POLITICS – Page 8 – Ramparts of Civilization

January 25, 2015

Can Anybody Here Play this Game?

American Leadership - Boehner Obama Mitchell — American Leadership – Boehner Obama Mitchell

“You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?'”

Casey Stengel

Toward the end of Casey Stengel’s managerial contributions to major league baseball, the manager that had led the New York Yankees to 10 American League pennants and 7 World Series titles, was saddled with the responsibility of attempting to shepherd the expansion New York Metropolitans (Mets) through their inaugural 1962 campaign. The result was a major league record of futility of 120 losses against 40 wins. Thus the quote.

The ‘Old Perfessor’ as Stengel was referred to, didn’t grow up with much personal education, but his vast experience innately told him what worked and didn’t work, and he was able to recognize when he was simply not putting a competitive team on the field. He further stated, “ Been in this game one hundred years, but I see new ways to lose’em I didn’t know existed before.”

What would the Old Perfessor say about America’s current team? Has the United States, for decades the undisputed champion of freedom and personal initiative, progressively become the New York Mets of 1962? Is there anything about the leadership team pictured above that provides one with the sense that real devoted professionals are at work? Stengel said of his first baseman on the Mets, ‘Marvelous’ Marv Thornberry, on the occasion of his birthday, ” We was going to get you a birthday cake, but we figured you would drop it.” What indication do we have that current team, facing so many enormous current challenges, wont simply ‘drop it’?

One might argue that Boehner and Mitchell have been outliers in the horrific record of the last six years, as President Obama had complete control with Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid for two years, and four more years with Reid blocking any contrary corrective actions to the Obama wayward drift for the past four. A tweet graph circulating the internet puts into perspective the domestic performance statistics of the so called professionals on the Democrat team:

How will Boehner and Mitchell respond to a President that is actually proud of such a record? Well, Stengel shifted players on the 1963 and 1964 teams and they did improve, losing ‘only’ 111 and 109 games respectively the next two years. Are Boehner and Mitchell, the Tim Harkness of today? Harkness was the successor to Marvelous Marv Thornberry at first base on the inept 1963 and 1964 Met teams, achieving a lifetime .235 average in his brief major league career. A step up, but not much.

What can we expect of these guys who have been participants in increasing the debt of the nation by 70% in just six years, initiated a pathetically conceptualized government takeover of healthcare of one sixth of the economy, struggled to define any form of a recognizable immigration policy that preserves the integrity of the nation’s borders, not to mention tipping over hard won stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, or identifiable security in Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Ukraine? What can we expect of people who have participated in defense contraction at a time of significant hostile expansion?

Okay – Lets assume its spring training and hope springs eternal for this team. Let’s ignore the bombastic state of the union speech as a lagging, out of date indicator of what we can really expect in the coming season. Maybe these guys will recognize that we can not possibly afford another losing season. We can give them a chance – but I say, the leash is short. If it looks like the same old, same old come the start of the regular season, its time to fire the whole bunch.

January 17, 2015January 17, 2015

Appeaseology

Western Leaders Show 'Solidarity' in response to Paris massacre — Western Leaders Show ‘Solidarity’ in response to Paris massacre

“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air”

Margaret Thatcher

“Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement is not surrender”

Chuck Hagel

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history, is the most important of all the lessons of history”

Aldous Huxley

The stark sequelae of the practice of appeasement leading up to the cataclysm that was the second world war has made the word appeasement a central focus of every consideration to determine how to confront tyranny since. The crystal clear lessons of Prime Minister of Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain’s decision to allow the Nazi gangster regime to devour Czechoslovakia in trade for a temporary etherial peace has remained the example for all time of the legacy of appeasement. Since the events of 1938-39, western democracies have been more sensitive to the risk of the label of appeaser being applied to them, to avoid the stigma of their actions being interpreted as ignorance or weakness. The consequences, however, of ignoring history’s painfully learned lessons are no less dire in today’s modern world than they were in the simple fascism of the 1930s when state driven fascists bluntly developed their capabilities in easily recognizable uniformed, organized military forces.

The basic structural elements of weakness in recognition, preparation and confrontation native to appeasement remain every bit as trenchant in the need for understanding in today’s world as it did in the seeds of destruction planted by inaction prior to world War II. The power of last week’s march in Paris, where a common defense of the principles of free speech was trumpeted by many world leaders (sans America) and millions of citizens was visually stunning, but vacuous. It crumbled the minute the French President Hollande left the synagogue where the Israeli Prime Minister was about to speak, afraid to be associated with any expression of opinion that did not fit the meme of political correctness on the just the subject he had marched to defend earlier. To the tyrannists, no better signal of the hollow nature of the “outrage” could possibly have been sent. They could see that Hollande did not equate terrorism that Israel lives with on a daily basis with that of the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre, though the terror cells responsible for both hold nearly identical credos and objectives.

What are the common foundational elements of ignorance and weakness that form the perverted logic resulting in appeasement, and are we once again heading down the road so presciently defined by Winston Churchill in 1938 with the current islamofascist threat? Ramparts takes a look at the science of Appeaseology.

The Falsehoods of Grievance :

The need to appease on the basis of perceived grievance is a common element put forth by all appeasers. The Nazi gangsters were forgiven their neanderthal tactics on the consideration that they had been aggrieved by the world. The territories they sought were, after all, filled with German speaking and germanic ancestral peoples forced to live under the unnatural flag of oppressive foreigners like the government of Czechoslovakia. Much the same, today’s Palestinians are forced to ceed their natural rights to the land to the occupationist Israelis, the once seamless islamic caliphate to the usurping Christians and Yazhidis of Syria and Iraq, and the arab nation to the vestiges of French and British colonial abuse. If only the rightful heirs to the land would be restored, the need to be belligerent would rapidly dissipate. Modern western European liberal thought particularly remains inextricably linked to this form of Appeaseology.

Engagement and the path of Least Resistance:

The belligerent character of aggressors is a sign of their immaturity in the realm of diplomatic give and take. Belligerents simply want to be respected and taken seriously. By constructively engaging them and showing your willingness to be reasonable and non-obstructive, you will show them the benefits of mature human behavior and the sincerity of your good will. Such behavior builds progressively trust and peaceful compromise. Though the risk of nuclear weaponry in the hands of Iran may seem volatile, their self respect and pride from being able to have the technical capacity to create such weapons and the national will to develop them is understandable, and willingness to deny them such capacity reactionary. They will appreciate the good will and recognize their role in needing to maintain stability. Nazi impulses were similarly seen as a temporary aberration of a civilized nation, that once engaged, would respond with the innate tempered civilized outlook of the great german nation evolved over hundreds of years. Putting up roadblocks to “evolution” would simply delay that behavior from the German nation.

Universal truths are relative and potentially insulting:

The tremendous rallies in the support of free speech last week in France are pledges only to the concept, not the reality of individual rights. Sarcasm or provocative expression anathema to another culture is the ultimate instigation to belligerence and hostile actions, as viewed by the politically correct modern appeasers. President Obama expressed this view best when he stated at the United Nations : “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Of the insult to every other culture that Islamofascism insists upon, subjugation of all other religions, enslavement and prostituting of their young, destruction of their religious symbols, erasing of their cultures, and elimination of their representative voice, Obama is ignorantly incapable of appreciating such realities as counterintuitive to his argument.

The actions of the extreme are a perversion of the culture, not a reflection of it:

The “lone wolfs” and terrorist cells that plague the world are outliers and perversions to the base message of Islam. Whether it is the monsters of Nigeria, Boko Harum, the absolutionists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Wahhabism, or the murderers of the ISIL caliphate, the Jew slayers of Hamas or Hezbollah, or individual “lone wolf” Soldiers for Allah such as the Boston Marathon Bombers or Major Hassan, the appeasement mantra is that this is no way reflects the base tenets of Islam, a supposed peaceful and tolerant religion. No different were the SS Waffen or the Jew beaters of the SA, obvious aberrations of the German nation to the appeasers who wanted to envision a Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Leibniz. Appeasers are capable of ignoring example after example of hostile actions because of the comfort they feel in the illusion of their contrived and fantastical image of their appeased subject.

The fires of extremism burn themselves out with the careful and steady management of appeasement:

Passions are the undirected energies of a rudderless culture, and as the culture is progressively brought into the family of nations, the passions will positively re-direct. Somehow by the West being patient and non-confrontational, willing to absorb a few spasms of violence, the progressive growth achieved by engagement will calm the instability. This irrational assumption that passion is not fed by fundamental belief flies in the face of all credible evidence In both the form of fascism of the late 30s in Germany and Japan, and the modern version in Islamofacism , the fundamental belief is that of a superior people denied its rightful place at the head of all peoples. The belief is not burdened by guilt, ethics, or any form of self controlled behavior. Each event that shows a lack of willingness to confront, reinforces the sense of that superiority. The fires are not burned out, but rather fed with the oxygen of each incitement without retribution.

It was briefly inspiring to see some blowback from the millions of French citizens who risked their anonymity to say “je suis Charlie Hebdo”. The proof however is in action, not intention. The modern governments of the West are filled with leaders who calculate and appease, rather than assess and confront. They are more offended and outraged by fantastical enemies such as climate change and lifestyle victimization then the ominous and fundamental threats to their civilization. We cannot count on our leaders, who are in love with their ability to socially experiment and control behavior, and willing to risk all that we have achieved. We need brave muslim leaders like General Al-Sisi of Egypt to continue to step forward and say no more. We need to have the average citizen of the civilized world stand up and say “Je suis Civilisation, J’aime Civilisation” – and let all know the appetite for appeasement is now at end. To the Islamofascists, our patience is at end. And with it, the unprovoked expansion of their perverted gangster world is at end. Its the end of our world or the end of their world, and we all know to preserve what is good in this world – its their world that must go.

Je suis civilsation — Je suis civilisation

December 20, 2014December 20, 2014

Freedom Loses Again

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand

What is freedom? Why did the United States for over 23o years declare the elevation of one’s individual capacity to determine his destiny without oppressive interference of others the primary definition? What is lost when the essential force for individual freedom sees itself as flawed for not recognizing another country’s capacity to set its on destiny regardless of personal freedom? What does it mean to the inhabitants of this country and those that exist under different definitions?

We are about to find out.

President Obama this past week overturned the settled philosophy of the 8 prior American Presidents regarding relations with the nation of Cuba by releasing three Cuban spies imprisoned for felonies such as murder and acknowledging the process for achieving formal relations with the government of Cuba. Having recognized in 1961 of the true political leanings of the young ‘revolutionary’ Fidel Castro, the United States attempted to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Castro retaliated by his willingness to bring the world to the brink of nuclear destruction in the October 1962 Missile Crisis instigated by young Castro accepting nuclear weapons from Russia aimed at the United States. The successive American governments have applied the concept of containment with variable success to the aggressive tactics of the Castro government, blockading it from formal trade, and encouraging the cuban exile population to work progressively toward the liberation of the island from the Castro regime. The fifty subsequent years have been essentially a cold war between Cuba and the United States, with Cuba progressively trading economic support from the Soviet Union to maintain its marxist totalitarian grip on the Cuba economy and people, and its willingness to act as a military proxy for Soviet communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s in places as diverse as Nicaragua, Granada, and Angola.

From 1959 onward, tens of thousands of Cuban refugees have attempted to escape the totalitarian government, risking life and limb on rickety boats to try and secure a meaningful existence in the United States, the passage to freedom a tempting mere 90 nautical miles away from the American coast. Many have made it. Many more have been drowned, eaten by sharks, sunk by Cuban gunboats, and turned around by American Coast Guard vessels.

What were they escaping? To the liberal Washington elites and Hollywood celebrities they were leaving a utopian paradise of free health care and societal equality, ruled by a leader in Castro charismatic in his affect, perpetually revolutionary in his appearance in military fatigues, and ultimately concerned only for his Cuban people being able to steer their own course without the oppressive domination of a whorish American capitalist caste. The level of cultural coolness and forever youngness was even secured on t-shirts and posters immortalizing the great leader Castro, and his right hand revolutionary, Che Guevara, the enthusiastic judge and executioner for revolutionary firing squads that purified Cuba from dissidents who didn’t recognizing the righteousness of the revolution. It is the personification of this idolatry that propelled the current President to the office of Presidency and the subsequent comfort with the ideals of the winds of change fomented by the Cuban revolutionaries.

If the process of attempting to secure individual freedom for the Cuban people over 53 years of consistent foreign policy through containment proved to achieving no identifiable changes in the Cuban government’s relationship with its people what possible risk is involved in accepting the Cuban revolution at face value, and recognizing it as the legitimate aspiration of an entire people? What could be possibly at stake in similar efforts to restore relationships with similar minded governments currently hostile in position against the United States such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela?

Maybe one could ask men such as Rafael Ibarra Roque, imprisoned since 1994 by the Cuban government without trial for ‘sabotage against the regime” for speaking out against things he had seen as a Cuban soldier and citizen through a nonviolent group he formed called Frank Pais effecting to restore democracy to Cuba. One could ask Human Rights Watch, which has documented a systemic oppression resulting in thousands of executions, arrests without trial, formation of forced labor camps (UMAP’s), suppression of independent media and opposition political movements, government drug cartels, and prostitution. One could ask the Cuban exiles in Miami who labored for decades to restore the most basic of personal freedoms in Cuba for the family members they left behind.

And now it is gone, as the citadel of personal freedom and institutional democracy determines that respectful relationships with such tyrants will serve both countries better over the long run. We are left with the question with each of these over-turnings of our own principles what is lost in ourselves as we deny the fundamental importance of such principles? Will a President who cares more how we look to others than how we act among ourselves lead us to our own loss of freedoms? That depends obviously as to what it means to be free and our willingness to prevent those who would sell such hard earned freedoms for the veneer of acceptance recognizes once gone, they wont be easily if ever brought back.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Ronald Reagan

Perhaps the freedom we lose, will be forever Cuba’s gain. Raul Castro, Cuba’s current leader and brother of Fidel thinks not. He is looking to the economic support of the Cuban Revolution, to cement its gains and prevent any change in the relationships with its people. Perhaps it will change Cuba’s belligerency. Then again, it was just last year that Cuba attempted to gain tactical missiles from North Korea to position against the United States, learning nothing in the intervening 50 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Cuba is not looking for change, but it will be hoping for change in the United States. As probably will Iran and Venezuela. It turns out when it comes to slowly dissolving the light of freedom, the Man of Hope and Change was ultimately the Man of totalitarians’ Hope , and our Change.

November 23, 2014

Oh, To Be King…

Rule by decree is a style of governance allowing quick, unchallenged creation of law by a single person or group, and is used primarily by dictators and absolute monarchs.

The expression is also sometimes used as a pejorative and polemical hyperbole when describing actions of democratic governments that are perceived to unduly bypass parliamentarian or popular scrutiny.

Rule by decree allows the ruler to arbitrarily create law, without approval by a legislative assembly. WIKIPEDIA

The considerations of democratic politics are a messy business. There is an inordinate amount of delay, obfuscation, debate, backroom dealing, uncomfortable compromise, and unintended consequences to the participants that are part of crafting any acceptable law that will hold the respect of the constituents of the law. Oh, to be King and do what is Necessary and Right without having to participate in such caterwauling.

President Obama announced to the nation on Thursday, November 20th, 2014 that he no longer felt bound by the constitutional process for the development of laws to secure immigration reform. As Ed Morrissey put so appropriately, Obama was invoking the “Sick and Tired” clause of the Constitution. In a rambling speech full of contradictions, Obama stated that immigration reform failures lay securely at the hands of the Republican led House of Representatives, who in his mind refused to engage a “bipartisan” bill put forward by the Senate because they refused to participate in a simple up or down vote, instead wanting to potentially craft their own version for eventual conciliation. Putting aside that little ball of nonsense as to how legislation is crafted, the two years in which President Obama led a party with full control of both the House and Senate 2009-2011 and did nothing on the issue speaks to the inanity of his argument. The President, therefore, unable or unwilling to participate in the necessary politics of crafting bills in a democracy, declared he was sick and tired and was unwilling to wait the two months that would be required to engage a new congress.

This is a blog, and not a book, but I could write a book on how wrong this all is. Thankfully as I have never written a book, many infinitely more talented are willing to do it for me on this underlying theme of this individual’s version of being President. But there is something so inherently cynical in an individual who professes to be a constitutional law expert to be so ignorant of the measured reason so carefully tendered into every one of the Constitution’s components. Politics is about persuasion, and it’s extremely telling that this President is more comfortable engaging in discourse with the mullahs of Iran than the Republicans of the United States Senate. He has determined to demand that elections have consequences when the electorate determined to take a chance on him and his vision, than ignore electoral consequences when the electorate repudiates him.

Jonah Goldberg has spent a significant portion of his writing life dissecting this unique facet of the left’s interpretation of democracy and has outdone himself with a biting summary of Obama and his modus operandi. It is of course the darker and more linear goals of socialist dogma that that drives Obama and extra-constitutionalists like him. There is a desire to always bend history toward the outcome that is in their mind most egalitarian, most correct, and it befalls them to nurse the masses that cannot see the way to the better world gently, or ruthlessly, toward the eventual desired outcome. America is an anachronism to such a concept, in that it exists a country with a Constitution, not a group of people living an idea.

How will it all end, in this two years to go with an extra-constitutional executive, who perceives himself as an ultimate arbiter? We can only hope that the father of Communism, Friedrich Engels, was correct when he stated:

The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realization of the measures which that domination would imply …

Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850)

November 9, 2014

Verdict: Turns Out, It was a Wave…

So much for the concern that the 2014 midterm national election would defy a direction or interpretation. Turns out, it was a wave election. The extent of the wave effect continues to be poured over by the various constituencies that thought they understood what was going to happen, and woke up to find that something more remarkable had occurred. After 4 billion dollars of investment to attempt to encourage a smaller and smaller group of uncommitted voters to shift their allegiance to the cult of the committed, it turns out good old voter engagement regarding the issues of the day may have won out one more time. A democracy is after all predicated on the single distinct feeling that things are heading either in the right way, or the wrong way, and this time, the wrong way vibe – won big.

The size and depth of the wave is what is most impressive. The election turned out not to be a battle of national organizations for a few high profile elections, but instead, a deep and philosophical sea change. The U.S. Senate will see at minimum a shift of 8 democrat seats, from a deficit of 45 Republicans in the minority caucus to 53, and potentially 54 by December’s run off in Louisiana. The U.S. House of Representatives will see the biggest Republican majority since before the Great Depression. Republicans will hold 31 of the 50 governorships, including securing Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois, the deepest of blue states now led by boys in Red. Most profoundly speaking to the depth of the wave, of the 98 state legislature bodies, 67, more than two-thirds, are in the hands of Republicans. It appears amazingly, America’s team is the Republican Party. For the philosophy of conservatism that was felt by demographics to be forever dead after 2008, and whose own party leaders performed an “autopsy” after the 2012 election, it appears the eulogy may have been a little premature. The majority party electorally is the Republican Party.

The President of the United States, leader of the world’s leading democracy, when asked in the day after election press conference as to his interpretation of the voter’s will, expressed that his job was to be a spokesman for the two-thirds of Americans who felt it wasn’t worth their time to vote. As to the President being a supposed constitutional scholar, that interpretation by the President leaves me a little cold. But then, maybe his grades in Constitutional Law weren’t that great, though of course we will probably never know. His mission, as he saw it in the wake of the biggest wave of policy rejection in years, was to circle the wagons, and forge ahead with his vision of “immigration reform” and “climate change”.

There’s a change in climate all right, but I don’t think we will see its effect focused on the Weather Channel.

Since the President and the pundits have their view of what happened, I think it only right that Ramparts take a measured look and provide its own spin. The longevity of this particular wave is yet to be determined, but some recognizable themes seem to be fundamental contributors.

Special Interest Themes Don’t Resonate in Down Economic Times: for some time and particularly since 2008, the focus of the democrat party’s electoral philosophy has been identifying victims and villains, and implying the republican party existed to make war with them. We had the War on Women, War on Unions, War on Blacks, War on Gays and War on Hispanics to the extent that one would assume that America existed only as prison of suppression and not a land of opportunity. In 2008 and 2012, the tactics seemed to take hold with what was referred to as the low information voter, where their sense of personal injustice dominated any rationalization of their true opportunity in society. In the 2014 election, however, the effects of 6 years of neglect of the forces that actually determine robust economic performance, overruled any sense that unseen prejudices held people down. Texans did not buy Wendy Davis’s supposition that the lack of universal abortion rights was the major suppressing factor in woman succeeding in the marketplace. The dark hand of voter suppression of minorities did not seem to effect South Carolinians from determining Tim Scott’s conservative economic plans were more important than the color of his skin. The danger to the undocumented alien of a stiffer border security did not seem to sway a dramatic shift of Texas hispanic voters into the republican column. Fundamentally, regardless of personal interpretations as to perceived victimhood, it remains that the overriding force that determines elections is the Clintonian motto,”It’s the Economy , Stupid”. Voters saw the lack of job growth, the massive increase in the underemployed, the instability of the nation’s fiscal health, and the generational expansion of reduced opportunity, and decided, not as women, minorities, gays, or millennials, but as Americans, to vote their pocketbooks and change the direction of the nation.

The Party of Government Doesn’t Know How to Govern: 2014 is the year that it began to dawn on Americans that the party that declared that only though government can equality, security, and opportunity be secured for all on a level playing field, had no idea how to make that happen. The realization that incompetence was the expression of hope and change, made voters feel hopeless, and opt for change. Voters saw a party that declared the time was right for government supervised management of everybody’s health, only to find that three years and two billion dollars wasn’t enough even to get a website to work. Voters look around and saw that the states and cities that flexibly addressed their budgetary and health issues in rough times were run by republican governors, mayors, and councils, and those burdened by disastrous strangleholds of the dual killers of government unions and the inbred party hacks that underwrote them run by democrats, and decided the future resided progressively with siding with mature adult management. Thus the tsunami of state governor and legislature outcomes. The battering of mounds of evidence of what government should do well, and couldn’t, defense of the borders, impartial collection of taxes, care for its veterans, even good old public health organization in the face of a possible pandemic, left the voters who wanted to believe in the more government is better government meme, doubting their own personal safety and security. Government that can not even run itself can not run others, and the electorate seemed to recognize it was time to clean house.

The Incredible Shrinking President: Despite Tip O’Neill’s oft remarked statement that legislative elections are “local,” mid term elections are never really independent of the effect of the President. The fact that the Presidency is not specifically up for election certainly does effect how many come out to vote, but nevertheless bends the local nature of the elections based on the right way wrong way vibe. This President has been immersed in an avalanche of wrong way vibe. When times were better internationally and when this President was seen as a confident savant that would glide above partisanship to a better future, the electorate saw his vagaries and loose work habits as ‘above the fray’. The progressive disaster that is the international position of the United States in a progressively dangerous world of instability has not reflected well on this veneer, and the electorate began to realize belatedly that this ’emperor’ has no clothes. The cocky assuredness that President Obama tries to project that he is right above all other interpretations has collapsed policy in Israel, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Russia, and China and left his allies wondering if they can count on a single thing he says. All the redlines and resets in the world don’t protect you when the world’s baddies sense weakness and a leadership void, and they are beginning to think they are circling a carcass of a once great carnivore. Americans since the election of Theodore Roosevelt have not been used to a world that thinks America can be had, and that made this electorate very uneasy. This election proved to be, above all, a monster repudiation of this President, and this imperial presidential model.

What’s In It For Me?: Meism is the culture of our times. Ask the typical college student about the concept of checks and balances in the Constitution, the role of fiscal stability in preserving the marketplace, or role of the Bill of Rights in securing this nation’s prosperity, and you will likely get a blank stare. The story is that the modern individual is most concerned about their social circle, as defined by Facebook and Twitter and the Cloud. There has been a lack of connectivity to role one’s own responsible behavior and performance plays in the achievement of success in life. This certainly wasn’t born in the current generation. This nation had the Lost Generation, the Beat Generation, the Turn On and Tune Out Generation among others, all of which were assumed to have forgotten the essential responsibility of each generation to leave the world better than they found it. Yet, the brilliant structure of the American Experiment put forth by the founders left tools in place to recognize and adjust wayward behavior , even belatedly. Of particular note, the voter gap in voters 18-29 shifted perceptively against the democrat monolith, narrowing substantially. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, though to be a pariah among the state’s youth, lost the 18-29 age group by only 52-48, after previous elections resulted in 10 and 12 point margins. There may be faint recognition that degrees in victimhood studies attained at confiscatory tuition rates are unlikely to secure personal happiness or achievement in an increasingly competitive world. Young people may be starting to realize that their lack of attention will soon immerse them as owners of a country with unsolvable debt and irretrievable loss of individual freedom. When faced with such challenge, worrying obsessively about issues such as a global warming that simply refuses to happen is perhaps becoming a canard they would rather do without.

Minorities are a Monolith(?): Regardless of any malfeasance, the Democrat Party has always assumed it could count on the monolith of minority voting to put it over the top in elections. Secure in this assumption was the desire to drive American diversity increasingly toward a white minority, thereby securing a permanent Democrat majority. This assumption has always required maintenance of the myth that the American Experiment and its philosophical underpinning, the American Dream, was not meant for minorities, and does not appeal to them. The evidence has been primarily the urban black voter, that though faced with 50 years of deteriorating inner cities, continued to vote monolithically for democrat dominated governance, and in cities like Detroit, minority democrat governance, despite catastrophically failing infrastructure and opportunity. Republicans as pariahs identified by these urban black leaders as “racist” and “overseers” could not be trusted to improve things even in the obvious case of voting for continuous decline.

These series of assumptions may not be forever. An increasing number of minority candidates are finding success and energy resides in confronting the monolith. 2014 brought visible cracks in the wall. African American populations, though increasing their participation in 2014 to 12% of the participating electorate, increased their vote diversity to 10% republican from 6% in 2012. Tim Scott, a black conservative republican won his US Senate election by almost 25 points, destroying his black opponent, in one of the first elections for US Senate between two African Americans. Mia Love of Utah became the first female African American Republican in the US House of Representatives. The assumption that the Hispanics of Texas are in lock step with open borders promoted by their national spokespeople and would eventually turn Texas blue, was answered with the election of a black republican advocating border security in Texas’s largest border county which is majority hispanic. Asian Americans, traditionally democratic, voted in two Korean American Republican house members in California, and nation wide narrowed the gap between democrat and republican support to less than ten percent. Indigenous American Indians, through the cruelties of history forced into the position often as wards of the state, voted republican 52 to 43% nationally as progressively they look to control their own destiny.

And all of these various threads led to a wave, and Republican victory. But what of the victorious Republican Party, that so often in a position of power fails to be the party its voters assumed they were voting for? Is this just another example of substituting one statist impulse for another? Frankly, I suspect this is likely the last election in the two party mode, if neither party learns from this election and governs as true representatives of their electorate. The President states he hears the calling of the nation that doesn’t express itself democratically, and the Republicans are embarrassed by their constituents fervor for change. The great likelihood of course is that neither the President or the Congress will listen to each other. Well, nothing can be done about this President. Hopefully though the newly elected Congress will look to listen to the electorate that got them there and accomplish the things that more and more Americans are expressing what they want. Good rational governance. Outcomes based investment in our future. Securing the American Experiment against lethargy and corrosion so that it continues to be a beacon for all of us.

Is that too much to ask?

October 26, 2014

A Wave versus a Ripple

The United States nationally participates every two years in perpetual rebirth as defined by the founding fathers. The securing of a representative legislature for governance occupies the first article of the Constitution, laid out in means by which renewal and stability can co-exist. The house of representatives allied most closely to local expressions is positioned to reflect the feelings of the electorate as to their sense of representation and influence over the nation’s direction. The election of senators, adjusted by amendment to the constitution remains positioned at six years in the post to be more immune to the day to day emotional shifts of the electorate. As the senate elections are however staggered such that a number of senators are nationally exposed to assessment at every election, there remains the potential that if the local district ,the statewide electorate, and the national zen are emotionally confluent in the interpretation of the country’s direction, a wave election is possible.

Wave elections are not necessarily about substantial increases in a party’s representation in Congress. They speak more toward a fundamental shift in the electorate’s sense of the country needing to change direction, and the effects typically extend beyond the current election and may influence several election cycles. Maybe no sea change in electoral philosophy expressed through a wave election will fundamentally top the epic wave of the 1930-32 elections. For almost 70 years since the Civil War, the country had maintained a confident sense of destiny through self actualization and growth that resisted intermittent economic downturns and for the majority of elections left a Republican bias in place. In the depths of the depression, however, the country demanded a hard tack to the left that has influenced the nation’s course ever since. The 1930 Congress was composed of a house of 267 republicans and 163 democrats, a senate of 56 republicans 39 democrats and a republican President. Just two years later, the electorate converted the house to 313 democrats and 117 republicans, the senate to 59 democrats and 36 republicans, and the Presidency to FDR. This dramatic change was not simply a “throw the bums out” reflex. It reflected the country’s conversion from a self reliant, libertarian concept of life to a community driven, safety net philosophy that has never left. With minor ebbs and flows, the Democrat wave secured the House of Representatives for the next 31 of 33 elections, the Senate for the next 25 of 27 elections, and the Presidency for the next 7-9 elections.

Now that’s a wave.

With the increasing influence of money and the immediacy of social media, it seems that the ability for the country to digest the effectiveness of governance and the re-orientation of priorities has been fundamentally effected. Waves have steadily turned to ripples as the effects of the wave are often cut off by the manipulative influences of media driven by money. With billions now spent on elections, most of it to the prosperity of those that deliver the message, there is an industry developing to convert elections into mini-waves, increasing the hostility and inaccuracy of the discourse, and guaranteeing the progressive expenditure of money to adjust. The waves have progressively shortened almost to the extent of each election cycle, driven by the media’s need to create conflict, and deflect the momentum of a philosophic governmental change. The shorter attention spans of the electorate, driven by the more emotional immediacy of the message, contributes to this, and plays into the hands of those who wish to control the country’s direction.

A pattern of back and forth waves, with more radical peaks and troughs, has settled in. The “Reagan Revolution” flowed for a decade, until the 1992 election re-oriented the country back towards collective economic security with the end of the Cold War and the election of Clinton. Almost immediately, the Clinton in your face style with the push toward universal healthcare, led to pushback, with the unexpected Republican takeover of Congress with republican “wave” of 64 seats in 1994, leading to the ultimate politician Clinton shifting to the right, abandoning his wife’s healthcare initiative, cooperating with welfare reform and declaring “the era of big government is over”. Not so fast. The overreach of the congress with the Clinton impeachment drove a schizophrenic election of 2000 that hung on a couple ballot chads, and within two years led to a republican President driving a massive governmental infusion into healthcare with the formation of Medicare Part D, covering for the first time prescriptions. The cataclysm of 9/11 briefly aligned the country’s vision on the international stage, only to lead to the democrat wave of 2006, which wrenched a sharp escalation in the concept of debt investment and government influence, resulting in the election of the most liberal President in history, comfortable with doubling the size the nation’s debt accumulated in over 230 years, in just five, with the enthusiastic support of the democrat majority in congress. This budget busting philosophy and a back room push of government take over of healthcare, the liberal uberweapon to control populations, led to the Republican “wave” of 2010, in which the president himself declared his party to have absorbed a “shellacking”.

The apparent”shellacking” delivered by the electorate in 2010 this time, however, led to no perceptive changes in governance, as the presence of enormous money and the shorter attention spans was maximized by the president in collapsing the wave with his re-election of 2012. The power of the election to influence government policy proved progressively powerless against the use of media to propagate distortions and out and out lies through the power of social media. “If you want to keep your health insurance, you will keep it. Period”. ” The massive stimulus plan of 2009-2010, will create hundreds of thousands of “shovel ready jobs”. The IRS political motivated suppression of free speech to reduce influence of conservative discourse in elections contained “not a smidgen of corruption.” The Benghazi terrorist attack was a “response to a Youtube video.” One could go on and on and on.

The 2012 election secured the undoing of the 2010 election. What should we therefore make of 2014? The polls suggest the country is again deliberating on a potentially massive “wave” response to the lack of influence of the 2010 election to change anything. History suggests that the result will have less influence on the government’s tactics than one would suppose. The President already is describing a massive extra-legislative process to change the country’s demographics through the executive edicts to achieve immigration “reform”, feeling himself immune to both election results and potential extra-constitutional actions. Have we reached a point where the democratic process has lost its capacity to influence government, that responds instead to the flow of money and the real time manipulation of the social media emotions through propagandistic distortion?

Like all defenders of the ramparts of civilized society, I remain wistful about the potential ability of a democracy to stop internal decay, restore fiscal sanity, secure its borders and principles of citizenship, defend against external enemies, and providentially commit to its future. A 2014 “wave” to restrain the collapse of these ideals so influencing our current administration is the least we can hope for. Recent history is not comforting.

On November 4th, outcome aside, it behooves us as defenders of the Ramparts to attend the barricades and vote for change one more time, and fight, fight against the dying the light.

Maybe this time, we can hold the potential of renewal beyond the satisfaction of winning an election night.

September 28, 2014

The Rule of Law

Attorney General Eric Holder - gettyimages — Attorney General Eric Holder – gettyimages

“No man is above the law, and no man is below it ; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor.” Theodore Roosevelt 1903

” I, Eric Holder, do solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” Oath taken by Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States February 3rd, 2009

On Thursday of this past week, President Obama accepted the resignation of Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States. So ended the controversial 6 year term of the country’s chief law enforcement officer, who spent as much time ignoring the country’s fundamental structure of law as enforcing it. To those who see activism as the highest calling, he is seen as a hero; to those who would seek equal justice under the law and respect for its unprejudiced adjudication, he is an abomination. What Eric Holder is not, is insignificant. Holder managed to infuse political activism so intensely into the Department of Justice that it may prove impossible to ever return it to its calling of enforcing the law that has been given it. The rule of law, and the protection it provides a free society, may be irreparably harmed.

What is the rule of law that has previously been considered the mandate of a free people? The definition has certainly been deliberated, and there is no single answer. The concept of law obviously requires a standard people find fundamentally just to their lives. Is a law for instance that serves to enforce servitude, physical pain, or premeditated inequity a law that deserves enforcement without pause? The laws of sharia, Krystalnacht, Stalinist Russia, and Jim Crow America come to mind. Martin Luther King, speaking of the logic behind civil disobedience, suggested in a free society, there is often the need to define the equity of a law by the willful breaking of it:

” I submit that an individual that breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” Martin Luther King 1963

The American Bar Association through its World Justice Project attempted to secure a universal meaning to the concept of rule of law that could merge the concept globally across societies:

1) A system of self government in which all persons, including the government, are accountable under the law

2) A system based on fair, publicized, broadly understood and stable laws

3) A fair, robust, and accessible legal process in which rights and responsibilities based in law are equally enforced.

4) Diverse, competent, and independent lawyers and judges

The overriding message is that the rule of law is not so much the law itself but its accountability and its equality of enforcement. Throughout Holder’s tenure as Attorney General, he proceeded to abrogate these two tenets that regardless of his personal views, he had a responsibility to uphold. The selective prejudicial enforcement or premeditated neglect of laws rather than the hard work of convincing a people of their apparent inequity and improving them was part of the innate hubris of this Attorney General. There were several profoundly disturbing events in his tenure that stand out in sharp contrast. Particularly remarkable was the dominance of race outrage as an alternative to the concept of civil rights. The civil right of every individual regardless of race, the centerpiece of assurance for the elimination of racial discrimination, was converted time and time again to perceived racial abuse, one directional toward alleged white on black injustice. The elevation of the Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, Missouri incidents by the Department of justice threatened to intimidate the equal protection under the law for all concerned, making a mockery of the concept of true civil rights. While propagandizing the idea of white on black violence, Holder ignored multiple other minority group injustices, the most profound of which was black on black violence, devastating community after community with little attention or concern.

The laws of immigration, designed to protect the country’s borders, and secure the concept of citizenship regardless of race, were habitually ignored by Holder and the administration, turning the process of achieving citizenship by accepting and respecting a nation’s laws, into somehow a racial injustice to those who would ignore the requirements of citizenship.

Holder became the first Attorney General in the history of the country to be found in contempt of congress, for obfuscating in the process of examination of the Fast and Furious scandal. The Fast and Furious program, in which the government deliberately ignored its own laws regarding the sale of certain armaments, participating in gun trafficking with criminals , in an effort to create a perceived environment of law breaking that would allow increased restrictions on the second amendment. The result was the deaths of untold numbers of Mexicans and several Americans for which the government remains, protected by Holder, unaccountable.

Holder continued the pattern of selective civil rights enforcement, with his department involved in the incredibly questionable investigation of reporter’s personal information without cause in an effort to identify the sources of “leaks” in the administration, and has put no effort in the policing of the administration’s own IRS that sought to use its powers to inhibit individuals participating in free speech the administration saw as counter to their aims.

Civil rights activism delivered with a point of view is of course the inherent right of every citizen but the adjudication of every citizen’s civil rights is the calling of a Department that calls itself Justice. For Eric Holder to have accepted the position with no intention of equally enforcing the laws that assure rights of all citizens while elevating beyond law the perceived injustices of a few, is a person to whom civil rights have no meaning. This country, that through the strength of its constitution and bill of rights achieved hard fought victories for the rights of all men, was diminished by his time in government. The damage done is incalculable to the real mission of equality and equal opportunity for all.

In a free society, justice blind to prejudice, firm to the law of equal accountability of the meek and the powerful, is the link that secures the future of a civilization. Those of us who consider this a foundational value, won’t miss Eric Holder.

September 7, 2014

Scotland Contemplates Cracking the Union Jack

In 1707, with the passage of the Acts of Union, the parliaments of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland determined to secure a Parliament of Great Britain forming a political union so successful that, at its height, presided over an empire that encompassed nearly 20% of the people and a quarter of the land mass of the globe. On September 18th, 2014, the people of Scotland will vote in a referendum that seeks to dissolve that union. For more than three hundred years the contributions of Scotsman and Englishmen to the enormous influence the presence of a Great Britain has meant to the world as a military, political, cultural and democratic force has been inestimable. What looked like a quixotic quest for separateness by a smallish force of malcontents just a few months ago however has suddenly become a very real potential outcome of the referendum. A yes vote could mean some unalterable changes for centuries of communal considerations between kingdoms of the island of Albion and the kickstart of a number of similar actions around the world.

The Union Jack, the flag of Great Britain combines the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in an overlapped blend of the Crosses of St. George, St Andrew, and St Patrick. If the September 18th referendum separates Scotland, the blue background and oblique white cross of St Andrew will wash out of the flag and Great Britain will be considerably less – great.

Certainly the careful blending of the crosses on the flag has tended to obscure a fairly rocky history of relations between the inhabitants of the islands off the continent of Europe. In particular, the Picts of the northern part of the island known as Albion, with genetics, language and culture considerably different from their southern neighbors, developed a necessary defensive posture for nearly a thousand years to resist the encroachment of a progressively more aggressive south. First, the border of the northern reaches of the Roman Empire pushed against the native Caledonians and Pict tribes resulting in hostilities and the establishment of Hadrian’s wall as the boundary between civilizations. Later it was the encroachment of raiding parties of Saxons and Vikings, the militaristic push of the powerful Normans, and eventually the hostility of the English Kings, that belied any sense of shared destiny. But the island known as Albion also had at its core the antethical force of unique coalescing visions on the island such as the concepts of property, individual freedom, and the capacity of individual merit and industry. This led to the flowering of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and progressively the sharing of a unique blend of character to change world history.

The current forces at work are not necessarily the hostility of cultural dissonance, as much as it is the political schisms that have wreaked havoc with the natural commonalities that have held the island together for so long. Scotland leans toward a more socialist construct, heavily supportive of public burdens for free health and education more in tune with the anti-democratic thrust of the bureaucrats in Belgium fronting the European Union. They object to the growing movement in England to protect the island against European mandates for immigration and trade, its love affair with the pound sterling, and the english tendency to see foreign policy more in line with their American cousins then modern Europe. They see their capacity to affect law suppressed by the higher representation of the English in parliament, and the natural resources abundant in the north sea oil fields off their coast as insufficiently benefiting them. They look to an independent Scotland as righting a mistake made when the Scottish King James was usurped on the throne by the outlander William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, securing the primacy of English Protestantism at the cost of Scottish Catholics in the combined kingdom.

The forces attempting to hold the United Kingdom together have missed badly on gauging the mood of the Scottish populous. It has been assumed that the economic pain of separation would be too great for Scotlanders to be willing to take the risk of a yes vote, but the emotions are overwhelming any measured consideration of the risk. As has happened in America, the realities of economics are failing to sway the emotions of ‘hope and change’, and the price to be paid seems somehow avoidable. Yet realities are just that-realities- and the effects of a separation are considered to be dire for Scotland.

What Scottish independence says for the rest of Great Britain and the world may be as great. The Quebec province in Canada, the Catalonians in Spain, the old city states of northern Italy, the Walloons of Belgium, and others will be watching closely and taking measure. Even within England, the massive effect on political roles of the previously dominant Labour and Tory parties would be thrown asunder and likely make the upstart UKIP party the dominant force, upending hundreds of years of relative political tradition and definition.

The United States, which fought a war to secure the supremacy of the Constitution as the common force binding a diverse people, has progressively fallen away from democratic process to adjudicate differences, with the federal government taking more dominant roles every day in transcending the legislation process and regulating livelihood and personhood.

Wiiliam Wallace - Scottish Hero — Wiiliam Wallace – Scottish Hero

There is a significant Scot Irish genetics that runs through the founding documents of this country. One wonders if a William Wallace type is out there to stir a call to question as to whether the United States suffers from the same sclerosis of national leadership that has befallen its United Kingdom cousin.

It is after all, in a time like this devoid of leaders that drives the people to determine, more and more, to lead themselves.

August 29, 2014August 30, 2014

Men With Masks

Pro Russian Militia in Eastern Ukraine -kyivpost.com

In 1989, there was an interesting moment for those who were in the map business. Almost overnight, it seemed almost as if the entire Eurasian continent would require a reorganization and renaming. For those at Rand McNally , the midnight lamps were burning as new countries popped up daily as free standing entities – Estonia and Moldova; Montenegro and Georgia; Slovenia and Slovakia; Armenia and Azerbaijan; Russia and the Ukraine. An enormous re-ordering of the world occurred peaceably as the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union stood down to allow it to happen without major bloodshed. A new world order was declared – a world in which the principles of free choice, self determination, peaceful cohesion and global interconnectiveness would overwhelm tired old tribalism and cultural malevolence.

Well, the new world order did not last long, and it may be time to get those map makers busy again.

There’s a new technique being used to subvert international order and territorial integrity and it basically requires producing a map and finding men with masks to enforce it.

Charles Kupchan, former Professor at Georgetown and current Senior White House Director of European Relations for the Obama Administration, and one of the mentors for the President’s shall we say interesting interpretation of history, has defined this new technique as ‘hybrid warfare’ :

“Because I think one of the things that we’ve learned from the situation in Ukraine is that oftentimes in this new world that we live in, NATO or individual countries may be facing not armored columns coming across their border, which you can usually see in advance, but guys coming across in masks, you don’t know who they are — what we could call hybrid warfare, or asymmetric warfare. And that requires a very different kind of military response than NATO has traditionally been focused on.”

Charles Kupchan is the author of the book “No One’s World: the West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn” in which he sees the West – meaning the US, Europe and Japan – in a position of irreversible decline and the need to deal with a world where no one will be ‘in charge’. This administration is well on its way to making Dr. Kupchan’s vision a reality.

These men in masks seem to have a proclivity to ignore international borders, and part of their technique is to suggest the border has no validity. You do that by getting a map the reorders the border – thus the sudden existence of Novorossiya (or New Russia) – a country President Putin is referring to as spontaneously existing, and therefore the need for a map:

We seen this pattern in the recent past in another conflict: Masked Men

And a Map of the Caliphate they assume will be theirs:

So what’s with the masks? The masks are a device to allow the anonymity of not just the warriors but their nation sponsors. These so called hybrid warriors as Kupchan would have us believe spontaneously form have no desire to be recognized for what they are – shock troops for the countries that want to see maps changed in their favor. Masked men who hide their nationality and their identity allow free transition between borders and the ability for countries to provide them with sophisticated weaponry and support. These shock troops allow the Irans, Qatars, Saudi Arabias, and Russias of the world to engage in proxy war that otherwise would position them as old fashioned pariahs and might even engage an old fashioned response from the part of the world that is self absorbed in self induced decline.

The United Nations Charter of which of the above aforementioned are member states, pledges in Chapter I Article 2 of the United Nations Charter:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

That charter of course doesn’t matter if you can get the map to say a new territorial reality is present, and you have masked men to enforce it.

This is a very dangerous game that countries like Russia are playing, and it is awakening people from the political spectrum one would think would be the last to respond. The President of the United States however is still formulating a strategy that will permit the progressive decline of the West without him being perceived as directly responsible for its destruction. That’s a balancing act we have not seen him showing the high wire skills necessary to pull off. Then again, the United States has a border, a southern border, that the administration is loathe to enforce territorial integrity over. It won’t be long before we see our own masked men. And they’ll probably be carrying a map:

August 9, 2014August 16, 2014

Barbarians at the Gates

ISIS deals with prisoner of war issues in Iraq - AFP Photo — ISIS deals with prisoner of war issues in Iraq – AFP Photo

To comprehend events, one must be willing to descend into the faint mists of time and history to possibly understand the here and now. The boundaries that define the modern country of Iraq are artificial drawings on a map that simplify a maelstrom of historical peoples, events, and passions that are the basest contributors to the whole known human story. The fertile crescent of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has been the birthplace of great empires and religions, and perhaps the most contested real estate on the planet. At the northern edge is noted to be the birthplace of man as a creature of record. Some three thousand years before Christ the tribes of the region founded the worlds first recognized governmental structure, the Semitic kingdom of Semites and Sumerians known as Akkadia, soon divided into Assyria and Babylonia. It is said that the Assyrian Semite Abraham traveled out of Assyria around 1800 BC to eventually become the father to the Hebrew peoples. By the tenth century BC, Assyria may have comprised the largest empire in then known world and provided the legacy of one of the great core language structures, Aramaic, influencing people from northeast Africa to central Asia. The Assyrian people became important contributors to the expansionist Greek empire culture and subsequently were influenced to assume many of the philosophic constants of the Greeks, in many cases becoming early Christians as did their Greek counterparts in the first through third centuries AD.

With the arab Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia in the seventh century, the centuries long process of this ancient culture having to subordinate and assimilate while trying to preserve its identity began. Through Islamic pogroms and Mongol invasions, Ottoman overseers, British protectorates and Baathist dictators, the identity of the ancient Assyrian culture managed to survive.

Until now.

The city of Bakhdida, also known as Qaraqosh, is the home of the Assyrian Christian population of Iraq and the gateway to Kurdistan. With a population of 50,000, it represents one of the last congregations of Christian influence in Mesopotamia and its existence as such is an anathema to a virulent strain of Islamic puritans known as ISIS. On friday, August 8th, Bakhdida became the latest city to be overrun by the ISIS horde and the consequences to an entire people who profess a different fate are dire. With tens of thousands of Christians fleeing the genocidal sickness that is the ISIS modus operandi, President Obama finally determined to take action in some form to address his administration’s developing Rwanda event. It was not the fate of the Christians or their Kurdish or Shia muslim brethren that stirred him so much as the plight of the Yazidis, a small sect connected to the ancient Zoroastrian faith of monotheism that precedes Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. ISIS forces have forced them into the mountains with the intent of starving them to death, or killing them in place, whatever opportunity presents. For the ISIS adherents, this is the holy work that should have been done centuries ago.

The western world has always struggled to get too upset about genocidal outrages against Jews and Yazidis, but Christians? That used to be another matter. There is no Richard the Lionheart to lead a Crusade, likely not even a George Bush the Earnest. The post-Christian western world does not connect well with the outrages committed by Islamic extremists, whether it is the lunatic fringe Boko Haram in Nigeria slaughtering entire villages of Christians and trafficking in human slavery, or ISIS with its religious cleansing fury in Iraq. Christian outrage and responding to attacks is so Seventeenth century.

But ISIS is working in the seventh century and doesn’t give a flip to modern mores. Having stunned most of Iraq, conquering oil fields and water supplies, drowning in money from bank robberies and sympathetic fat cat Wahabiast poseurs from the Arabian peninsula, and in possession of millions of dollars of sophisticated weapons abandoned by the Potemkin Village Iraqi national army as it fled, ISIS is a Tamerlane disciple of the twenty-first century, with the will to kill who doesn’t submit. The map shows an effective reality on the ground that suggests they are succeeding in their vision:

ISIS in Mesopotamia - CNN maps — ISIS in Mesopotamia – CNN maps

So the President of the United States finally acted. Not to save Christians or Iraqis. That would have required previous strategic thinkings and actions. No, the action is to prevent current genocide against the Yazidis, certainly deserving, but no more deserving than any of the other hundreds of thousands already crushed under the foot of the marauding 7th century jihadists. President Obama thinks he can pick and choose his genocides he determines to intervene upon. I suspect ISIS and Boko Haram will give him plenty of choices from which to choose.

What is there to do in this inevitable world calamity approaching? It is frankly too late to recognize what would have been the easiest solution in Iraq. President Obama’s political trump card was the withdrawal from Iraq no matter what the consequences, when twenty-thousand in country troops would have likely prevented this travesty. Imagine you are the warden of a prison filled with 500 dangerous characters and innocents alike. With just 20 guards providing organized control, you can maintain the security of the prison and keep the most dangerous inmates from killing you, or each other. The previous warden gave you after much effort a stable place, with effective control. But you are a much smarter warden, who believes the previous warden was a doofus, and should not have been allowed to have made warden decisions in the first place that did not sit with your world gestalt. You therefore instead announce you are pulling all the guards, opening all the prison cell doors, and putting the kitchen staff in charge of negotiating with the prisoners. Its pretty easy to predict what will happen, unless apparently you are President Obama. Now, if you want to contain the violence, restore the security, and protect the innocent, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than twenty guards to achieve a renewed stability and civility. And a lot of people are going to pay a very grave penalty for your naiveté.

What to do with a modern world that would like to believe we have grown beyond the barbarians that defined our human past-the Tamerlanes, Attilas, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers – that would create a single vision of humanity on the slaughter of nonbelievers? The Assyrians of Bakhdida would like to know soon, and hope its more than a few food packages and pinpricks. But if the western world cannot decide this is serious business, don’t worry. We may soon get first hand knowledge of what the Assyrians of Bakhdida are up against, at a location much closer to home.