POLITICS – Page 3 – Ramparts of Civilization

August 26, 2018

Maverick

Zuni Rocket sets L.Cr. John McCain’s plane aflame on the USS Forrestal

At 10:51am July 29, 1967, the USS Forrestal, an American aircraft carrier positioned in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam prepared a flight deck for participation in the strategic bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, and had a deck full of fighter aircraft loaded with ordinance. Completing the dangerous process of loading live ordinance , an A-4 Skyhawk captained by Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III was docked at the stern of the carrier when a Zuni rocket secured to a craft on the opposite side of the deck, due to an electrical surge on the craft, spontaneously fired and released, shooting across the tarmac directly into McCain’s jet fuel tank, spilling hundreds of gallons of highly flammable fuel.

Deck crewmen, quickly realizing the extreme gravity of the situation, rushed to douse the flames. McCain got himself extracted from his cockpit, jumped down off the craft and raced across the deck as the fire crews ran past him to spray fire retardant.

McCain got half way across the deck when the first 1000 lb bomb beneath his craft ignited from the fire’s heat, blasting him 10 feet in the air, peppering him in shrapnel, and instantly disintegrating the courageous fire team behind him. Before the conflagration was over, scores of bombs exploded on the deck of the Forrestal tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel ignited, and in the worst on deck accident in U.S. history, 134 servicemen were killed, another 161 injured. John S. McCain, so close to the center of a death defying ordeal, managed to come out of the conflagration to live another day.

Yesterday, the Maverick met an ordeal beyond even his unique survival skills, and succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 82. Like every other adversary he had the misfortune to face in his life, he proved himself both courageous and circumspect in his place in the battle to survive.

John S. McCain III left an indelible mark on the world in the 50 or so years he was a public figure. History called him from birth to be a participant, not an observer. His grandfather John McCain was an integral part of carrier actions in World War II. Foreshadowing his grandson, he was a Naval Academy graduate, hard driving, profane individual who liked to take responsibility on his shoulders, and was empowered by the proximity to danger and action. A top Pacific commander at the end of the war, he died of a heart attack just four days after the Japanese surrender, completely worn out by the demands of the job. His son, John S. McCain, Jr., followed his father’s footsteps to become a four star admiral in charge of Naval Pacific Operations in the Vietnam War. It was an unavoidable destiny, therefore, for John S. McCain III, nondescript student and having a reputation as a hell raiser at the Naval Academy, to follow his father and grandfather’s path as a Naval aviator in the midst of the Vietnam War and a participant in the fighting during his father’s command.

The Forrestal was just the first of MCain’s life altering brushes with death. The second occurred three months later from the Forrestal disaster, when on October 26, 1967, when on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, McCain was shot down by a surface to air missile. Forced to eject from the plane, McCain fractured both arms and a leg on the ejection impact, nearly drowned when he parachuted into a lake, then was dragged out by North Vietnamese troops, who permanently crushed his right shoulder with a gunstock and bayoneted him. Transported to the notorious ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison camp, the severe injuries were left untreated, and further torture followed until it was discovered who his father was by the captors. This led to a hospitalization for basic treatment in hopes that McCain could serve as a propaganda tool against his father, and country. McCain lost fifty pounds in the ‘hospital’ and was not expected to live. When he revealed to the enemy the Maverick survival orneriness that everyone back home already knew about, he was placed in solitary confinement for the next two years. The beatings resumed in an effort to get him to sign a ‘confession of guilt for war crimes’ and he was offered early release if he would sign. The horrendous treatment could not break him, refusing any preferential treatment. He remained steadfast in the five and one half years that he was imprisoned until his release in 1972. He carried the physical and mental scars of his brutal treatment to the end of his life.

McCain returned from the war a different man, but as events that are as severe as the ones he had lived through, reinforced both his good and bad impulses. He returned to navy command and performed well, but recognized he would never achieve his ambitions to the extent that his father and grandfather did in the Navy. He turned his direction out of the military — and away from his faithful wife, who had been injured in a car accident, and suffered much of the same rehabilitation requirements that McCain endured upon returning to the States. He requested a divorce, and remarried, this time to an Arizonan who was an heir to a fortune and who’s father related to Arizonans of real influence. McCain entered Arizona politics, and won the congress seat for the Ist district as part of the Reagan wave of conservative victories, then subsequently, won the Senate seat of the retiring legendary senator Barry Goldwater.

Assumed to be a pure conservative, Senator McCain began the conversion to a contrarian that would earn him the title of political Maverick by a conflicted press, that, while enjoying his willingness to destabilize his own party unity and his love of the battle, confounded by his residual tendency to hold, for them, abhorrent conservative foundations and ‘warhawk’ persona.

He enjoyed the public world, never shying from a headline, and relished the discomfort his ‘reach across the aisle’ attitude caused his fellow Republicans. His ambitions showed full flower when he engaged in a bitter race for the Republican nomination for President in 2000 against the front runner George W. Bush, losing , but holding a fairly significant grudge in the process, that led to McCain functioning as an unpredictable thorn in the eventual President Bush’s side in legislative issues such as tax cuts, carbon taxes, campaign finance, and gun rights. He remained illogically close to John Kerry, a radical anti Vietnam war protestor following a controversial Vietnam combat experience, leading to a timid support of Bush in the 2004 election, and a further distancing from the party’s conservative core. Yet, when a quagmire and a potential ignominious defeat in Iraq loomed, MCain was unwavering in his support for President Bush’s decision against all odds and advice, to support an American military surge tactic, that turned the conflict and removed direct war in Iraq as an obstacle for future Presidents.

The moment of truth for John McCain came in 2008, when his ambitions and the party’s presidential opportunity coalesced in a Presidential nomination at the party convention. McCain worked tirelessly, but his contrariness and his lack of party discipline got him into trouble from which he never recovered. McCain made several crucial mistakes that doomed the already difficult task of defeating a Bush weary country against an unknown idealized Democrat candidate, Barrack Obama – young, sophisticated, and of mixed race — an exotic combination that proved intoxicating for a compliant press and a country looking to get a way from a war footing. McCain became disappointed that his personal rapport with the press held little sway when up against someone that exemplified their idyllic view of government. He selected an obscure candidate for Vice President in Governor Sara Palin of Alaska , who he hoped would restore his shaky relationships with conservatives, only to nearly abandon her when she proved shaky in her grasp of facts and unexperienced with the full court pressure applied by the press. He grossly misread the effect “suspending” his Presidential campaign when the October 2008 banking crisis hit, traveling to Washington to ‘work for ‘solutions’ where he was easily tarred as an accomplice in the disaster. Obama, also a Senator, wisely stayed away and let Washington flail, allowing Obama to remain clean of all the necessarily politically unpleasant decisions required to survive the crisis. McCain’s likeablity and hero status translated to nearly 60 million votes, but he was swamped in the electoral college by nearly 200. John McCain had reached the pinnacle of his political life, only to come up against a more presidentially projectable maverick than he, in Obama.

He spent his residual years in the Senate prior to his illness trying to fashion the illusory middle ground that he felt was the way forward for the country. Opposed to the Accountable Care Act as an unworkable and undemocratic bill, he ended up being the crossover vote that protected the bill against rejection in 2017, when he felt the alternative was equally unstructured and undemocratic. He sided with the Obama administration in the ill conceived actions in Egypt and Libya, but was virulently against the inactions in Syria and the process of negotiating with Iran’s theocratic dictators without Senate treaty submission. Despite being the Senator of a border state, he could never find a comfortable position on the need for border security and immigration reform. Regardless, as with all historical moments in his life, McCain positioned himself in the center of the action, and determined a course he felt he could live with, and a priority and principle he felt was consistent with his personal calling.

John S. McCain saw himself as a maverick, and like all mavericks was comfortable with the inconsistencies and flaws the maverick nature tends to expose. But more than maverick he was heroic, living through pain, torment, and controversy as if they were ennobling, rather than dehumanizing. He was authentically American in his heroism, sometimes losing the consistent and realistic for the ideal, and never, ever wavering in his love of country or mission his family had taken over multiple generations to sustain it. Choosing politics as his ultimate personal mission, he exhibited some of the recklessness that lost him the coalescence of support from all the factions that are necessary to ultimately prevail. The maverick model was, perhaps, a little ahead of its time, and McCain stopped just short of the populist impulse that would eventually position another maverick candidate, Donald Trump to achieve the ultimate prize.

John S. McCain III was above all, one great American story. His core is described in both his own memoir, Faith of My Fathers , and in the brilliant reporting of Robert Timberg in The Nightingale’s Song. We will miss John McCain as we will miss a crucial part of our Americanness, – action oriented, courageous, occasionally impulsive – but trying to find the right and true way forward.

Rest in Peace, John McCain. God Speed to the Maverick.

May 20, 2018

Who’s Country Is It Anyway?

In significant quarters of the United States, the election of Richard Nixon was a cultural event. An appalling cultural event. Nixon was seen by many as an abomination of the symbol America was supposed to project to the rest of the world in their chief executive position. He was a dark, conniving destroyer of reputations, who saw communists where others saw progressives, and worst of all, had support of what he referred to as the “silent majority” — to liberal elites, the great reactionary underbelly of American life. This sense of Nixon, epitomizing the cancer on progress as a people, was forever memorialized by Pauline Kael, the entertainment critic for New Yorker Magazine, stating, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them”. The cultural divide extended uniformly through the American Media and the country’s universities, who saw their burgeoning activism and progressivism threatened by the whims of an electoral college that had rewarded, in the defiance of the popular will, a person antithetical to all they envisioned for a country in transition. Finally, it was immersed in the permanent government, the Washington bureaucracy, that could not conceive of a cadre of Nixon loyalists infecting the levers of power, only 8 short years from the time their Camelot infused hero, John Kennedy, had supposedly banished Nixon to the political wilderness. Yet there he was. With his election , Nixon had overturned their world, and the clash as to who would control the narrative, and who’s narrative would prevail, commenced almost immediately.

Five years later, despite President Nixon’s seemingly immense electoral popularity, the permanent state and media, helped by Nixon’s many flaws, managed to take him down. The President, who in 1972 was elected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, found himself only 20 months later, by August 8, 1974, without any residual political support and had to resign, rather than face impeachment. The attack that had exposed his fatal mistake, had both external and internal elements. The American press, led by the intrepid reporters Woodward and Bernstein, had done the heavy lifting of telling the story of Nixon and his staff, but its was many years later, when it was finally admitted that ‘Deep Throat’ ,the prime whistleblower who functioned as Woodward and Bernstein’s inside mole, was Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI. The deep state and press, sharing a mutual disdain for Nixon, had collaborated to bring him down.

Thus, the means for securing a vaccination against elections that threatened the accepted status quo- in essence, sustained, intense and disproportionate press focus on perceived vulnerabilities of an unacceptable president, coupled if possible with deep state cooperation and coordination — was realized. For the next forty years, with variable intensity, the machinery was oriented towards reigning in Republican Presidents. The exception was the Clinton experience, where the mainstream media, positioned to bury the “intern” story, was caught completely off guard by a new force to this point not recognized, the internet, with a new arm of investigative oversight less biased by traditional views of the world exemplified by a uniquely new reporter, Matt Drudge.

The years of the Obama Administration were the reconstruction of the Kennedyesque narrative. Mr. Obama, a compelling figure who pushed all the right buttons — suave, progressive, intellectual — was feted for eight years by a compliant press the protected the image against whispered, darker reflections of a more imperious side – Fast and Furious, the weaponization of the IRS and other government agencies, the Benghazi debacle. None of the narratives gained weight, or reached the White House, because the press, having learned from the Clinton experience wouldn’t let it, and the politicized Justice Department had determined the ends justified the means. The end of the Obama Administration presented real dangers, though, to all that had been accomplished. An unstable maverick in Donald Trump had managed to wrest the Republican nomination, and showed no indication that he would follow the civility of previous Republican candidates to avoid the risk of a war on culture. At the same time, the Obama legacy was to be put in the hands of Hillary Clinton, a uniquely soiled candidate who encompassed the worst traits of her husband’s love affair with crony capitalism and innate dishonesty without the accompanying natural political instincts. What to do….What to do.

It progressively appears the old war horse of media narrative and deep state coordination was dusted off and pointed at Trump. Unlike in Nixon’s case, no one waited to see how the election would turn before initiating action. Too much was at stake, and no one would be able to trust the internet to cooperate. Trump was a perfectly designed foil. He had no political experience and no real organization. His business life was riddled with shady characters, shoddy tactics, and international scope. He was the perfect anti-Obama — rude, bombastic, and reactionary. Not since the juxtaposition of Kennedy to Nixon, was the righteousness of the process so obviously clear to both media and deep state characters as the potential jump from Obama to Trump. With such juxtapositions, the trust in the natural electoral process to do the right thing could not be calmly and passively accepted. The first action was to somehow cleanse Hillary Clinton of her stunning malfeasance in her Clinton Foundation activities, laced with sloppy security breeches codified in thousands of destroyed emails on a private server — and the on going abeyance of the Obama Administration, and perhaps the President himself. This required tortuous legal justifications by the Justice Department and FBI, that under a Republican Administration would have led to a Constitutional crisis — interviews not recorded and not taken under oath, immunity provided preemptively, legal decisions to ignore the mountain of evidence and declare outcome prior to any legal process. Despite the smell, the media accepted the outcome with satisfaction. The second process was to turn the legal investigative engine upon the opponent Trump, taking the kernel of longstanding Russian interference with American elections and point a one sided lens upon Trump. Cooperation with the Clinton campaign with acceptance of opposition research purchased by Clinton and then laundered like dirty money through government investigative organs to have it appear as clean counter intelligence, appears to have required coordinated activity with both the Justice Department and FBI, and possibly National Security agencies. Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the identification of a possible mole positioned by the FBI in the opposition Trump campaign. Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, a former federal prosecutor, has outlined in devastating fashion, the two juxtaposed processes of investigation of Clinton and Trump, as near polar opposites by the same legal arms of our government. After the stunning election of Trump to the Presidency, the narrative had to be put into over-drive, from one of Russian Interference to the quid pro quo of Russian Collusion, and from nearly the first day, the elected President has been under attack in a fashion positioned to overturn the election.

In my childhood, I remember the daily broadcasts of the Congressional hearings that pealed away Nixon’s defensive layers one by one, until the core conspiracy had been identified, vilified, and the outcome inevitable. The combined pressure of external and internal forces is immense and inexorable. Nixon’s supreme failure was the confluence of the elite institutions hatred of his persona and resultant success threatening the accepted meme, and the extent to which he used unsavory elements to fight back. Trump’s own naivety may have been his best weapon. Nearly two years of searching for evidence of ‘Russian Collusion’ has turned up nothing potentially for the simple reason that there may have been no there there. The Trump phenomena did not rely on traditional campaign structures and was therefore was not sophisticated enough to contemplate an organized coordinative process involving Russians, hackers, and Facebook ads. Trump was too busy utilizing a previously unconceived triad of threadbare campaign finance, old fashion rallies, and celebrity fueled twitter artillery. Stunningly, he won, and the unseemly, unsophisticated attacks and subsequent dismantling of the progressive legacy have driven the permanent state and Obama holdovers to the precipice of madness.

The clarity as to what has transpired has only begun to be revealed, and a painful boomerang may yet strike heaviest on those who sought to artificially direct the outcome. Unlike forty-five years ago, the country may not accept the logic to overturn the election, and those that hoped to control events in a constitutional republic, may find enough of the old pride to assure a government of the people, by the people, for the people, has not yet perished from the face of the earth.

April 14, 2018

Flying Too Close to the Sun

Paul Ryan
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Daedalus, having created the ultimate labyrinth to secure forever the Minotaur for King Minos on the island of Crete, was imprisoned by the king to prevent him from ever revealing the brilliant secrets of the labyrinth to anyone else, on any other land. Daedalus, however, determined to set himself free, and using his profound intellect constructed a perfect set of wings for he and his son, Icarus, to leave the island by the method the king thought impossible – by flight. Wings so beautifully constructed from string, feathers and wax, that Daedalus and his son were soon safely airborne over the sea, and free of the king’s confinement. Icarus, however, enamored with the freedom of flight, ignored his father’s admonition of the fragility of the freedom supported by wings – too close to the foamy sea, and the wings would be water laden; too close to the sun, and the wax would melt , the wings fragment and deconstruct. Surging ever higher, Icarus’s wings deconstructed, and he was dashed into the sea, and drowned. Daedalus’s victory proved etherial, and his great intellectual gifts were not sufficient to overcome human nature.

Paul Ryan had hopes on November 8th, 2016, of escaping the prison of government inaction of the past thirty years, and finally freeing the budget of the United States from the strangulating grip of unreformed entitlements. His two decade personal crusade to use his intellect and character to achieve the politically daunting process of epic, generational governmental action had lived for this day. He had learned at the feet of the energetic and innovative Jack Kemp upon coming to Washington DC, became at 28 years old, a politician himself and won for 9 consecutive elections the 1st District of Wisconsin’s congressional seat. He rose to the head of the Budget Committee,, then the House Ways and Means Committee, succeeded getting the House to pass the Ryan inspired entitlement reform bills only to have them quashed in the Senate, then in 2016 became the radical reform candidate in the Vice Presidential position on Mitt Romney’s ticket, only to fall in defeat to President Obama. But on November 9th, 2016, the now Speaker of the House surveyed a republican house, senate and president, finally in position to achieve real reform as a culmination of a twenty year quest.

So close, and yet, not remotely close enough. The appetite for Ryan type reform with measured, distributed pain to a mature and educated electorate was as etherial as the wings of Icarus, and quickly dashed. The President, who’s personality Ryan found untenable, was of no mind to drive policy that required entitlement reform beyond Obamacare, and fretted about that. Ryan, as Speaker, was poorly constituted to be any kind of an enforcer, and could barely assemble a weakened bill overturning the Affordable Care Act, only to see little direction from the White House and no direction from the Senate, as even weaker versions failed to pass. The ultimate dagger was.aptly, delivered by Senator John McCain, who proved to be the deciding vote preserving Obamacare, after having just completed his re-election to the Senate in a candidacy whose central message was repealing it. Any talking of budgetary restraint to protect against future debt growth disappeared in a tax bill that valued growth over deficit relief, and a budget bill that blasted out of the water any residual gasps of control.

The once rising Young Gun of the House, the Thinker, that was going to secure America’s future with policies designed on smarts and freedom, looked at the landscape and realized no one was listening to his intellectual framing any longer. Only 48 years old, a recent Presidential timber candidate, Vice Presidential nominee, and as Speaker, third in line to the current President, decided to leave the arena. Paul Ryan had designed some beautifully rendered means of escape for the country from an impending future of debt constraint and deterioration, but he proved all too deferential and insufficient in ego to drive the dream to victory.

In 1929, Winston Churchill was asked to abdicate his cabinet position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and rapidly drifted into the political wilderness, his ideas and style felt to be antithetical to modern progress, and with little respect from the opposition and minimal support from his own party. He was 55 years old, and would not return for a decade to any position of public trust or leadership. But Winston Churchill was always sure of his calling, even when destiny seemed cruel in its place for him. The World Crisis of 1939 broke, and suddenly Churchill’s type of leadership was felt to be the missing ingredient to survival. It may be Ryan has little stomach for the abuse Churchill endured until history again found him, and will want to only spend his time in think tanks with people who are sympathetic to his theories. I, for one, thought Ryan understood his calling, and the recognition that he very well could have been the indispensable man, that Churchill always assumed himself to be.

It appears to not be the case, and Ryan will watch as others avert their eyes to the obvious treacherous waters ahead. It is sad for me to admit, as I thought Paul Ryan was the Right Stuff, that he would be committed enough to the country and its means of governance, that he would let the voters decide whether he was a prophet or a nag. Alas, it appears the arena he was close to dominating proved too big for his moment. Too carefully crafted and averse to the dirty, grungy nature of politics, Ryan flew too close to the sun.

Its nice to reflect back, though, when the fire was in his belly:

January 21, 2018

Finding a Way in the Age of Uncompromise

The Obama Administration barricades public monuments during the government shutdown of 2013. attrib. Getty Images

On Friday, the United States Senate failed to extend funding to United States government functions when Democrat Senators unanimously blocked the passage of a continuing resolution for government funding absent funding support for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). As with all typical government verbiage, the relatively mundane language of DACA belies its controversial roots, the acceptance of the presence of individuals who have circumvented the immigration laws of the United States. The funding arc for the estimated 800,000 individuals affected under DACA placed at risk a policy initiated by the Obama administration in 2012 that circumvented another extra-legal reality, the application of principles of a law that was never passed, the DREAM act ( Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) , a proposed law put forth in 2001 that has failed several attempts to be passed into law.

And so results the current narrative, the unwillingness to fund the government to assure the passage of funding for a program to protect and support work visas for individuals who entered the country illegally on the basis of a law that has been implemented extra-legally as it has never passed into law.

How did we get into this mess? The weeds of obscuring the birth of such dysfunction are thick but the underlying causation is relatively straight forward. The founders envisioned a constitutional process of checks and balances that would encourage the vetting of ideas and develop maturation of ideas into principled law. For a bill to become law, sufficient consensus and compromise would have to be present to secure passage. A representatives to the legislative branch were assumed to represent their all their constituents’ voices, there was always expectation that coalitions would develop that would overcome rigid ideological obstruction. In Robert Caro’s monumental treatise on the path to civil rights legislation, Master of the Senate, Caro meticulously lays out how Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson developed the cross party coalitions necessary to overcome decades of obstruction and achieve the legal basis for instituting critical civil rights reform that the broader nation would acknowledge as the accepted law of the land. He recognized the simply declaring moral imperative would not be sufficient for the nation to accept actions of the government to direct the behaviors of the nation as a whole. It would take laws that survived the gauntlet of the cacophony of opinions that existed in the country. He understood that the moral basis for conversion of the country’s direction would come from all elements of the country seeing the process through to a legislative conclusion.

The current imbroglio is inevitable outcome of special interest groups having been rewarded in the recent past for confusing their assumed moral imperative sufficiently righteous for the achievement of their outcomes without having to work in the arena of debate and compromise. Immigration policy has been a controversy since the origin of the nation borne on the concept of a nation of immigrants subsuming the native population. Various periods of rapid population growth have had periods of intervening restriction as the nation has worked towards absorbing the new contributors and assimilating them into the fabric of the present population. It has worked because the principle of rule of law was accepted by all, and when considered no longer pertinent to current considerations, changed as a process of law. Since the 1980’s, radicalization by progressives of the process to re-orient society based on removal of enforcement of immigration law circumvented the society’s concern as to the speed of change, and ignored any arguments to the contrary as impediments to the assumed moral righteousness of the cause of societal change, regardless of societal damage or lack of consensus. The inevitable reaction reached high tide in 2016, when the country voted to install a President who would stand athwart the forced re-orientation of society. The reaction found its muse in Trump and its symbol of resistance the Wall, that would physically force the rule of law on those elements of governmental bureaucracy had become so enamored with distorting the law to effect the means of societal re-modeling.

Now, we stand at a crossroads, where the legitimate concerns of the nation to assure the lawful assimilation of those who seek to come to the country for its perceived unique principles of foundation can be secured, while providing humanitarian understanding for those who find themselves in an untenable position based on the actions of their parents many years ago. The way forward on difficult issues is always a path of careful compromise assuring larger principles of fairness and balance based on rule of law.

Sit down, and hash out a law, and the nation will follow it. Press forward with the age of uncompromising agendas driven on ideology rather than the principles of the founding, and we will see walls go up permanently at locations other than our borders.

December 1, 2017

The Great and Terrible Wizard of Trump

November 8th, 2016 represented a cornucopia of shattered illusions about the United States of America. A thirty year meme had been assumed, that our country had entered into a new social consensus, having risen above individual concepts of rights and moralities, to a progressive consciousness. The establishment convinced itself it understood the modern concept of the village, tied together by willingness to sublimate individual success to the general ‘well being’, led by a wise council of elites, that would forge a more tolerant, environmentally sensitive, and egalitarian world. Concepts of borders and unique characteristics of nationhood were seen as quant relics of a past battered by conflict, and were subsumed by the desire to create a shared world order and purpose. The queen bee of the new consensus was to be Hillary Clinton, the elites’ most elite. The first woman president, the most prepared President ever, the new consensus of generations was expected to obliterate a candidate with more character flaws than a back country bandelero.

But like a coastal tsunami, Florida, then Ohio, then Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan fell to the renegade from Queens and the wholly unexpected became reality; the reality television star had achieved the ultimate in surprise endings. Donald Trump crushed the Inevitable One and , in the end, it wasn’t even close.

The nation awoke the following morning to one of the great proverbial hangovers, wondering what in the world it had just done. Approxiamently half of the country breathed a sigh of relief that the wicked witch of the East had not won, and the other half dribbled and waled in a flush of anxiety sure that the great experiment in social progress had just been turned over to the cretins of Duck Dynasty and mental giants of Jersey Shore. The whole country was in agreement, however, that the new occupant of the Whites House was of a wholly new, never before seen iteration. How would Trump actually face up to the enormous responsibilities and pressures as one of the most ill prepared and experienced political neophytes in history? Doom was the common conclusion.

One year later, we still are perplexed as to what we have in Donald Trump, and the division as to those who put Trump into power, and those who seek to find any means necessary to get him gone, is starker then ever.

For the anti-Trumpers like myself who in the end could not ignore the profundity of the binomial choice of the election in regard to the futures they projected, the comfort with the outcome took some time to clarify.

One year later, we are faced with the Great and Terrible Wizard of Trump.

Trump turns out at the one year turn to be both great and terrible, but whichever view you hold, the performance is most unexpected. The one shock that resonates with both the zealots and the haters is, who knew he was going to prove to be so….competent? National Review’s Deroy Murdock lays out the optimal governmental approach that for conservatives would have been seen as a generational win, only to be dumbfounded that the politician who appears to be pulling it off is the ultimate anti-politician. Remove Trump’s name from the achievements, and the roll of victories for rolling back government, restoring the economy, and re-ordering foreign affairs is gobsmacking.

The extent of the pull back from the very cliff of socialist permanency achieved in one year would have been considered impossible by any rational conservative strategist, and certainly none of the preferred candidates likely would have driven the agenda with the singled mindedness of Trump, a man assumed by all to be without any defining philosophies other than the vagaries of “greatness”. Increasing the astonishment level of the consistent results has been the recognition that the haters have hated Trump with a unique vitriol. Trumps’s destruction has been a planned event from the first day after the election. The Deep State and Democrats could not even wait to the inauguration to initiate a full scale demolition derby meant to emasculate Trump, and position him for removal as soon as the their position in power had been restored. An independent council was immediately named within days of Trump taking power to investigate a Democrat fantasy that the election was stolen by some nefarious Russian influence. The pounding has been daily and relentless, with the hypocrisy of those most compromised by Deep State bias being the grand inquisitors. Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most ethically challenged of modern candidates for president, has become the incredible shrinking foil, as with each attempted smear of Trump, more and more of the dirt ends up on her own legacy. There can be no stopping this attack as the statist hegemony can not risk the bountiful grip over the people that had been so remorselessly achieved.

And then there is Terrible Trump, who shows incredible indiscipline and self absorption with spasms of ludicrous tweets, that distract and dwell on people and events of immeasurably vapid value. Is Clown Trump or Revolutionary Trump the real Trump? Are these distractions from his agenda tenth dimensional chess designed to distract the haters as he continues behind the curtain to quietly run the levers of a profound revolution to halt the country’s slouch toward a socialist Gomorrah? Or are they just Clown Trump, unable to contain his narcissism, every bit the unhinged pretender his haters assume him to be?

It may difficult to watch, but watch we must, as real history is being made, after decades of national hesitancy and bloating of the progressivist state. You don’t have to like the man in order to realize he isn’t going to just sit back and let two hundred and thirty years of a great experiment be allowed to implode on itself. The Great and Terrible Wizard may simply be the strange little man that will find a way to get us back home…

October 28, 2017

What Happened?

If you are Vladimir Putin, you are probably always a little surprised how easy it is to screw with democracies. The formula is straight forward. Inject a little a little disinformation into the mix, then sit back and satisfyingly watch the show evolve into more than you could have ever hoped for. Having to stew in the reality that Russia has become a one product economy under great competitive strain from entrepreneurial fracking geniuses in the United States, and having to find a way to somehow keep pace with the leviathan that is the U.S. military,it must be especially satisfying to realize how the core institutions that once gave the United States its enormous strength, are riddled with manipulable dupes, compromised bureaucracies, and third rate political hacks.

The nation is waking up to find that the manufactured meme of supposed corrupting Russian intervention in the American election process fatally ensnaring the new President, is proving to be no more than an attempted diverting side show to wholesale self corruption of an entire generation of political elite.For over a year, an incessant drumbeat by operatives inside and outside the government using a grab bag of nefarious leaks and innuendos worked to drive a compliant press into attempting the destruction of candidate Trump, and when unsuccessful, the termination of his functional presidency from day one.

The Presidential election of 2016 provided the ultimate expression of the collapse of the traditional party vetting process to obtain candidates of appropriate capability and stature to the potentially take on the most complex and powerful executive responsibilities in the world. On the Republican side, a neophyte businessman with no thought out plan, a shoot from the hip style, and a spotty at best past, amazingly defeated 16 better turned candidates who had no answer for his peculiar combination of bluster and ability to blast through supposed norms of political correctness. On the Democrat side, a known political stiff, with a long standing history of difficulties with the truth, unbridled ambition for power and wealth, and a family tradition of playing the victim card while ruthlessly using whoever necessary to advance,plodded her way passed an ancient socialist, who somehow appeared the more energetic and ideas driven candidate.

Hillary Clinton, the supposed anointed one, had found herself caught in a typical Clintonian mess of her own making. Having spent the better portion of her years of Secretary of State using the position to influence foreign powers in enriching herself through the Clinton Foundation , her sloppy tool of hiding the activity, a private e-mail server containing all the more nefarious requests no doubt, became known. Clinton then did what Clintons do, she brazenly destroyed access to her emails, and dared anyone to imply a connection. The grotesquery of her act, a process that would have thrown any other government employee in jail, required a special kind of obsyiquience by a government and compliant media that wanted her to win, and continue the statist revolution. High brazenness produces high risk, and therefore, there was work to do to assure the processes of enforcement in a democracy, the cratering but still possible rule of law and the bright light of investigative journalism, did not interfere with her inevitable election, and thereby permit with her election the permanent burial of the story.

And then, the bountiless wonder of providence sees to the nomination, on the Republican side, of maybe the easiest opponent in a century, a populist simultaneously weak in the most conservative states, and weaker still in the swing states. The predictions are for a landslide, a republican wipeout. When however, you are empty of principle yourself, the idea of leaving the election up to a notoriously fickle public enthralled with the brash talk of the opponent and still holding fresh in their minds another example, in the email scandal, of your absent personal virtue, another weapon is needed.

Having participated yourself in the making of millions of dollars by entering the United States into deals with Putin’s oligarchs that divest 25% of the United States uranium reserves into Russian hands, you are comfortable with the thought that a modern businessman like Trump would obviously operate by the same rules of enrichment. Looking for the political dagger, your political operatives employ a company with known Russian ties for misinformation, and spend millions for a ‘dossier’ that reveals the ‘real Trump’ and alleged Russian influence peddling. What a wonderful distraction as the thin skinned Trump distracts himself in fighting off attack dogs in the media, while you work on your own leaky vessel. The FBI, run by a Director long since oblivious to his legal obligation, devises alternatives to prosecution on the email scandal even before he has interviewed you for the facts. He gives immunity to your team before they request it. Your husband manages to gain the necessary assurances from the U.S. Attorney General in a preposterous ‘accidental’ airport rendezvous. The President of the United States stands back, as he sees risks to himself and his legacy in having the unbound bowling ball of Trump anywhere near a victory. The FBI, so willing to have a distraction to equalize the playing field and take on the appearance of balanced justice warriors, may even have invested in the opposition ‘research’ — provided by a foreign spy from other foreign spies, hand fed by a gleeful dictator enabling Americans to get stuck in their own sanctimonious goo.

The election comes, and the impossible happens. The anointed one loses, and the bumbling amateur loud mouth pulls off the greatest upset in modern election history. What does Hillary Clinton do? — she does revenge. A brilliant Clinton inspired campaign of leaks, innuendos, complicit media and a retiring President protecting his legacy creates a firestorm of lies, fabricated news analysis, and a compromised FBI Director who assures the stage is set for an independent council to go after the President practically day one in office, a prosecutor who just happens to be his mentor and friend, best able to divert any direct tracks to the Director himself.

It’s a tragicomedy on the scale of the greatest conspiratorial nonsense, and horribly beneath contempt in a country that once prided itself on its civic institutions. We can now look up and see compromised, the Democrat nominee for President and the Democrat National Committee, The former President of the United States and his Justice Department, the FBI and its Director and its last two Directors, and the legion of media sycophants that perpetuate the myth of objectivity while promoting a form of propaganda for the state.

Where it will end, typically is not with justice being served to all the miscreants.

President Putin can at least laugh in what he can accomplish with just a little chaos. No one from this country can any longer raise the standard of objective justice, selfless civil servants, or a fourth estate of a free and unbound character, when pointing the finger at him. We are stuck, knee deep, in our own goo.

President Trump has innumerable faults, but he is looking like a peach compared to the last crowd. Hopefully, he really will be able to start to drain the proverbial swamp.

Despite a foundation of a most perfect union, we have become mired in one very deep, deep swamp.

June 18, 2017

A Republic – If you can keep it…

Gaius Julius Caesar is assassinated in the Roman Senate

Upon deliberating and formulating in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a mechanism of governance for the ages, Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Stopped on the steps by a well wisher, he was asked about the outcome of the secretive deliberations. “Well Doctor, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?” The circumspect Franklin thoughtfully responded, “A Republic….If you can keep it.”

Benjamin Franklin was fully aware of the fragile tenets upon which self governance, the rarest of human societal structures through history, rested. Having the opportunity to develop a republic from scratch after a providential victory over the strongest military on earth, Franklin was under no illusions as to the longevity of such an undertaking if the baser human emotions took over from the agreed upon foundations of a democratically led governance.

Yet, the republic has indeed stood for 228 years from the day the Constitution became law, and the world’s oldest continuous democracy took root. Its careful balance of the rights of citizens and the limitation of government, protected by an innate understanding as to the role of free speech in the form of civil discourse and the rule of law as represented as blind to bias, linked inextricably to objective truth, has led to the exalted position of the United States as a beacon of freedom and stability so many years from birth.

Now we sit at a time where the hubris about the gift of self rule is equally matched by the ignorance of the role each individual must play in the maintenance of the compact that preserves a healthy, functioning republic. Examples abound. The congress is back to building laws in secret to avoid the difficulties an open forum of discussion provides. The president is back to accomplishing changes by diktat. The deep state leaks to subvert the elected will of the people, to harass and damage those that would upset the applecart. Free speech is considered a weapon that risks upsetting entrenched interests that have re-imagined the American story into one of victim groups and predators. Elections are to be manipulated to make sure the accepted side wins. Justice is imbued with the mission to reorder law through interpretation, not to find justice in the objective truth. The press has become an arm of propaganda, seeing events in the shades of pre-ordained opinions and prejudices, turning facts on edge and subverting measured thought and appropriate rationalizations. Reason has been trampled by emotion, and violence as an acceptable alternative to any compromise.

The events of the past week, where a premeditated attempt to assassinate multiple representatives of congress because of their political philosophy, couldn’t maintain a first page position in any news outlet for more than 24 hours shows how far we have fallen in our understanding of the threat every day to this most fragile of gifts, self governance. We are in danger of losing Franklin’s republic, and the people who are pushing it over the edge are ignorant of what they would have lost, and arrogant in their ignorance of what would transpire if they get their way.

The self righteous senators who convinced themselves that by assassinating Julius Caesar they were preserving their position as the elite representatives of Roman society, found themselves instead to have permanently destroyed the republic that had given them their exalted position. By killing their Caesar, they brought upon themselves a hundred more.

It is proving progressively hard to guard the ramparts of a civilization that has presumed itself unworthy of guarding. Et tu?

May 21, 2017

Venezuela: The Dream State Becomes a Nightmare

Venezuela : Socialist Utopia begins the inevitable process of turning on its own
photo attrib: Christian Veron Reuters

In 1921, the brutal Russian Revolution originally born in 1917, first, to overthrow the Czarist rule and subsequently, the nidus of a social democratic structure, was coming to a climax. The Red Army, infused with the radicalist furor of the Bolsheviks, had nearly completely eradicated the White Army, a loose collection of monarchists, non-bolshevik democrats, and militarists that stood as a viable option to the installation of a utopian manifesto facing the ever suffering Russian people. Like all Socialist ‘dream-states’, the Revolution was predicated in convincing the mass of people of the coming egalitarian utopia, and ignoring the means of creation, a top down elite dominance over a servile proletariat, demanded of all utopian structures. Two organized groups began to realize their view points, as part of their cooperation with the overlords in the Bolshevik structure, were no longer valued. Faced by the severe consequences of communist rigidity in the economy, the soldiers, sailors and citizens that had taken up the mantle of revolution, now asked the revolution to respect their needs. A rebellion against the overlords ensued, called the Kronstadt Rebellion. The millions of peasants of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the developing Soviet structure, objected to the forced requisition of foodstuffs without any return or support of local needs. The response from above was ruthless; the peasant response was to defend themselves against the theft of their labors, by forming the Green Army. The result of asking for the egalitarian provision of the resources and bounty of the state as outlined in the Marxian manifesto? The total crushing of both groups to secure the dominance of the overlords. The Revolution eats its own last, but inevitably.

The one hundred years since the revolution on Marxist ideals first succeeded on the planet have been littered with the same reality of socialism deviating from its theoretic idealized form, over and over and over. The recruitment of the poor and dispossessed by leaders proclaiming a utopia denied by a capitalist elite. The progressive recruitment of the nation’s resources and power into the hands of a few elite who claim a special objectivity and principled character that allows them to make the crucial decisions for the masses. The hero worship idealizing the leaders that permit like minded elitists in other country to exult upon their idealism, and ignore their minder’s corruption. The eventual collapse of the agreed upon interactions that maintain civilized human behavior. The collapse of the compact between the governed and the governing – and the inevitable brutal clash where only one societal construct can remain standing — the oppressors or the oppressed.

From Russia to China, Laos to Cambodia, North Korea to Uganda, and Cuba to , now, Venezuela – the socialist revolution eventually eats its own. the saddest stupidity in the never ending tragedy of injecting the ideal socialism of academic treatises into the real life consequences of human society, is that elites of the world continue to observe its successive failure as an example of the lack of purity of commitment and the nefarious undermining of individuals seeking “advantage” over others. Never mind the millions of murdered, starved, imprisoned, and oppressed in the gulags of the Soviet State, the death camps of Cambodia, the starvation of the Korean masses, the slaughter of the Chinese middle class by the Red Guard.

Now, the world turns it’s lonely eyes to Venezuela. The emerald country of South America sits upon the world’s largest oil reserves, a bottomless piggy bank to fund any conceivable socialist agenda for its 31 million citizens. With the nationalization of the oil industry, Hugo Chavez secured the financial means of building the infra-structure lionized in socialist lore. “Free” health clinics and hospitals. Universal education. Planned economy. Expansion of government direction into every societal and individual decision. The oil piggy bank also filled the coffers of the elite — making millionaires out beholden military leaders and judges, and billionaires out of the Chavez family. the Chavez mystique was imprinted everywhere in Venezuela – the ‘fatherly” advice for his children, the Venezuelan poor, on television talk shows, the posters extolling his far sightedness in schools and buildings across the country. For a while, the socialist ideal was artificially propped up.

The world’s leftist elites, enthralled with yet again another potential example of the superiority of marxist principles (they themselves would never accept the yolk of), flocked to this newest latest savior from capitalist reality. The “charismatic” Chavez – socialist dictators always have to be “charismatic” to excuse their totalitarian instincts (as in the “charismatic” Castro or “charismatic” Mugabe) — unfortunately did not count upon the great equalizer. cancer, that would abort his life time appointment to lead his nation’s socialist revolution. At the occasion of his funeral, the celebrity elites opined upon his ‘great father’ role for Venezuela. Michael Moore – “Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous”. Sean Penn – “I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chávez and the people of Venezuela. Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro.” Oliver Stone – “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place. Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

The great father Chavez in death turned the whole cabal into the hands of Nicholas Maduro, who made sure to continue the unique brand of hero worship, corrupt oligarchy, and the permanent stoking of the resentment of the poorer classes. Unfortunately, the conversion of a difficult to control diverse economy into one 93% driven by oil and petroleum product receipts, reached its nadir with the collapse of oil prices, in 2014. The United States had discovered fracking, and suddenly the OPEC countries faced the sullen reality of capitalist competition. In Venezuela, there was not enough money left to bribe all the officials, subdue the black market, and provide for essential goods. Inflation destroyed people’s meagre savings, and essential goods — food stuffs, medicines, even petrol — dried up. The not so charismatic Maduro packed the court and attempted to shut down the Assembly, jailed his opposition, paid off more aggressively the military, even began to form para-military fascist groups — the colectivo — to harass and cower the population.

Now, Venezuelans live the life of the socialist oppressed. There is nothing to eat, nothing to fight disease, and progressively, no hope, whether you were once rich, or poor. The elite cabal Maduro runs cannot let go, because they would face the full fury of the enraged population. The junta must fight the citizens, the citizens must fight back and the country progressively descends into hell. The socialist virus must find another host to infect as this one is almost dead.

As Venezuela must endure its inevitable collapse throwing off the socialist yoke, and its equally painful rebirth, the elites of the world, particularly the profound hypocrites that live in free market and free expression societies, will of course avert their eyes. They will revert to lambasting their own bountiful providence, and work toward the socialist virus infesting itself deeper into the American host. When Maduro falls and the country is adrift with parasitic warlords like Libya, or an even more terrible junta takes his place, the leftist elites will sigh, and look for the next carcass.

If only Chavez had been a little more pure, a little more stalwart….too bad. It appears Venezuela wasn’t a worthy dream-state after all.

May 14, 2017

Matador

The matador lives in a world of complete peril, using concentration and will to exist in a very dangerous space where a beast infinitely more powerful then himself looks for any sign of weakness or fear to destroy him. The matador gets the juice of having survived the closest of encounters threatening complete destruction. The beast knows it has to make the most of this encounter, because as long as the matador lives on, the beast’s fate is sealed.

Donald Trump has lived his life assuming himself to be a supreme matador, but for every matador there is inevitably the reality of having made one careless assumption too many. Last week was a perfect example of such carelessness. The firing of FBI Director Comey and the ham-fisted communication, particularly the President’s incredibly undisciplined mouth, has lead the beast, the nation’s incestuous partnership of established media and the its political arm, the Democrat Party, to believe its about to find its way around the capote de brega. A long standing press tradition of seeing Democrat Party actions as righteous, but at times unaware, and Republican Party actions as anti-societal, and at times criminal, has once again reached hyper-agitated state. Convinced that a President who on the campaign trail bragged he was willing to treat Russia “differently” , was the codeword for traitorous collusion, sees the firing of the nation’s chief investigative officer the blunt tool of a cover-up. And boy does the media love Republican inspired cover-ups.

Trump, like a self confident matador unaware of his own sloppy preparation, thinks his limited tools of bluster and distraction will fool the beast one more time. Maybe so. The blood lust of the beast has its own overbearing certitude that made it possible for a complete neophyte like Trump to succeed in the arena of public opinion in the first place. The public though superficially repelled by matador Trump’s clumsy ‘Tanda‘ technique, remain enthralled with the sheer blissful self confidence of the matador to engage such an unequal foe.

The success of the matador is inevitably based on the internal discipline and intelligence, to recognize what is possible and not possible in close proximity with the bull. Trump’s tendency to see the world in black and white, those loyal to him and those not, may lead to further blind spots, that may place him in the perilous and vulnerable state more in tune with being the mortally injured but angry bull then the capable matador.

FBI Director Comey kept confusing his role to function as prosecutor rather than investigator, placing himself multiple times into the center of the narrative, rather than the dispassionate deliver of evidence to prosecutors whose role is to determine whether crimes have been committed. From his ridiculous press conference of July 5th, 2016, in which he went into extraordinary detail as to candidate Hillary Clinton’s multiple law infractions regarding her private server, destruction of e-mails, and pathetic management of classified information as chief foreign officer of the land, only then to state that he had determined the actions showed extreme carelessness, but did not rise to the level of a crime, Comey showed himself to be incongruous to his position, and should have been fired then by President Obama. Comey now sees himself as the public servant who has been blamed for the effort to be impartial. Certainly, as Ramparts has discussed before, a true public servant who sees that his own principles have been compromised by others, has the appropriate option of resignation available to them — but Comey, like most modern public servants, has enjoyed the spotlight, perks and power too much to avail himself of the dignified and principled approach.

President Trump, whose communication style reminds one of a pinball on a pinball machine, responding and reacting in completely random fashion to every obstacle, buffeted by the combination of impacts, creates the environment for his own failures. He is likely to respond to the current criticism by doubling down, with more disconnected thoughts and ridiculous tweets, that make him feel like he is fighting back, but undermine further any constructive way out of the morass. At some point if he is to survive his own amateurish indiscipline, he is going to have to define an executive council of political and legal advisors around him that he listens to and respects, rather than a group of people that through their leaks appear as undisciplined and bombastic as their boss.

The Russia connection is a meme propped up by a Democrat Party unable to recognize their radical left persona has lead them to be abandoned by the electorate, and a press consumed with the glory that could come from ‘exposing’ another Republican Watergate. The goal is to force the matador into a corner, distract him as long as possible to prevent any success, than go for the fleshy core beneath the capote, and strike to kill. This matador may provide them with his own sword for a self induced estocada. If the president cant get his act together and find some discipline, the press will have its glory, the Democrats the restoration of their assumed position as the anointed elite to manage the country’s inevitable controlled decline, and the nation, its best last chance to restore the unique balance of competence, accomplishment, and individual freedom and fortitude that once made this country unique and great.

April 8, 2017April 8, 2017

It Gets Syria-ous

USS Ross fires tomahawk cruise missile towards Syria washingtontimes.com Robert S. Price/ U.S. Navy via AP

Its been fun and games for opponents and media deriding the inexperienced Trump administration’s floundering around as the new President has adjusted to the massive difference between being an outsider deriding leaders for their actions or inactions, and being the leader of the world’s most powerful nation and head of the world’s most demanding bureaucracy. The President has been his own worst enemy becoming fixated and pitching conspiracy theories in a badminton match with opponents regarding Russian influence and spying, while simultaneously driving a premature health care process into a political muddy rut. The difficulty of having a tradition of gut instinct for decision making rather than a carefully developed principled philosophy has made the President look disorganized and reactionary. His opponents on either side of him, a position he created himself by suggesting he was the ultimate ‘outsider’, are circling like vultures over an assumed terminally injured animal.

This past week however the job suddenly got serious, and the President, under estimated every step of the way thus far, is showing himself to be tenacious if not a quick study.

The hardest skill to learn for any president is the ability to project themselves as commander in chief of an unbelievably powerful weapon, the US military, without committing the force into a role antithetical to its purpose. It requires real dexterity and recognition of the levers and dangers of escalation, when the country’s vital interests are not directly at risk. Do nothing, and the enemy sees only a paper tiger and a corrupted and dithering power. The puny response of President Clinton in the face of Osama Bin Laden’s massive provocation with the embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole led to the Al Qaeda leader’s confidence that his movement could survive a 9/11 response. Do too much and the Powell Doctrine of “you broke it, you own it” becomes an ominous trap for any President. Iraq and Libya come to mind.

Syria has proved to be a Petri Dish for both modes of superpower involvement. The Russians have inserted themselves in the center of the conflict, resulting in any failure of survival of the dictator Assad being a direct reflection upon their abilities, and being splattered with the casual brutality of the same dictator. Assad, a survivor like his father, recognizes that for dictators who are clinging to power, no force vector is too horrible to retain that power. Assad looks to chemical weapons (curiously presenting after Saddam Hussein’s stockpile disappeared) as the ultimate nondiscriminatory terror weapon of intimidation. Having used them previously, Assad faced a President in Obama who drew a red line,against their use, putting his country’s very prestige and resolve on the line, that in humiliating fashion a week later he withdrew and did nothing, fearing a quagmire he had no intention of risking. The message was clear – Assad need only give Obama a superficial out, and the President would leave him alone. A Potemkin village agreement to “remove” chemical weapons from Syria was promised by Assad. Obama pretended he had solved the problem, to the extent that as recently as January of this year, his buffoonish National Security Advisor Susan Rice bragged about how Obama had achieved the elimination of such weapons from Syria. Assad knew Obama would do nothing, and was willing to use them again, this time under the nose of a new president who as a private citizen disparaged President Bush for drawing red lines with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Citizen Trump and President Trump may well not be the same person, and this week the world took notice. The President showed real skills in this week when the game got serious. Consider the balancing act. The irrational despot dictator of North Korea Kim Jong Un shot a ballistic missile off, threatening Japan and the United States with an impending ability to secure a nuclear warhead on a rocket that could reach either nation. Trump had to respond, and sent advanced weaponry to South Korea including B-52’s, having his Secretary of State announce that the US policy of strategic patience regarding such belligerence from North Korea had ended. But was that just typical empty bluster from the US? Assad took the signal to test Trump himself with the horrid chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun with Sarin gas, resulting in torturish deaths of scores of men women and children. On Thursday Trump declared the action a crime against humanity, and responded promptly with a lethal measured fist full of ominous portent, blasting the airfield in Syria where the planes carrying the gas attack had based, while simultaneously meeting with the Chinese President regarding his seriousness confronting North Korea’s threat. A powerful message reverberated throughout the world. This President wasn’t blustering. The North Koreans knew the Syrian bombs were symbolically pointed at them. Assad’ s partner the Russians, realized their hegemony in Syria was at an end. Assad reacted but knew his partners the Russians were going to not be happy with further escalation. The Chinese, who have supported the increasingly deranged Kim dynasty in North Korea for the buffer it achieves against having a successful capitalist democracy being established on their border, took note that Trump would not use empty rhetoric, should the Chinese want to test him in either North Korea or the South China Sea. The Syrians realized the next event would potentially end the dictator’s residual chance to stay in power. The Iranians from a distance realized the next provocative act in the Straights of Hormuz against US ships may not be passively accepted. The allies of the US appreciated the superpower had awakened from its lethargy.

Now that’s Exhibit#1 how you play the serious game.

The media hoped to control narrative to paint Trump as unhinged and somehow responsible for the refugee disaster in Syria, but the clarity of Trump’s approach resonated in profound ways that flummoxed the reflexive liberal media that always assume their superficial view of the world and the negativity regarding the U.S.’s role in it is shared by everybody.

The mess on the foreign stage that has been left to this President is going only get more serious, but at least, the world has been made aware, there’s a new sheriff in town. The sound you are hearing from many parts of the world, is a quiet sigh of relief.