Category: POLITICS

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The Gingrich Dilemma

    

     The presidential political landscape is beginning to clarify itself as 2012 approaches, and several observations are becoming apparent on the republican party side.

      The first is the power of the Mitt versus the Non-Mitt.  Governor Romney has struggled to convince a party  increasingly principled in its views as to what the country needs, that he has any base principles that they can rely upon.  This has led him to be fairly stuck at around 25% of the republican electorate, and has led to wave after wave of alternative candidate interest, in hopes that someone, anyone, with a more committed view of conservatism might take hold and overtake Mitt. The general weakness in quality of the alternatives has thus far made Mitt unassailable.

     Second, the acknowledgement that most of the alternative candidates are pretenders to the office of president is becoming clear.  The latest heretofore ‘serious’ candidate Herman Cain announced his candidacy suspension amidst a cloud of snarling allegations regarding his personal life discipline, but the predominant reason for his collapse was the exposure of his seemingly oblivious knowledge base regarding current events.  A President that doesn’t remember the name of a leader of a country is forgivable, but a president that isn’t sure which country is which is more telling.  Cain’s announcement foreshadows a flurry of announcements that are bound to occur after the early primaries as it becomes obvious to most of the electorate what a weak field of candidates this really is. A sad commentary of our times when the world shows the need now more than ever for transcending leadership.

     Third, any hope that an articulate voice of reasoned conservative thought would see the void and jump in to the race is essentially gone. The young lions of the Republican Party like Jindal, Ryan, and Rubio have determined that their moment in time lies in later years, and the old guard such as Senators Demint and Coburn have determined that their role lies as behind the scenes ruttermen.

     That leaves…Gingrich.  The phenomena of the sudden boon in popularity of one of the more conflicted politicians of our times is fascinating.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who only two months ago whose viability as a candidate was a daily question, is suddenly the chosen means of conservatives seeking to derail the Romney train from crossing the bridge to nowhere.  Speaker Gingrich seems to have caught fire at just the right time, a two month window of debates where the various pretenders were outed for their obvious lack of depth of insight into the current issues,  and Gingrich’s acknowledged ability to frame issues and show depth of understanding.  Of course, the President’s critical skill set is not simply being a debater (as our current debater in chief has woefully proven), but to direct the debate with reasoned and prescient analysis, that solves problems and finds a way forward.

     Gingrich’s style has always been a more scatter-gunned approach with good ideas and scatterbrained ones sitting side by side with no apparent discernment between the two.  This lack of intellectual discipline, and the former Speaker’s tendency to see himself as the superior ‘better idea’ incubator, has led to some of his conservative colleagues with a very bad taste in their mouths.  Brian Bolduc in National Review Online describes the events of 1997 when Speaker Gingrich, at the height of his power, was nearly undone by a coup among his own leadership team due to his recurring undisciplined, egocentric tendencies.  It appears to be the opinion of those that know him best, that the personality characteristics that got him into trouble then, are still innate within him, and will inevitably derail him with the voting public, or worse, create an undisciplined, chaotic presidency.

     I have personally heard Gingrich in extended form previously, and must say though it was some time ago, I recall the sensation of having participated in an auction.  The Speaker as auctioneer put forth an enormous number of words and ideas, but at the end of it all, I realized I wasn’t interested in buying anything he was selling, and wasn’t even sure what exactly was for sale.  This unsettling feeling about Newt Gingrich has never left me.  Can a principled reasoned conservative vote for a candidate who at one time bought into anthropogenic  global warming hysteria and was comfortable with ‘cap and trade’?  How about a candidate who would be relied upon to bring fiscal discipline to government agencies (Fannie Mae)  who he recently took mounds of money from in consultative fees?  And most damnably, a candidate that just this past summer looked upon a well thought out approach for health care reform put forward by Paul Ryan and accepted as an official plank of the Republican legislative agenda, as “right wing extremism”?

      The Gingrich dilemma, can someone lose the most onerous parts of his makeup, and discipline himself into a positive force, is question for debate as 2012 arrives.  The good news is that Gingrich himself will likely over time define the dilemma clearly for us all as the race for the nomination becomes a two man event.  How can he not.  For Speaker Gingrich, all the world is about to become a stage.

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An Inconvenient Truth

 

     The several decade long crusade to achieve directorship of the western world’s economies through the mantra of stopping so-called anthropogenic global warming is finally beginning to come up against the rocks of unbiased scientific analysis.  As leaders of this blog know, I have been a long standing skeptic of the argument of human directed global warming for its lack of historical perspective, the nonsense of arguing the concept of investigatory science as “settled” when the science is in its infancy, and the obvious and overt political overtones of those who would “redirect” our resources in an effort to “stop” the unstoppable.  Science as politics has been a long standing failure in regard to scientific truth, and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who rest their argument on their superior will, rather than the available data.  Whether it was the Church’s long standing earth centric vendetta against the science of Galileo or Copernicus, or the race theories of the National Socialists propped up in the pseudoscience of Eugenics, there has been a dark suppression to individual thought and contrary opinion through history by those who desired to “own the truth” for their own political purposes and profit. 

      The critical tenets of linking the natural processes of climatic warming and cooling to man’s societal advancement through the use of carbon based energy offered a massively powerful tool to those who would seek to “control” man’s individual initiative in favor of some specified collective good.  The weapon of choice was to tie the natural component of the atmosphere the gas carbon dioxide to the moniker “greenhouse” gas, and the production of it as a byproduct of an advanced society, the driver of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ global warming.  Through such linkage lay the mother-load of environmental activism, governmental activism, and massive fortunes for politicians and politically connected scientists and industrialists.  The king of the scare Prophets was the American politician Al Gore, who recently rejected by the American electorate in the close election of 2000, found a post-election venue for political idolatry and personal fortune in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming.  His thrown together cinematic slide show of patchy science and ludicrous predictions, An Inconvenient Truth, electrified the political left and created the edifice for the argument that only through the reining in of the superior economic position of the West through elimination of their reliance on a carbon energy economy and the ‘redistribution’ of the West’s ill-gotten wealth to the impoverished, less developed world, could the globe be saved from utter destruction.  It was a socialist’s wet dream – the critical key to reforming 500 years of individual initiative and progress, and putting the acquired wealth into the hands of the bureaucratic few who would be considered ‘smart and sensitive to the planet’.

     Whole nations have stood in line since the Kyoto protocols of the 1990’s to profess their subservience to the dogma of “settled science” and thereby prove their fidelity to the mother Earth.  They have allowed the climate data to be collected and doled out by a few chosen oracles such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without asking the critical questions all science should be required to withstand- is the data sufficient to prove a hypothesis, is the data set reproducible, are the data points incontrovertible or corrupted, does the science hold up to skeptical scrutiny?  It turns out, with the billions and billions of dollars and euros at stake, the delicious conclusions were too desirable for those responsible for the science to question their own observations for risk of being cut out of the moneytrain or the exalted position as oracle to the world.

     The “settled science” has finally come under appropriate scrutiny, and we have the intrepid computer hackers of the East Anglia University e-mails to thank.  The thousands of e-mails between the oracles of the settled climate science have shown them to be data corrupted, politically biased, suppressive of their own contrary evidence, and willing to bend their own work to fit the narrative they had established regardless of the facts – a perfect storm of pseudoscience and politically twisted desires.  The fact that scientists can be tempted into self corruption based on their all too human flaws of ego, political bias, or evangelical sense of mission shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the immense power, money, and influence that was waved in front of them by political pirates such as Al Gore for whom they served his purpose.

     Thankfully, despite the willful suppression of information, a more balanced interpretation of the science of climate and the multiple effects upon it are beginning to emerge.  The inconvenient truth that appears to be forming is that multiple factors influence global temperatures, and that man’s effect is difficult to isolate, and perhaps minimalist in effect.  It has been clarified that the computer models that suggested direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature have been shown to be incorrect, with the world in a cooling, not warming,  phase since 1998 while Co2 levels have continued to climb.   As Karin McQuillan’s review article in the American Thinker cogently observes, climate scientists are finally finding the courage to speak out when the data does not fit the assigned narrative:

But within a week, Muller’s lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global “temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.”

       This is nowhere near what the climate models were        predicting,” Prof Curry said.  “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”  In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.  They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

          The telling argument regarding global warming hysteria is that it fit a political rather than scientific narrative, long before the infant science had a chance to develop into a rational understanding of the influences on climate, and man’s relationship to them.  No one desires a world without clean air, clean sources of water, efficient utilization of resources, but the dominance of bureaucratic oversight at the risk to personal freedoms must be understood for what it means for humanity’s future development.  The argument ultimately turns out not to be one of the temperature of the earth, for we live on a globe that was dramatically both hotter and colder than the one we currently inhabit, but rather, who will define human progress, individual rights, and the means to achieve personal happiness.  We are stumbling our way to an inconvenient, but, universal truth, that the last five hundred years of human achievement, driven as it was by the hard fought acquirement of individual expression, property rights, and individual freedom, is the best possible device to preserve the world for the greatest proportion of those who inhabit it.

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The Disappearing Will

      Max Boot has a definitive article in this week’s Weekly Standard regarding the progress being made by American forces in their “hold and build” strategy in southern Afghanistan, and collective yawn back home in a tired nation that cares little regarding the details, only the end game. The hard work and sacrifice of the nation’s finest in the dusty cauldron of a far away land holds almost no interest for the country that once bought the Democrat Party’s argument that Afghanistan was the key to control of islamoterrorist problem and that Iraq was the side show. Well, come the end of the year, Iraq will truly be a sideshow as all American troops will leave, and Afghanistan, despite the apparent mission put forth by their Commander in Chief for the nation’s troops to surge and hold territory, the withdrawal following the surge has already been scheduled. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave. There will be no ” we will fight them on the beach, we will fight them in the hills” this time.

     What has happened to the concept of will?  The disintegration of this one time bedrock characteristic of western civilization is showing itself across a slew of crises and societal challenges.  The southern tier of Europe is crumbling like a stack of dominoes under the lack of will to restore reasonable relationships between the governed and those that govern them.  First Greece, then Italy, Spain, and Portugal are collapsing under the weight of mandates to their citizens, unable to put forth the argument that with self responsibility comes personal freedom, and the ultimate security of a good life.  The governments of these forlorn countries frame the argument as enforcing austerity, rather than restoring rational expectations.  The abandonment of will is pervading the United States, not only in its schizophrenic involvement in Afghanistan, but also on the issue of its own domestic securities.  The state of Ohio determined to stop the steady slide into eternal state budget deficits, stagnent job growth and strangulating business climate by electing a Republican government in 2010.  The elected officials instituted a capacity for fiscal sanity, and promptly were rejected by the very population that electing them to fix things, with yesterday’s defeat of the recently instituted mechanisms for such fiscal sanity.  The desire to want things better was not reinforced by the will to make things better.  The collapse of will shows itself in the west’s acquiescence of state sponsored demonization of Israel, and the timid response to Iran’s increasingly belligerent and apocalyptic attitude regarding its relationship with Israel and the greater world.

      Historian and professor Niall Ferguson delineates a set of characteristics that have defined the West’s unique position in the world over the past 500 years and are components of will.  He notes them as Competition, Science Revolution, Rule of Law and Government, Medical Advance, Consumer Society, and Work Ethic.  All are in essence the will of an individual to take command of  his existence and desire the ability to prosper, create, function under rational rules of behavior, maintain health, repeat the benefits of his endeavors, and accept his role in controlling the outcome.   Ferguson as historian reminds us that typical for dominant empires in history the end comes suddenly rather than gradually, and that the pattern is that “you are fine, until you are not fine, and when you are not fine, you are in a death spiral.”  The legitamacy of a society is a fragile flower and is more easily destroyed from within then by any external threat. 

      The process of collective will is not a cheerleading slogan, but rather an collection of individual desires to be better, and individually live well.  Will we find our will to stop the dithering and accept responsibility, roll up our sleeves, and fashion a new standard of human freedom and life quality?  Time will tell, but the game is nearly up, and the fourth quarter we find ourselves in, despite all our enormous talents and advantages, finds us playing from behind.

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Mitt Romney and the Crucial Conversation

   

    The modern political process often creates the environment for a political figure to secure his position in a race before the first vote has even occurred.  In the Presidential process for 2012, the Republican race for the nomination is inexorably moving toward one individual, the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.  The complex requirements of a successful modern candidate are coming together in the figure of Romney, impressive organization, carefully crafted messages that offend the least number of potential voters, and gads and gads of money.  As Romney consolidates his position,  conservatives are taking notice of Romney’s philosophic underpinnings and are becoming progressively concerned as to whether the Romney philosophy is up to the challenges of our time.

      In the parlance of modern organizational tactics and conflict resolution, the United States is in desperate need of a crucial conversation.  Authors Patterson, Grenny, et.al., in their best selling treatise on the tools of addressing difficult dialogues, Crucial Conversations,  identify three characteristics of a crucial conversation.  The conversation required is assured to have a variance of opinion, the stakes are high as to the outcome, and emotions are bound to run strong.  The fundamental conversation required to be undertaken by own next leader is about the nation’s burgeoning debt and the need to come to grips with the difficult sacrifices and changes in behavior that will be required to overcome the approaching crisis.

     Variance of Opinion – The current President is locked into a philosophic foundation that government’s role is not of a safety net, but rather a equalizer of societal forces.  However misguided, this idea is the bedrock of over 35% of the voting electorate and unlikely to be ceded easily without a cohesive argument as to the role of a flexible society that allows the natural upward and downward transitions of people to take place as they seek their individual aspirations.   Governor Romney struggles to articulate this critical discussion for fear of offending- this is almost always a sign of lack of personal commitment to an argument that leaves the discussant appearing weak and insecure in the assuredness of their argument.

     Stakes Are High – The nation’s financial picture indicates the stakes couldn’t be higher.  The United States is facing over 14 trillion in accumulated debt, approaching 100% of the Gross Domestic Product, and has over 100 trillion in accumulated unfunded mandates, that will simply rip the country apart if not addressed and addressed soon. Yet the presumptive Republican candidate can’t even wrap his hands around a chip shot argument like Ethanol subsidies – unneeded, nonmarket sensitive, adversely affecting the country’s energy needs, and unjustified.  If Romney can not find a way to discern the end of wasteful subsidies like big Ethanol, how in the world can he be able to take on the crucial conversation of the unsustainable mandates of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? 

     Emotions Will Run Strong – The summer of 2011 has seen microcosms of the emotions to come in the crucial conversation of unfunded mandates.  Wisconsin was roiled with emotion regarding the proposition that government employees should be asked to share a small part of the cost burden of their entitlements, resulting in multiple recall elections and massive unruly demonstrations that attempted to shut down implementation of the consequences of the prior elections.  This pattern is additionally playing out in Ohio and in the protests in cities across the nation, as the realization as to what is at stake is becoming clear to all. Romney, however, with the opportunity to express support for the embattled governments of Wisconsin and Ohio who faced up to their fiscal crises and stabilized their budgets, found it impossible even with a friendly audience to declare a commonality of purpose. Everybody knows what these governors faced is nowhere near the emotions that will be released when the country as a whole is asked to undertake sacrifice.

     To many conservatives, at the very moment the country needs a principled conservative to articulate a way forward in the burgeoning crisis, we are moving toward nominating a “will o’ the wisp”.  As George Will articulates so cogently, is this what we worked so hard to accomplish as conservatives, such that at our moment of the crucial conversation, we put forth a mute?
We could avoid this approaching debacle, if we could figure once again how to get my guy into the race. I know he has said no a hundred times, but there is someone out there having the difficult, the crucial conversation, every day, who can articulate in reasoned, intelligent, and most of all principled fashion the solutions both necessary and tolerable. Sometimes it takes a while for the world to move toward and discover inevitably what it needed all along:

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Another Tyrant Down the Rabbit Hole

  

   If you are a tyrant with an extended period of totalitarian rule over an oppressed people, there seems recently to be a tendency for you to realize the End of Days ignominiously down a rabbit hole.  Saddam Hussein in 2003 was discovered hiding in a underground pipe absurdly demanding an interaction with the president of the United States upon capture. Today the dramatist African king of kings was discovered in a similar rabbit hole and, despite his pleas, meted out  a more acute sentence by his captors.   There is a certain sympathy that develops with  a surrounded individual who faces ruthless justice, no matter the circumstances.  The president for life  of Romania Nicoli Ceausescu came back from a state trip in 1989 to discover Romania had determined to significantly shorten his tenure of life president to something more like president of the week.  The Italian Caesar Mussolini at the end of World War II had his fascist rule end hanging naked upside down from a lightpole in a definitive end to the fascist experiment.  Today the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was pulled from a rabbit hole  by combatants in the fight for his home town in Libya and the long rule of the king of kings was ended with a bullet to the head, his body paraded like a lifeless puppet by jubilant executioners.

     It is easy to feel some sympathy, perhaps a tug of regret in the digusting way his mortally injured body was paraded like a clown corpse for amusement.  It is doubly ironic to reflect that the powers that  contributed to his downfall fairly recently supported his nation’s nomination to the head of the United Nations Human Rights Council, bought his oil, turned their heads to his violent suppresion of his own people the Berbers, his ruthless military adventures in North Africa, and the decades log support for the most radical of terrorist activities. Well, no surprise regarding the hypocritical actions between nation states should be contemplated.  Its been going on as long as there have been nation states.  Gaddafi has played the west for decades like a fine fiddle, brandishing the victim card, while carrying out a targeted program of some of the most cowardly and vile actions against innocents.  Watching the balding old man on video today paraded like a mannequin almost made one forget all that.

    Careful focus regarding this man’s legacy causes the sympathy to fade very rapidly, however.  The singular event that makes his humiliating treatment today gratifying was his direct role in the massacre of innocents , in the perpetrated mass murder he achieved over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988.  Stung by President Reagan’s direct attack for his earlier attempt to  mass kill US servicemen in a Berlin  nightclub in 1986, Gaddafi hungered for revenge and in typical cowardly fashion determined a means of indirect slaughter against the citadel of democracy, the United States.  Through his agents, Gaddafi  had a pressure sensitive bomb placed on the Pan Am  New York to London flight on December 21st, 1988, the bomb exploding just prior to the Boeing 747’s decent over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the horrific slaughter of 243 passengers and 16 crew members. The destruction of innocents included 189 American and 43 British citizens as well as citizens of 19 other nations, as well as 11 individuals on the ground from falling debris.  The tyrant never saw any irony in continuing to interact with the countries whose citizens he had murdered for spite, and in a particularly onerous hypocrisy, the British government who had lost so many in this attack, gave Gaddafi last year the ultimate triumph by releasing the bomb-maker from British prison for “medical” reasons, soiling forever the memories of all the innocents who died in the horrific terrorist attack.  The deaths included high school students, artists, musicians, authors, and business officials, all cut down in the prime of life by this vainglorious clown.  It was weeks before all the spewed body parts could be identified and removed from Lockerbie gardens and rooftops.   Gaddafi always took special pride in his moment in the sun as an unstable state terrorist, and nothing in his future years, the cozy relationships with other humanity stalwarts such as Mugabe, Assad, Chavez, Arafat, and Farrakan, seemed to fulfill for him the sense of triumph that he felt when he was a party to the special killing fields he achieved over Scotland.  The price to so many for the world kowtowing to this cowardly bully was immeasurable and the bully’s death decades later doesn’t come close to evening the score.

     For Lockerbie alone, the despoiling of the tyrant’s pathetic worldly vessel performed today is simply insufficient.  No matter how the end was inappropriately reached, or what eventually replaces this pathetic figure, the End, like those of Hussein, Bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Awlaki , and hopefully soon, Assad and Mugabe, can’t come soon enough.  Sic Semper Tyrannis.

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The Motherlode Under the Prairie

     The north center core of the United States has for several hundred years been seen as the desolate outback of the country. Sparsely inhabited at one time by nomads, it was seen initially as an endless ocean of grass to be navigated and surmounted to reach the desired bounty of the more inviting western and Pacific states. A residual back water for wheat farmers and isolationists, the prairie states of the Dakotas with their vast spaces and brutal winters were suggested to be economically inviable and best left to be returned to the condition of a laboratory for unhindered and uninhabited nature.

     No one is suggesting that now.

     It is not that the massive distances, snowstorms and winter temperatures in the 40 below range have suddenly disappeared or that large numbers of people have irrationally determined they actually like to live in arctic cold.   What has changed everybody’s mind lies some ten thousand feet under the gentle undulating prairie, formed from ten of millions of years of  accumulation of the detritus of living organisms.  It turns out that the state once voted most likely to uninhabit itself out of existence, North Dakota, is sitting on potentially the largest oil field in the continental United States, and may yet be positioned to become the Saudi Arabia of North American oil production.

     Like so often in America’s past, it is the combination of technological advance and entrepreneurial know-how that has converted North Dakota into a dramatic economic powerhouse and a magnet for job growth.  The Bakken formation, a geological formation of shale and sandstone, has been known about since the 1950’s as a potential bountiful repository for oil.  The first well was drilled in 1951.  The formation required a set of conditions however to make it profitable to drill that has not existed until recently.  For decades the easy access of the wells in OPEC countries and the transportation highway provided for by the world’s oceans left the difficult to access, expensive oil drilling process of the prairie oil fields unattractive to large oil producers.  It also left the world hostage to the manipulations of the OPEC collaborators both to price and the enormous political power of the world’s energy supply.  North Dakota drilling required two essential ingredients to be profitable, a stable oil price and the invention of two techniques, horizontal drilling and frakking, to unleash the oil from the shale rock and start the oil really flowing.  The process of horizontal drilling allows a single well access to a massive amount of teritory of oil, and frakking, the process of fracturing rock under high pressure to release capture deposits of oil, have proved ideal to the conditions present in the geology of North Dakota and Eastern Montana.   Both conditions are present today and North Dakota is rocketing up the oil production charts, soon to pass California as the largest continental oil producer with the sky , according to the US Geological Survey, the limit.  The recognition of the huge economic potential is drawing thousands of people anxious for work and economic stability to the once desolate climes of the northern prairie.

     It would seem that a process that may provide the United States with stable and bountiful energy supplies, free it from the blackmail politics of OPEC, provide hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, and achieve energy independence in a safe onshore, environmentally controllable way would be extremely attractive to the US government.  The current administration, however, bound to the storyline that carbon is an evil energy source and that only “green” sources are worth exploring and investing in, continues to place a mountain of regulation in front of the numerous small growing energy companies that took the leap to invest in the Bakken when the larger companies felt it not worth their attention.  In a Wall Street Journal interview with Harold Hamm, the entrepreneur who unlocked the Bakken formation, Hamm quotes President Obama in a meeting he had that shows the President’s tone deaf aversion to success in North Dakota, seeing it as a direct threat to “green” investment.  Hamm recalls the conversation:

“I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this.” The president’s reaction? “He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'”

Mr. Hamm is owner and developer of one many small companies that took the leap in North Dakota and Eastern Montana that now own the greater portion of the Bakken formation and are likely through their success to be major contributors to an economic resurgence in the United States. The impediments put forward by the current administration are bound to be a political issue that will resound in next year’s election. The aversion to real science in the climate change debate has shackled this administration to the myths of the evil nature of carbon energy and left it throwing money away on green ventures too earlier in their scientific development to be of any rational help to this country’s and the world’s developing energy needs. It required fifty years for the economic conditions to be right for Mr Hamm and others to exploit the new technologies of  horizontal drilling and frakking that have made the North Dakota motherlode accessible and economically viable.  Noteably, it was not governmental oversite that identified the potential of the fields and developed the technologies.  As usual, it was the intrepid pioneer, with indomitable will, creativity, good ideas, and some really hard work that may yet allow all of us to reap the benefits.  If you are finally listening, Mr. President, THAT is the American story….

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Presidential Vigilante?

  

  Just after 9/11, an emotional President George W. Bush, confronted with the knowledge that it was likely the Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden who was directly responsible for the carnage, was asked what he meant when he stated he would work to bring bin Laden to justice. The President acknowledged he didn’t care if he was brought in “dead or alive”.  This frontier justice remark was immediately seized upon as a prime example of a leader who held a view of international justice devoid of any nuance.  It was considered by the opposition and the liberal media as an extremely intemperate remark.  Even Mrs. Bush stated she was concerned with the imagery the President’s words projected.  This remark however was just the start of a whole series of attacks on the President’s perceived reactionary cowboy justice mentality felt serially responsible for inappropriate ‘lone ranger’ actions resulting in their opinion in the radical mistakes of policy defining Guantanamo imprisonment of unindicted combatants, WMD, Iraq, Abu Graib, and the Surge.

     Well it turns out there is a new Wyatt Earp in Town,  and this one is the real embodiment of frontier justice.  President Obama has determined the court room process and commitment to perpetrator rights  he initially felt was so vital to the American psyche as evidenced in  his initial determination to try in American courts the 9/11 co-conspirators,  has little residual value.  He has essentially abandoned his considerations for civilian justice and instead has become a mighty force for vigilante justice.  Over the last several years he has become a singular success in finding and eliminating Al Qaeda’s  starting lineup, and a court room is the farthest thing from his mind for determining the sentence.  The continuous sentence from the sky that is delivered by the Predator drone assumes the sentence is tied to the identification of the perpetrator, and the verdict is, without fail, an immediate execution.  The reality of the bin Laden raid was that the justice meted out would be instantaneous, and there was no effort to “bring him back alive” for a traditional court room conviction.  Now, in the country of Yemen a similar sentence has been passed on Anwar Al-Awlaki, the notorious instigator of the Fort Hood massacre and director of other significant terrorist attacks, and the justice has again ended with a frontier noose party.

      This time, the howling hypocrites on the left are going to have a hard time keeping silent on this act.  Awlaki, for all his attempts at mascarading as the next bin Laden,  is after all, an American citizen.  If there ever was an argument for what the left has been enraged about in the United States actions regarding terrorist combatant’s rights, the execution of an American citizen overseas for an alleged role in a crime without due process is enough to make the Guantanamo and Bush haters gag.  The attack against Obama’s ongoing strategy as an extralegal act is bound to pick up steam.  

     The President is finding out that his reflexive and harsh stance against the previous administration’s legal argument in avoiding civilian court positions himself as a hypocrite of the first order in own recent actions.  Awlaki, born and raised in the United States, projected his venom on the internet inciting violence, but the direct link to traitorous acts against the United States is a circuitous one.  The actions has led voices as diverse as the liberal Salon eMagazine and presidential candidate Ron Paul to condemn the act.  The argument is beginning to be put forth that the presence of views antithecal to the United States is being used as grounds for targeting killing, a slippery slope indeed.

     Awlaki’s pathetic persona was more demonic than his ridiculous resemblence to the  movie actor Avner Eisenberg in 1985’s movie Romancing the Stone: Jewel of the Nile.

The Bad Guy                                                                                         The Movie Actor

No, Awlaki was not the bumbling well meaning religious figure Avner Eisenberg played in the 1985 comedy – he was every bit the nihilist creep that has seized the Islamic mantle in the name of a fascist vision of the world. There are no tears to be shed because he happened to be an American version of the male fantacists dream of an islamic “holy man”. The truth is that Awlaki was willing participant in the violent conspiracy against modern civilization and ended up as he should have – at the wrong end of an American directed weapon. Good riddance. But the argument, if there ever was one, put forward by the President of the need for due process, died with Awlaki. I dont want to hear even one more little hypocritical squeak from any liberal about this administration’s purified notions of justice any more. This President, like no other,  has turned the war on terrorism – into the O.K. Corrall.

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“Better a Bad Press, than a Good Eulogy”

     The world, in damaging fashion, has become progressively attached to mythical narratives that no matter how detached from reality are held up as rock bed truths. Former Vice President Gore flies around on private jets raging about those who would question “the settled science” of global warming. President Obama professes that the root of all current economic ills is to be found in the inequities of “the rich not paying their fair share”. The most poisonous world myth narrative, however, has been present for more than fifty years – that the underlying cause of world tumult and Arab middle east radicalism and extended poverty is the ongoing sore of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The narrative states that if only the government of Israel would give the Palestinian people a viable territory for statehood and address legitimate grievances the ongoing strains that fragment the world would cease to exist and radical terrorism would die on the vine. The narrative projects Israel as the unique obstruction to a world of peace and the paramount cause of an Arab nation unable to lift itself from backwardness, totalitarian governments, and individual sense of inferiority and hopelessness.

     The mythmakers of this narrative are particularly pronounced in Europe, a continent that participated in the not so distance past in a process designed to methodically and ruthlessly  ethnically cleanse itself of the Jewish people, and progressively in the American administration, that views Israel as the intransigent that stands in the way of restoring a rightful order in the Middle East that would enhance American security.  The conflict that has raged since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 provides a ongoing template for literally every untoward fact on the ground, the persistence of poverty stricken ‘temporary’ sanctuaries for the “homeless” Palestinian refugees, the rise of radical terrorist organizations to run governments, the unbending totalitarian streaks in Arab governmental rule, and the legitimization of a nihilistic sociopath to the position of President of Iran.

     The greatest weapon the world has to defend itself against these mythmakers are the few statesmen that are capable in measured, logical tones to shine the light of truth on to those that continue to evoke the fantasies.  The combination of courage, intelligence, and rational expression has no greater exponent in the world today than Bejamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the state of Israel.  Yesterday, in front of a hostile United Nations General Assembly, one of the most profound propagators of the myth through its non-stop condemnation of Israel for the past forty years, Prime Minister Netanyahu laid out the bright light of a truth that put the whole world on notice that truth can be the only means of solution of the conflict. 

History has seem of recent years void of the type of leaders who speak to the greater truths that advance humanity and speak across cultures.  The Prime Minister of Israel shows to all that such leaders are still out there.  His command of subject, and clarity of argument knows no equal on the world stage today. He reminds us that overriding role of great statesmenship is to recognize truth as the path to solve conflict, and in doing so to accept that many will not want to hear it. He notes that we can not hope to find answers when only one participant in conflict resolution is asked to sacrifice, and that sacrifice can not come without the rational outcome of security. One could only hope that we  in America may find our own Netanyahu.  Thanks to the wonderful work that the blog Powerline continues to provide, we have Netanyahu’s speech in its entirety.  Watch the whole thing, and see if you don’t have the lazy mists of accepted narrative dissolved by a statesman who has accepted this generation’s mantle of one will speak the truth, and through truth, lead us all to a better place.  The charlatans out there who emote glibness without reason in comparison look ever more inconsequential, and are doomed to history’s dusty hall of insignificance.

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Searching for Something, or Somebody

 

     The world is in a bit of a funk right now.  The cherished elements of human progress and life quality assumed as the societal pinnacles for most of the twentieth century – good government, impartial laws, secure health, universal education, individual freedom, and unfettered commerce – are tottering, and we seem unable to know what to do to re-invigorate them.  Europe,  having sustained two devastating world wars, looked to the collectivist instinct and social safety net, building eventually the greatest guarantee of a life comfortably safe from the pain of failure or circumstance, yet it now finds an unmotivated, unhappy population, and a surging inability to financially underwrite the created lifestyle.  America, the beacon of personal freedom and achievement, is progressively committing itself to the same kind of  securities for its population it has viewed in European society, accepting progressively oppressive indebtedness at the very moment it sees its European cousins collapsing under theirs. The Arab world, so long under the yoke of dictatorial regimes, has risen to throw off the oppressors, only to appear to except an even more oppressive religious dogmatic rule.  The Asian behemoth China hurtles forward to modernize at an unabsorbable rate, ignoring its internal conflicts to aggressively project upon its wary neighbors India, Korea, and Japan a new subtle hegemony.

     What the heck is going on?   The air feels heavy and stagnant, the humidity high, the threat of rain and storm on the horizon.  The sense of helplessness and inevitability of a lesser existence continues.  The world’s  human spirit is feeling worn; almost as if it is tired of the burden and simply waiting for a new species to take over.  Its not just economic recessions, scarcity of resources, theoretical climatic doom, or looming conflicts that suppress the primordial fight or flight response of individuals.  It seems progressively our innate give-a-damn is busted.

     I really think a large part of the collective funk is the world’s indifference lately to seek great leaders who worked to achieve great universal truths without regard to their personal advancement.  Where is the Arab world’s George Washington, who threw the tyrants out, secured his nation’s future, then threw himself out to prevent any possibility of despotism?  Where is Europe’s  Abraham Lincoln, who recognized the importance of a federal unity while carefully protecting the capacity and rights of every individual citizen?  Where is China’s Konrad Adenauer, who can marshal the enormous potential of his citizens while respecting and working with his neighbors to the benefit of each?  Where is Islam’s Martin Luther King, who spoke from the depth of his religious conviction about the universal basic rights of all people, regardless of individual circumstance, color, or creed?  Where is America’s Alexander Hamilton, who recognized the balance between the national investment and the individual responsibility to create the foundations for the  greatest economic engine the world has ever seen?

     I am fairly certain they are out there, but classic selflessness is not currently considered an attractive virtue.  The American experience currently may be the test best as to whether the world is willing to wake up and look for leaders that project our better nature.  The current American President, enmeshed in an economic downslide progressively of his own making, is incapable of putting forth an agenda that frames clearly the problems we face, nor propose recognizable and constructive solutions.  He is post modernist, reaching back to past strategies to provide securities to the populous supposedly denied ignoring the effect of those strategies on the future.  He is a created hologram of an inward looking society that wanted its President to look, sound, and emote a certain way, but never assessed as to whether the experience or track record of achievement was there to act. The result is a political process that doesn’t remotely correct the inequities of the past, while assuring through its actions the inability to solve this problems in the future.  We have as a society, through this man, achieved perfect political irrelevancy.

     I think the world is going to watch America over the next year to see if the concept of leadership will come back into vogue.  Is there a collective will to see the re-establishment of common sense, restoration of personal responsibility,  return of right and wrong, promotion of individual talent and creativity, and mature and aggressive true shared sacrifice to secure the nation’s future?  Will a leader come out of the current malaise to harness human capacity and articulate the path to a better future?  The world will watch closely to see if the country most designed for course correction can self correct.  The way forward is fairly well delineated.  Lets see if America, and the world, can once again accept the better angels of our nature, and recognize the current pathfinders that mirror those that at one time were celebrated in our textbooks.

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Passing the Buck

     President Harry S. Truman was proud of his sign displayed prominently on the Oval Office desk – “The Buck Stops Here”.   No other principle was as important to him.  He understood that the occupant of the office of the President held ultimate authority and ultimate responsibility for the events and actions that occurred during his watch.  The weight of the responsibility was clear to him from the very first moment he took the oath:

“I felt as if the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me. I got the most terribly responsible job a man ever had.”

        There was additional little doubt in Truman’s mind the process of politics created the critical energy and vetting needed to achieve real change, but it never occurred to him that anybody else could inevitably to be seen as the fulcrum of all credit and blame under a President’s watch.  He had no time for whiners.

     Our current President has made an art of being the anti-Truman. Wherever the responsibility for our current mess resides, he wants everyone to know it doesn’t reside with him.  For the umpteenth time in a recent interview, he looks at the economic chaos and stagnation before him, and nearly three years into his watch sees where the buck of responsibility clearly rests – George W. Bush. A clever device of the Democrat party in undercutting the previous President, candidate Obama brought the device to a fever pitchand, like a one trick pony, can not seem to divest himself of the role the SuperBush has played in preventing Obama from achieving sustained recovery. The mantra of Democrats in regards to the supernatural capacities of our supposedly mentally enfeebled former president to continue to reek economic havoc, nearly three years after he released control, is a wonder to behold. President George W. Bush, singularly responsible for .Com recession, 9/11, the lack of WMD, Abu Griab, the Iraqi debacle, global warming, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing bubble and Mortgagegeddon, World hatred of the United States, and the Banking collapse, apparently continues to wage nefarious control over our current President’s success.

     Obviously the blame game can only go so far. The farther one gets from BushHitler the harder it gets to connect the dots that link the barbarian to our current mess. In fact, the current stagnation in recovery and apparent drift toward a second recession is progressively being recognized as a pillar of President Obama’s time at the tiller, and the President may be the last to recognize it. Unlike Truman, who was politically able to rail against the “do nothing” republican Congress of 1947-48, President Obama’s Democrat party has been in control since 2007 and the opposition has had to mostly sit back and accept the massive increases in government size and regulation, stimulus spending, and the progressively creepy and destructive Obamacare.

     The crux of the matter for Obama is, the American public can tolerate a blowhard, barely tolerate a fabricator, but can not tolerate a whiner. Kind of unbecoming. Maybe somebody ought to get the President a copy of Truman’s sign.