More beautiful, beautiful insight from VDH:

The Origins of Obamism

I do not think it will be easy to delay Obamism. It is not just that both houses of Congress are under liberal leadership with ample majorities, with a White House and captive media egging them on. The problem is that now the entire engine of the federal government is harnessed in the most unapologetic way to pushing through a far left agenda. There is no shame, no hesitancy in using the full powers of the state.

How does that work out? Without qualification (remember we are in a new age of transparency and ethical reform) votes are bought with hundred-million-dollar earmarks; the attorney general predicates judicial action on the political ramifications of indicting or not indicting; federal bureaucracies (watch the EPA if cap and trade stalls) are devoted to the new Caesar rather than the letter of the law.

Such a strange scenario we have found ourselves in—a clear majority of Americans is opposed to almost everything Obama has to offer; congressional representatives know they are acting against the will of the people, but know too that they are offered all sorts of borrowed money for their districts to compensate for their unpopular actions. And a charismatic commander in chief believes that he can charm even the angriest of critics, and that anything he promises (Iran’s deadlines, closing of Guantanamo, new transparency, no more lobbyists, etc) means zilch and can be contextualized by another “let me be perfectly clear” speech spiced with a couple of the usual “it would have been impossible for someone as unlikely as me to have become President just (fill in the blanks) years ago”

No, I would not count Obama out. So what drives his agenda? What are its origins?

Here are the three most prominent catalysts.

Equality of Result

What Barack Obama advocates is as old as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, the agenda of the classical dêmos and Roman turba.

It is why the French Revolution emphasized égalité and fraternité, while the Founding Fathers instead championed the freedom of the individual from the despotism of the state. In short, equality of result doctrine ignores the role of markets, of skills, of tragedy itself that renders some of us ill, others in perfect health, some born gifted, others less so, some evil by nature, others good, and instead promises that the state can even us all out through its power of material redistribution. Give us all the same amount of money and perks at the end of the day, and then utopia reigns under the benevolent watch of Ivy-League professors and organizers.

It is a given that what we make is not our own, but predicated on the liberality of society. Thus, for those who were too greedy, too conniving, or even too lucky, the state must step in to ensure that we end up the same.

In its most benign form, we know this as progressivism or communitarianism, a big government, high tax philosophy that co-exists within democracy. Its more pernicious strains are socialist, in which the state ensures, through bureaucratic fiat and a labyrinth of laws that curb free expression, that redistribution is institutionalized. And the virulent form (thankfully with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China not so global-threatening any more) is, of course, a murderous communism, in which any means necessary are justified to ensure the desire ends and the rule of anointed apparat. Remember, history’s greatest killers (Stalin and Mao) do it all “for the people.”

Multiculturalism

But there is another element to Barack Obama besides progressive statism. A number of contemporary –isms and –ologies (multiculturalism, moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, post-modernism) also help to explain Obamism, especially in cultural terms. Our universities subscribe to race/class/gender theory of exploitation, in which much of the unhappiness of today’s women, of today’s nonwhite, and of today’s poor originates with the privileges of the white Christian Western male that are predicated on oppression.

It works like this: The ghetto resident, the denizen of the barrio, the abandoned and divorced waitress with three young children, can all chart their poverty and unhappiness not to accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality or drug use, or simple tragedy, but rather exclusively to a system that is rigged to ensure oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender—often insidious and unfathomable except to the sensitive and gifted academic or community organizer.

So Obama combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field (rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must recompensate those by fiat on the basis on their race or class or gender. Remember all that, and everything from the Professor Gates incident, to the dutiful attendance at the foot of Rev. Wright to Van Jones become logical rather than aberrant. Michelle Obama could make $300,000 and she will always be more a victim than the Appalachian coal miner who earns $30,000, by virtue of her race and gender.

The Chicago Way

A third and final ingredient to Obamism is the Chicago way. Here we see an interesting updated version of the old big-city, Daley thuggery. Rahm Emanuel threatens recalcitrant congressmen with reminders of the long Obama memory. The Axelrod/Jarrett clique ensures that the government channels stimuli to blue-states, that key Congress people are bought off with tens of millions of government largess, that every campaign promise—from no lobbyists and airing on C-span health care debates to posting impending legislation on the Internet for set durations and “reaching across the aisle”—is simply cynical fluff that no sane person would take seriously.

So?

In short, we have a traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words, not mine), updated with the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out to enemies and shun allies), all energized by an ends justify the means Chicago bare-knuckles apparat.

And?

These true believers, then, don’t really care that the Blue Dogs (if such really exist) bite the dust in 2010, if Harry Reid goes up in smoke, or indeed, if Barack Obama is reelected. Instead, they will institutionalize an agenda that will affect America for generations, move it sharply to the left, and earn a spot in the academic pantheon of American heroes.

Asking why would Obama & Co. be so self-destructive to push through an array of proposals that have no more than 45% of the public’s support is like asking whether the English Prof who teaches incomprehensible Foucauldian theory worries whether he has only 2 students, or whether the well-off union boss is all that upset that membership has sunk to 30% of the workforce, or multimillion-dollar-earning Sarah Palin-interviewing Katie Couric is worried about her sinking ratings, or whether the New York Times columnists are upset that their mother paper is broke with subscription and readership down, and laying off thousands of blue-collar employees.

Instead, for the true believer, it is all about the self, and the sense of the self—and damn all other considerations. (We saw that with Jimmy Carter as well; that he destroyed liberal Democrat politics for a generation meant nothing; that he won prizes and jet-setted the world for thirty years meant everything. For these people, it is always about them—all the time. Let us eat cake as they end up liberal icons for the duration).

What Are We Left With?

The most blatant cynicism in recent American political history—a man who ran as a bipartisan who is the most partisan we’ve seen, a healer whose even flippant comments are designed to offend, a statist who assumes that the sheared sheep cannot stampede somewhere else, a reformer who trusts his honey-laced rhetoric can disguise Daley style-corruption.

On that happy note.

Everything, as my dear late mother lectured me, happens for a reason, or at least presents a sort of logic—irony, paradox, karma, and nemesis being the best ways of interpreting our unfathomable existences. It took messianic narcissistic Barack Obama to expose the full extent of the mess that a once noble tradition of 19th-century liberalism had devolved into. Only he could have rammed it down the throats of the American people, and when he is done, we will suffer, but also sicken of it for quite a while.

Source

From VDH:

It is quite surreal to see a U.S. president — after borrowing nearly $2 trillion this year, with a scheduled aggregate increase in the national debt of $8-9 trillion during his tenure alone — talk about borrowing more money to enact cap-and-trade transfers, as his secretary of state promises a $100 billion cash grant to poorer nations. And all this takes place in the aftermath of Climategate, at a summit whose attendees give the thuggish Hugo Chávez a rousing ovation, get lectured by the murderer Robert Mugabe, and also hear from multi-millionaire global-warming capitalist Al Gore.

Source

December 17, 2009

Our Flip-Flopping Wars

By Victor Davis Hanson

We don’t hear all that much about Iraq these days, do we?

The war at one point almost tore apart this country. Public anger sent George W. Bush’s approval ratings plummeting. And the outrage over our losses helped elect vocal anti-Iraq-war candidate Barack Obama.

But Iraq is hardly in the news anymore. That seems odd, given there are still 120,000 American troops stationed there.

So, why the silence?

In short, Americans are not dying in Iraq as they were from 2006 to 2008. Twice as many Americans have died in Afghanistan this year as in Iraq. As of this writing, in December, there have been four coalition fatalities. That’s about 1/10 of the number of people murdered per month in Chicago in 2008.

Perceptions of the war in Iraq have also changed in unforeseen ways.

“No blood for oil,” for example, was once a common anti-war cry. But Iraq’s auctioning of its oil leases has gone mostly to Europeans, Russians and Chinese – not Americans.

The U.S., it turned out, did not go to Iraq to steal its natural resources. Apparently, we instead ensured a fair auction by a constitutional government that preferred non-American companies to pump its oil. In the end, we were more idealistic – or naive -than conspiratorial.

via RealClearPolitics – Our Flip-Flopping Wars.

December 10, 2009

Has War Really Changed?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Has war been reinvented in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Sometimes it seems so, with the confusion that has come with the instant communication offered by the Internet, YouTube and satellite television

- along with the new arts of precision destruction via high-tech weapons like drones and GPS-guided weapons.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers don’t quite disappear into distant theaters abroad. Instead, they can e-mail or call their spouses from halfway across the world – often minutes before and after battle.

A phony Internet rumor, like the supposed flushing of a Koran at Guantanamo Bay, can incite thousands in mere minutes.

As those in the West become ever more affluent and leisured, it is harder for us to ask our children to risk the good life in often distant, controversial wars. Who wants to leave our comfy suburbs to fight in godforsaken places like the Hindu Kush or Fallujah -against those for whom violence and poverty are accustomed experiences?

The West still has the technological edge in warfare. But thanks to globalization, the Internet and billions of petrodollars, terrorists can get their hands on weapons (or the instructions on how to build them) that often prove as lethal as those used by American or NATO troops.

That Osama bin Laden did not have anything like the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz did not prevent him from taking down the World Trade Center.

Nonetheless, many of the old rules still apply amid the modern fog of war. Human nature, after all, does not change. And since the beginning of civilization the point of war has always been for one side through the use of force to make the other accept its political will.

We should remember that and get back to basics in Afghanistan. Our leaders must remind us that war always offers only two choices – bad and worse.

via RealClearPolitics – Articles – Print Article.

One of the questions that haunts an American patriot has to do with the mathematics of war.  At the time of Truman, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were justified in large part on the accounting of human lives saved vs. lives lost, both in raw terms and in terms of American soldiers and Marines vs. Japanese soldiers, Marines, and noncombatants.  Back of this whole enterprise is the question:  how many _____ lives is one American G. I.’s actually worth?  Clearly, the son of an Afghan mother is morally equivalent to the son of an American mother.  At the individual level, moral considerations mitigate for a 1:1 equivalence.

But Victor Davis Hanson asks us to consider the cultural dimension and the moral and arithmetic asymmetries that result from it:

Finally and most seriously, I think, there is what I call, for want of a better term, “asymmetry.” Western culture creates citizens who are affluent, leisured, free, and protected. Human nature being what it is, we citizens of the West often want to enjoy our bounty and retreat into private lives—to go home, eat pizza, and watch television. This is nothing new. I would refer you to Petronius’s Satyricon, a banquet scene written around 60 A.D. about affluent Romans who make fun of the soldiers who are up on the Rhine protecting them. This is what Rome had become. And it’s not easy to convince someone who has the good life to fight against someone who doesn’t.

To put this in contemporary terms, what we are asking today is for a young man with a $250,000 education from West Point to climb into an Apache helicopter—after emailing back and forth with his wife and kids about what went on at a PTA meeting back in Bethesda, Maryland—and fly over Anbar province or up to the Hindu Kush and risk being shot down by a young man from a family of 15, none of whom will ever live nearly as well as the poorest citizens of the United States, using a weapon whose design he doesn’t even understand. In a moral sense, the lives of these two young men are of equal value. But in reality, our society values the lives of our young men much more than Afghan societies value the lives of theirs.

Hanson, V. D., “The Future of Western War,” Imprimis 38(11):1-5.

Hanson concedes the moral question at the individual level.  But those who declare war are not declaring it at that scale.  They are declaring it at the societal and cultural scale of sovereign nations, nations whose attitudes toward the lives of their children are embodied and expressed in the political and cultural values that predominate; and where nations are not involved per se (think al Qaeda, for instance, or Hezbollah) the same calculus applies, perhaps even more self-evidently.  We Americans, as a whole, value the lives of our boys and girls more than the terrorists value the lives of their boys and girls.

Food for thought.

qb

Obama: More Troops to Aghanistan; Timetable to Leave

obama speech afghanistan

Reaction to Afghanistan Speech – CNN

Reaction to Afghanistan Strategy

Glenn Beck Show – December 1, 2009 – Pt 2 of 7 – Susan Ferrechio

Obama to announce Afghanistan troop strategy Tuesday

Democrats Afghanistan Strategy Counter Productive

General McChrystal Speech

General McChrystal Speech Part 2

General McChrystal Speech Part 3

Reasons for Optimism in Afghanistan? – General Jack Keane

Beating The Taliban By The Book – Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MLv2Cg7_go

The top secret classified detailed report prepared by General McCrystal apparently asked for 60,000 additional troops with an absolute minimum of 40,000 and the strategy was a “game changer.”

This would require the deployment of between about twelve and sixteen army combat brigades.

President Obama announced tonight that an additional 30,000 troops would be deployed or about eight combat brigades.

This represents 50% or what General McCrystal asked for and 75% of the absolute minimum.

Will NATO come up with additional 10,000 to 30,000 troops?

If not, the minimum resources requested falls far short.

Combined this with an eighteen to thirty-six month time schedule and victory is clearly not the goal of this war.

Counterinsurgency warfare does not usually have such a short time line and should not be announced no matter how long or short it is.

The disclosure of a timeline for withdrawal was to try to placate President Obama progressive radical socialist base in the Democratic Party. This only gives the Taliban a weapon to intimidate those who support what the US is doing in Afghanistan.

A three year timeline that just happens to coinside with the 2012 elections in the United States means the President wants all or most of the troops out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq before the 2012 election campaign. The timeline appears to be paced by election politics rather than military necessity.

Just remember that this President lies regulary and there are enough loopholes in the speech that the President could get out sooner or much latter depending on what is happening on the ground.

Does the United States Army have the necessary trained, equipped and available combat brigades for such a deployment?

Apparently not.

The force structure was deeply cut under President Clinton and now when the troops are needed, they are simply not enough for victory.

Will the whistle be blown?

I doubt it, but expect more and more leaks.

Mission impossible will quickly become Obama’s retreat and defeat strategy.

President Obama or the I/me President is simply not committed to this effort.

The President is more interested and committed to health insurance reform and a cap and trade energy tax than waging war in Afghanistan.

Either give General McCrystal 50,000 troops or fourteen combat brigades over the next three years or leave Afghanistan now.

“In war there is no substitute for victory.” said General Douglas MacArthur.

President Obama never says victory.

The American people are now searching for an Obama exit strategy.

The Obama retreat and defeat strategy will not make the progressive radical socialist–peace at any price-wing of the Democratic Party happy.

Code Pink, Woman for Peace, have already given Obama’s plan a song and dance–The Hokey Pokey:

How to do the Hokey Pokey 

Background Articles and Videos

Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon’s new map for war and peace

The Pentagons New Map – Thomas Barnett lecture

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4689061169761152025

At War with General Jack Keane

Conversations with History: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson: War in the Post Modern World – why the new laws of conflict are surreal

General McCrystal’s Afghanistan Assessment: An Alternate View

Brian Matos

“…The key takeaway from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate,” states McCrystal on page 1-1 of the report. Later in the report he elaborates by saying that U.S. and NATO forces must change their mind set from killing the enemy alone, to protecting the entire civilian population from the Taliban, Al Qeada, violent ethic extremists and internal criminals. The change in mind set would require U.S. troops to blend in with the population, getting closer than ever before and risking immense danger by trusting local leaders who may double cross them.

The General calls for a full counter insurgency which will require more “resources” than what the NATO and U.S. forces now have. The report does not make clear how many resources, a.k.a troops, it will take to launch this Iraq-like surge, nor does it make any suggestion that more “resources” will come from other NATO nations. …”

“…McCrystal ends his assessment by simply stating, “Through proper resourcing, rigorous implementation, and sustained political will, this refocused strategy offers (the coalition) the best prospect for success in this important mission.” “

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2204403/general_mccrystals_afghanistan_assessment.html

Brigade Unit of Action

“…The Army normally deployed forces in 2,500 to 4,200-soldier Brigade Combat Teams. These consist of a ground-maneuver brigade (most divisions have three) augmented by other units, such as artillery battalions, which are controlled by the division commander.

The new “brigade based” structure will replace the current arrangement, designed for the Cold War when the Army was prepared to fight giant set-piece battles on European soil, where the support roles were organized at the division level. It will improve the deployment ratio so that there can be two brigades at home for every one deployed overseas.Brigade combat teams will be restructured into Brigade Units of Action. Once transitioned, BUAs will enable greater capacity for rapid packaging and responsive and sustained employment to support combatant commanders. BUAs will also enhance the expeditionary and campaign qualities of Army forces by better enabling Joint/coalition operations. The transition to BUAs will also increase the brigade-equivalent forces available to meet both enduring and emerging mission requirements.

Within the force the Army will have formations that are leaner, that rely on Joint force capabilities and that rely on information. The Army is going to build these future force teams around a combat team, and is not going to wait until 2010. The Army began this change in 2004 (with) a movement to brigade combat teams where the brigade commander will have everything he needs to execute the operation. The brigade combat team will all be packaged within one team – formed that way, packaged that way – and will deploy as an entity, not as a number of small units pulled together when the flag goes up.

The restructuring would leave a division with three types of brigades: heavy, with armor; light, with motorized infantry, and airborne. This new Brigade Units of Action is different from the Units of Action the Army is forming to achieve the Future Combat Systems [FCS]. The FCS first unit equipped (FUE)-one battalion equivalent-in 2008 and an initial operating capability of one brigade Unit of Action (UoA) in 2010.

Growing the fourth includes taking much of the division-level support elements — such as engineers, military intelligence, supply and maintenance units — and making them organic to the brigade structure.

The service will move some enabling resources – such as air defense, signal and intelligence – to the brigade level. Each brigade unit of action will have one fewer company-size element and less artillerymen. However, it will have more military policemen, better command and control assets to talk to each other over long distances, and more certified troops to call in close air support. The brigade unit of action will have enough command and control capability to operate independently. This pushes support roles down to the brigade level. It takes the support brigades — those that do artillery, supply and maintenance, for the most part — and sprinkle their personnel across the Brigade. …”

Structure of the U.S. Army

Officially, a member of the U.S. Army is called a Soldier which is written with a capital letter.

The U.S. Army is structured:

1. Field Army: Usually four star level (GEN).
2. Corps: Consists of two or more divisions and organic support brigades. Commanders are generally at three star level (LTG).
3. Division Commanders: Generally two star level (MG).
4. Brigade (or group): Composed of typically three or more battalions, and commanded by a Colonel (Col). (See Regiment for combat arms units.)
5. Battalion (or squadron): Most units are organized into battalions. Cavalry units are formed into squadrons. A battalion-sized unit is commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel (LTC), supported by a Command Sergeant Major/E-9 (CSM). This unit consists of a Battalion Commander (CO, LTC), a Battalion Executive Officer (XO,MAJ), a Command Sergeant Major (CSM) and headquarters, 3-5 Company Commanders (CPT), 3-5 Company Executive Officers (1LT), 3-5 First Sergeants (1SG) and headquarters, 6 or more Platoon Leaders (2LT/1LT), 6 or more Platoon sergeants (SFC),and 12 or more Squad Leaders (any NCO).
6. Company (or battery/troop): Artillery units are formed into batteries. Cavalry units are formed into troops. A company-sized unit is usually led by a Company Commander usually the rank of Captain/O-3 (CPT) supported by a First Sergeant/E-8 (1SG). This unit consists of a Company Commander (CO, CPT), a Company Executive Officer (XO,1LT), A First Sergeant(1SG) and a headquarters, Two or more Platoon Leaders (2LT/1LT), two or more Platoon Searents (SFC), and four or more Squad Leaders (any NCO).
7. Platoon: Usually led by a lieutenant supported by a Sergeant First Class/E-7 (SFC). This unit consists of a Platoon Leader (2LT/1LT), a Platoon Sergeant (SFC), and two or more Squad Leaders (any NCO).
8. Section: Usually directed by Staff Sergeants/E-6 (SSG) whom supply guidance for junior NCO Squad leaders. Often used in conjunction with platoons at the company level.
9. Squad: Squad leaders are often Staff Sergeants/E-6 (SSG), Sergeants/E-5 (SGT), or Corporals/E-4 (CPL). This unit consists of eight to ten Soldiers.
10. Fire team: Usually consists of four Soldiers: a fire team leader, a grenadier, and two riflemen. Fire team leaders are often Corporal/E-4 (CPL).

The Army is organized by function. Combat forces include Infantry, Armor, Cavalry, Artillery, and Special Forces. Combat support troops include Army Aviation, Army Corps of Engineers, Quartermaster Corps, Medical Corps, Transportation Corps, Ordnance Corps, Adjutant General’s Corps, Signal Corps, Intelligence Corps. Support troops include the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/US_Army

United States Army Brigade

In the United States Army, a brigade is smaller than a division and roughly equal to or a little larger than a regiment. Strength typically ranges from 2,500 to 4,000 personnel. Army brigades formerly contained two or more and typically five regiments, during the American Civil War and continuing as a formation through WW 1, but this structure is now considered obsolete since an Army reorganization before WW 2. The US Army has moved to a new generic brigade combat team formation which contain combat elements and their support units, and is standard across the active US Army, US Army Reserve, and the Army National Guard.

In the United States Marine Corps, brigades are only formed for certain missions. Unlike the United States Army, the Marines have intact regimental structures. A Marine brigade is formed only for special expeditionary duty, for which it is outfitted like a smaller Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF). For example, TF TARAWA (2d MEB) during the Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign.

The Brigade Commander is usually a colonel, although a lieutenant colonel can be selected for brigade command in lieu of an available colonel. A typical tour of duty for this assignment is twenty four to thirty six months.

A brigade commander enjoys an appreciably sized headquarters and staff to assist him or her in commanding the brigade and its subordinate battalion units. The typical staff includes:

• a brigade deputy commanding officer, usually a lieutenant colonel
• a brigade executive officer, usually a lieutenant colonel
• a brigade command sergeant major
• a personnel officer (S1), usually a major
• an intelligence officer (S2), usually a major
• an operations officer (S3), usually a lieutenant colonel
• a logistics officer (S4), usually a major
• a communications officer (S6), usually a major
• a medical officer, usually a major
• a Judge Advocate General (legal) officer, usually a major
• a brigade chaplain, usually a major

In addition, the headquarters will include additional junior staff officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted support personnel in the occupational specialities of the staff sections; these personnel will ordinarily be assigned to the brigade’s headquarters and headquarters company.

Book TV: Lt. Col. John Nagl “The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuDlrrRDfUw

Mission Impossible? Deconstructing Counter-insurgency in Afghanistan 

Related Posts On Pronk Palisades

President Obama’s West Point Speech on War in Afghanistan–Cadet Honor Code–Generals Marshall and MacArthur Speeches On Peace and War–Duty, Honor, Country

Obama’s Berlin Speech: The First New World Order Citizen–Fellow Traveler World Citizen!

Victor Davis Hanson–Videos

From Victor Davis Hanson:

A final prognosis—or why Obama is in deep, deep trouble, since he won’t quit in his dream to transmogrify American into something like Belgium at best and Brazil at worse.

Millions of independents and swing voters went for Obama for five reasons: (1) they believed the media hype that Bush was the “worst” (fill in the blanks); (2) the sudden financial panic of September 2008 and the anger at Wall Street banditry and bail-outs; (3) Obama’s youth, charm, and oratory; (4) the feel-good novelty of voting in our first African-American president; (5) Obama’s centrist campaign message of paying down debt, working with allies, drilling, being tough against Al Qaeda, and being bipartisan.

It’s taken almost 11 months, but voters now know that propositions 1-5 are now refuted or irrelevant:

1) Bush is history. Like Truman, in time he will begin to look better not worse. More importantly, Bush’s sins that bothered voters— too much big government and big deficits—were simply trumped by Obama’s gargantuan deficits and federalization of health care, banking, and the auto industry. “Bush did it” doesn’t work any more. “Obama did it even more” is the new worry.

2) The panic that we would lose all our 401(k’s) and home equity has passed. What we are left with in its wake is a sinking feeling that badgering small business and the Chamber of Commerce, as if they are Goldman Sachs grandees, isn’t working. Raising income, payroll, and surcharge taxes at a time state, local, and sales taxes are surging, is, well, a good way to turn a recession into a depression—or at least a stagflating, weak recovery. Sometime around next March, “Bush’s did it” will transmogrify into Obama’s recession. Obama can’t run against the economy, but must fix it—or take the blame. His best hope is that the Republicans don’t run a demagogic figure such as he himself acted in 2007-8.

3) Obama’s smoothness is getting old. All of us can almost write the next Obama speech: a) “some” say/do, but “I” say/do… The bad straw man is set up, followed by the contrast of the annointed “I” and “me” ad nauseum. b) then comes the apology for the sins of the rest of us—mitigated somewhat by the election of , yes, Barack Obama, the first black President; c) third is the impossible: spending more on health care saves more; cap and trade massive taxes will result in economies; no more lobbyists means gads of them, Bush shredded the Constitution equates into I’m copying his anti-terror protocols; d) an end with hope and change ruffles and flourishes. Bottom line: the oratory is old and trite, given the lack of commensurate accomplishments.

4) On the matter of racial landmarks, some of the voters think, rightly or wrongly, that they did their thing, proving America is not racist by the fact of Obama’s election. Now? A lot of independents, however, won’t seem obligated to vote in 2010 or 2012, motivated by the same sense of liberal assuagement of guilt. This been there/done that feeling will be accentuated should Obama’s supporters continue to play the race card as his popularity dips as a result of a statist and neo-socialist agenda.

5) We know now that the campaign was a centrist deception. Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright make logical the presence of the Truther Van Jones and Anita Dunn (cf. her encomium to Mao). His most partisan Senate record presages his near suicidal effort to ram through statist health care, tax hikes, and partisan appointments, in addition to polarizing rhetoric. His campaign promises to meet with Ahmadinejad were not only met, but again trumped by serial apologies, selling out the Poles and Czechs and outreach to Chavez and Castro. In other words, the so-called right-wing nuts who tried to scare the hell out of voters are proving to be Nostradamuses of sorts.

All sorts of things can happen. Printing and borrowing can give us a brief, though unsustainable recovery around 2010. A war could break out. We could get hit big-time again as in 9/11.

That said, I think not merely the thrill is gone, but a righteous anger about an Obama trifecta— of serial apologies and bows abroad, massive borrowing and deficit spending, and government-take overs of private spheres of life—is swelling up in the electorate. I haven’t seen in my lifetime anything quite like it. And this furor of being had has the potential not just to take Obama down, but also his ideology and supporters along with him for a generation.

Source

..  Agriculture returned to the human scale.

If you are interested in some of the below have a look inside, ideas about them and their combination will show up eventually:

…

What/How/When:

• Earth
• Gardening
• Soil building
• Cover crops
• Green manures
• Rotations
• Seasonal everything
• Agrarianism
• M’ore’ganic  agriculture
• Nutrient dense food
• Cottage/artisan farming
• Home-steading
• Permaculture
• Square foot Gardening
• Intensive gardening methods
• Extensive gardening methods
• Kitchen gardens
• Monastic gardens
• Medicinal/herb gardens
• Orchard
• Pature
• Woodlot
• Chickens
• Small-scale grain
• more to come..

Who/Why

• Albrecht
• Gene Logsdon
• Catholic rural life movement
• Steve Solomon
• Eliot Coleman
• Christopher Alexander
• Charles Walters
• Dick Raymond
• Mel Bartholomew
• John Jeavons
• Wendel Berry
• The Agrarians
• Victor davis Hanson
• more to come..

I’m not gonna excerpt it, you have to read the whole thing.

Anyone with brain cells knows that all the working people of the United States would have to foot the bill for the currently promoted healthcare reform plan, but we’re not the only ones:

A large portion of the new Obama borrowing has to be covered abroad, mostly through Chinese and Japanese purchase of U.S. government bonds.

The Obama administration expects to borrow yearly hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese to expand American health care. In some sense, therefore, 400 to 500 million Chinese — most of them without much access to even rudimentary medicine, doctors, and hospitals — will be working overtime to loan Americans enough money to ensure universal access to hip replacements, gastric bypasses, and flu shots.

Cut through the soaring rhetoric: We are left with an America that assumes the world’s less well-off will directly subsidize our own better-off.

No wonder that Obama has cooled his rhetoric on Chinese smoky coal plants, Tibet, mercantile trade policies, and human rights. All such idealism falls before America’s voracious appetite for borrowed cash.

This is from Obama’s Prissy America by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online. On a side-note, I wondered that Hanson couldn’t find one more opportunity to insert the word “prissy” into his article. Yes, it was a little overused.

Victor Davis Hanson has some harsh words for the President over at National Review, but he has some scary truth to back up the rhetoric. This part should make everyone who thinks that President Obama is a compassionate messiah who cares about the poor and oppressed lose sleep at night:

“The Obama administration expects to borrow yearly hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese to expand American health care. In some sense, therefore, 400 to 500 million Chinese — most of them without much access to even rudimentary medicine, doctors, and hospitals — will be working overtime to loan Americans enough money to ensure universal access to hip replacements, gastric bypasses, and flu shots.

Cut through the soaring rhetoric: We are left with an America that assumes the world’s less well-off will directly subsidize our own better-off.

No wonder that Obama has cooled his rhetoric on Chinese smoky coal plants, Tibet, mercantile trade policies, and human rights. All such idealism falls before America’s voracious appetite for borrowed cash.”

Obama isn’t good at anything but liberal talk. He has done nothing to improve the economy and his health care bill, supposedly a sign of his compassion for the poor and needy, is actually an America-Centric bill that exploits the world’s needy for the sake of Americans. Not to mention the fact that we will be in debt to a communist country, forced to look the other way while they oppress entire populations. Oh, and the fact that this bill won’t work anyway, so all that money and the integrity of our nation is wasted for nothing. Great legacy for out messianic president.

November 12, 2009

Same Old, Same Old at Fort Hood

By Victor Davis Hanson

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of murdering last week 13 people (12 of whom were soldiers) and wounding another 30 at Fort Hood, Texas. It was not the first, nor will it be the last, domestic terrorist incident since Sept. 11, 2001.

We now see that authorities had, or should have had, reason to be suspicious of Hasan — including his contact with a radical cleric and a bizarre “medical” presentation he once gave to Army doctors that focused on Islam and the military.

Now, we’re also learning that someone going by the name Nidal Hasan posted extremist views on the Internet, and that at least one former classmate questioned his loyalty to America.

Yet no one acted.

Was, as there appears to be, a fear among would-be accusers of being charged with politically incorrect bias?

That worry has certainly been evident in the postmortem Fort Hood analysis. Repeatedly the media advised us not to rush to judgment about the motives of Hasan, who, witnesses say, yelled “Allahu Akbar” before he shot the unarmed.

via RealClearPolitics – Same Old, Same Old at Fort Hood.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Barack Obama ran a healing campaign. He offered sonorous themes of a country no longer to be divided by blue-state/red-state animosities, by race, by income — or by much of anything.

In turn, we were to suspend disbelief over his past hardball campaigns for the state senate and the U.S. Senate. The young, charismatic, post-racial, post-political inheritor of Camelot could not really have compiled the most partisan record in the Senate. We were to think away his tough-guy Chicago-style associates. His pastor at the time, the venomous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an aberration. And when candidate Obama occasionally derided George W. Bush, it was considered rough, but deserved.

Alas, the first nine months of this administration have proven the most polarizing in memory. Polls show a 61 percent partisan gap. Obama is now rated as the most divisive first-year president in the past four decades. As this week’s elections suggest, even in liberal New Jersey and moderate Virginia, voters are becoming tired of being caricatured as either saints or sinners, depending on the degree to which they embrace the Obama vision. No wonder. As a Manichean, he increasingly envisions the world as “us” versus “them.”

Source

From Victor Davis Hanson:

If one were to collate the public statements and actions of many in the Obama administration, one would conclude that the most conciliatory past language masks the most divisive, polarizing administration in recent history — a fact born out by most polls. Surely this is one of the most radical turnabouts in memory: in a mere ten months the mellifluous voice has become a siren that charms and hypnotizes the voters as they are lured onto the partisan shoals.

Entire marvelous essay here

OPINIONO CTOBER 28, 2009, 7:14 P.M. ET

Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy

Jimmy Carter rejected the postwar consensus. President Obama appears to be following a similar path.

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945.

President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—especially in Iraq and Afghanistan—left to him by George W. Bush. But Mr. Obama’s inheritance is mild compared to the myriad crises that nearly overwhelmed the rookie President Truman.

All at once Truman had to finish the struggle against Hitler, occupy Europe, and deal with a nominally allied but increasingly bellicose and ascendant Soviet Union. Within months of taking office he had to make the awful decision to drop atomic bombs on Imperial Japan.

At war’s end, Truman was faced with a global propaganda nightmare. Stalin’s victorious Soviet Union—soon to be nuclear—cynically posed as the egalitarian leader for millions of war-impoverished and newly liberated colonial peoples. In contrast, America accepted the difficult responsibility and expense of rebuilding the destitute former European colonial powers and rehabilitating ex-Axis Japan and Germany.

Some of Truman’s initial military decisions proved nearly disastrous. After the atomic bombs forced Japan’s surrender, he was stubbornly convinced that a nuclear air force could ensure American security on the cheap.

via Victor Davis Hanson: Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy – WSJ.com.

Victor Davis Hanson, da man.

His [Obama's] opposition is no longer ossified, but decentralized and grass roots. One of the oddest proofs of that statement is the sudden leftist furor at tea parties, town halls, the media, dissent, and free speech. As long as Obama was opposed by calcified Republicans in Congress, there was no real danger to him. But once the opposition proved populist, panicked liberal elites started demonizing populism — and Obama now finds himself opposed to the popular grievance-mongering that was once the mother’s milk of our Chicago organizer’s existence. 

The conservative movement’s great strength in 2009 was that it was able to organize an opposition to Obama that ran independent of the chickenshit GOP leadership.  Now, hopefully the Republicans are starting to realize that they need the Right just a little more than Right needs them.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Imagine what might have happened had Obama been a dreary old white guy like John Kerry; or had Bush’s approvals been over 50 percent; or had Obama run on the platform he is now governing on; or had McCain crafted a dynamic campaign; or had the panic occurred in January 2009 rather than September 2008. Then the trance would have passed, and Obama, the Chicago community organizer and three-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, would have probably lost his chance at remaking America.

Source

October 23, 2009 4:00 AM

America’s Obama Obsession

Anatomy of a passing hysteria.

By Victor Davis Hanson

For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.

HOW OBAMA WON

Barack Obama was elected rather easily because, in perfect-storm fashion, five separate trends coalesced last autumn.

1) Obama was eloquent, young, charismatic — and African-American. He thus offered voters a sense of personal and collective redemption, as well as appealing to the longing for another JFK New Frontier figure. An image, not necessarily reality, trumped all.

2) After the normal weariness with eight years of an incumbent party and the particular unhappiness with Bush, the public was amenable to an antithesis. Bush was to be scapegoat, and Obama the beginning of the catharsis.

via America’s Obama Obsession by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online.

October 22, 2009

The Kitty-Cat Who Roared

By Victor Davis Hanson

President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion – only later to meow like a little kitty.

Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year?

The clock ticks — and Guantanamo isn’t close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush’s supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials or deporting them to unwilling hosts.

Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted “to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now!”

That “now!” sure sounded macho.

On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that “the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We’ve had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet.”

Talk about “unmet” deadlines and “spin”- here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand he does not want to be responsible for undermining them.

via RealClearPolitics – The Kitty-Cat Who Roared.