trump, and their association with the GOP will end when he exits the stage.  They’ve really bonded with this guy.

They’re salt of the earth Americans, and he’s letting them down.  He has a responsibility to them, and he’s not living up to it. The way he’s going, he’s going up in smoke.   His millions of fans will be disappointed in him, because, even they would know, it would be his own damn fault.

Donald Trump needs to act more like a man, and less like a woman.  A man can handle criticism.  Most women can’t.  A man is disciplined, and in control.  He doesn’t fly off the handle, he keeps his cool.  Hysteria is for women.  They can nurse grudges for years.  Men are bigger than that.  Venting anger is a form of womanly self indulgence.  Men keep a lot of things to themselves.  Getting mad gets in the way of getting even.

Part of Trump’s act is he’s a tough guy.  I, personally, am not impressed.  Eisenhower was a tough guy.  He didn’t need to act like one.  Trump has to choose between acting like the tough guy, or being President.

The Democrats/media think they’ve found his Achilles heel, and he’s about to be tested.  The Khan family was a political master stroke.  They pushed Trump’s button and he couldn’t help himself.  They’re all sitting around figuring how they can push that button again.  These are creative people.  With few exceptions, the entire media is on the hunt for another Khan family.  They’ll find something, and spring it on Trump.  If he blows up again, he’s toast, because it would mean that he’s incapable of controlling himself.  Time will tell.

I read an article by Steve Forbes, where he says, of Europe, “Their safety is our safety.”  Uh, excuse me, Steve, but we’re not them.  We’re us, and we wish them well, but they’re not us.  Europe is one of the five great powers of the world.  They’re our best friends, but not our only ones.  We want to be friends with everybody.

I’m reading Secondhand Time, the Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich.  It’s the story of the effect the end of Communism and the breakup of the USSR has had on the Russian people.  It’s a little depressing, and I’m not sure I’ll finish it.  A lot of these people were totally brainwashed, and still admire Stalin today.  Pity the Russian people.  The losses they suffered in World War II were absolutely staggering.  And the society they saved, in the act of saving their country, was a dehumanizing brutal tyranny.  My God, has any other people suffered more in the 20th Century?  They’re still in recovery, and it will take a while, but they’ll endure.  That’s what Russians do best.

I think I saw Trump ask an audience, “Do we want to be friends with Russia?”, and got a positive response.  As a rule, Americans like Russians.  We respect them for the losses they suffered, so that we didn’t have to, in beating the Nazis.  And they’re tough.  They survived 70 years of hell.  Their women are among the most beautiful in the world.  Oh, and we do share a common Christian and European culture.   Russian literature is among the world’s greatest.  We’re practically neighbors, only 50 miles apart.   Why would we ever go to war with these people?

Do you think they want to go to war with us?  No, so if they don’t want to do it, and we don’t want to do it, let’s just not do it.

 

I drove over to Carson City yesterday to ask Mike Pence a question, and saw an accomplished political pro at work.  Not one  misstep, hitting every line, and exuding competence and sincerity.  But nobody was there to see Pence.  It was a Trump crowd, and he was there for Trump.

A Democratic activist (I assume) with a soldier son was booed when she attacked Trump’s statements about the Khan family.  Pence handled it masterfully, shooshing the crowd and defending her right to speak.  He spoke of Captain Khan as an  American hero, who advanced toward danger, rather than let someone else take the risk, and went on to talk about Trump’s commitment to the military and to vets.  This is what a potential President looks, speaks, and acts like.

Donald the Raging Bull charges wildly at every red flag the media/Democrats wave at him, regardless of the consequences.  His recklessness would be disqualifying if he wasn’t running against an incompetent criminal.  The only thing that can save his campaign is Clinton herself, combined with Islamist and anti-police violence.  A race to the bottom is underway, which may continue for the next three, long months.  Let’s all hope Bismarck was right about the special place America holds in the Lord’s heart.

I’ve been looking at Trump’s family background, trying to figure out where his tremendous sense of insecurity comes from.  His older brother, and father’s namesake, died of alcoholism at a fairly young age.  He was probably the apple of his father’s eye, and Donald may have been trying to replace him in the eyes of his father his entire adult life.  But maybe the key is his mother, who came to America from one of the remote islands of Scotland to work as a domestic, and wound up working for the Trumps.  I imagine her as a loving wife and mother, married to a man not a little unlike his son Donald.  Perhaps her humble background accounts for his combativeness, and part of his insecurity.

It makes sense to me, and I find it comforting.  Trump is a weird guy, and it make me feel better if I think I’ve got the source of his strangeness identified.  It could be a lot worse.  Like Nixon, and we survived him.

When I got the mike I told Pence that I’d seen him at an ALEC meeting a few years ago, and  how he talked about Article V, and the Balanced Budget Amendment, and federalism.  I told him we had 28 states now, thanks in part to the leadership of his own Sen. Long.  “One of them’s Indiana!” he said proudly.  I asked if we could count on his continued support, and if he’d had the opportunity to discuss this with Mr. Trump.  (For those of you who know me personally, you would have been shocked at my mild manner, and soft voice.)

He gave me a great response, and we should try to hold him to it.  But he really didn’t mention Article V in his answer, and he hasn’t talked to Trump about it.  I certainly didn’t expect that he would have.  But I was planting the seed, and if Trump wins, and we get to 30, 31, 32, we’ll have a champion in the Vice President.  I think he could bring Trump around pretty easily.  The politics of it is good, which Trump would like.

In order to get access to the mike, I chatted up the woman from the Carson County Republican Party who controlled it.  A very nice, conventional Republican woman.  I talked to her about the Transfer of Public Lands, and a guy with her said Trump lost Elko County, the only county in Nevada he lost, on that issue.  The fact that everybody in the Republican Party of Nevada is aware of this is very encouraging.  It convinces me more than ever that Trump gets it.

Which gets me back to the Pence town hall.  He’s working off 4 by 6 note cards, and is extremely well prepared.  In a rhetorical flourish, delivered with great emphasis, as if to draw applause, he says, “Trump gets it!”  The crowd cheers and applauds, and I’m thinking where have I just heard that phrase?  (see below)

I wound up talking to a couple Italian-American cousins from New Jersey.   They’ve recently moved here, and told me Trump will take New Jersey, because everybody there hates Hillary.  One’s a retiree, and he hates Christie for messing with his pension.  The other one said he’d gotten a chance to talk personally to Trump, who opened up his coat to show him a concealed .357.  He said Trump told him, “They may get me, but I’m taking some down with me.”

I guess I should go to New Jersey some time, though I don’t really know why.