There has never been a war in American history so strategically ill-conceived as the one currently developing against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria.
The Mexican war of 1846-47 was essentially an aggressive operation to take Alta California and New Mexico, and to cement the status of Texas. It was limited in its objectives, and it was conducted in a strategically sound manner. The goals – their legality apart – were achieved, and the balance between costs and benefits was never in doubt. Vae victis!
The Civil War (under whatever name) was a “rational” bid by Abraham Lincoln and his team – legal, moral, and humanitarian considerations notwithstanding – to create a centralized state. He won the war, and hugely expanded federal governmental power. This was a disaster for America, but it was a resounding success from the standpoint of its instigators.
The 1898 war against Spain was but another exercise in Realpolitik. It finally moved America from a republic to an empire, the “manifest destiny” now manifested in Admiral Mahan’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical designs.
Woodrow Wilson’s 1917-1918 intervention against the Central Powers was the first overtly “ideological” war – to make the world safe for democracy etc. Its slogans were silly, but in the end it could be argued that the geopolitical purpose was well served: to prevent the dominance of the continent of Europe by a single hegemon. America did not make much difference to the outcome in the battlefield, but her entry signaled to the Germans that the Entente could not lose.
World War II was a convoluted affair that entailed FDR provoking Japan in order to provoke Germany. Considering Roosevelt’s Weltanschauung it worked beautifully. His goals were rational within that paradigm, and they were fulfilled beyond expectations.
NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Bill de Blasio refused to take questions Friday about the latest revelations surrounding an embattled top aide who has become a flashpoint in his strained relationship with the rank-and-file in the New York Police Department.
De Blasio didn’t break stride as he walked past waiting reporters into City Hall after attending a memorial service for fallen NYPD officers. But controversy continued to swirl around Rachel Noerdlinger, a highly visible face of the administration, and what she revealed on background checks when she was hired for the $170,000-a-year position as chief of staff to first lady Chirlane McCray.
The Department of Investigation found that she declined to disclose that she was living with her boyfriend, Hassaun McFarlan, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a 1993 shooting when he was 15 and later served time for drug trafficking. The news website DNAinfo reported that McFarlan’s Facebook page, now taken down, had several posts referring to police as “pigs.”
The DOI probe concluded without recommending that Noerdlinger be disciplined. De Blasio, who has repeatedly defended her, has snapped at reporters asking about the aide’s future, declaring on Monday that it was “case closed.”
But two more damaging stories appeared Friday.
DNAinfo reported that she and her underage son were in the car with McFarlan when he was pulled over in 2011 for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. The officer smelled pot in the car, and McFarlan was arrested for marijuana possession. Police in Edgewater, New Jersey, confirmed the arrest and said Noerdlinger was given a summons for allowing someone to drive a car without a license.
Additionally, the New York Post reported that Noerdlinger left a $28,000 tax lien off her Conflicts of Interest Board disclosure form. De Blasio aides said she later updated her form.
Though the mayor remained silent, his spokesman voiced support for Noerdlinger later Friday.
“Rachel Noerdlinger is a valued member of our team,” said Phil Walzak, who praised her experience “fighting for social justice and equal rights.”
The rank-and-file police union has called for Noerdlinger to be fired. But it’s not just her association with her boyfriend that has made her a source of ire for many officers.
Before assisting McCray, the most prominent first lady in city history, Noerdlinger used to be a top aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been a fervent critic of the NYPD for decades. He took center stage again this summer by leading protests over the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed man who died after being placed in a police chokehold.
VIDEO at LINK
The Friday release of 10,000 pages of Clinton White House documents scored an enormous amount of media attention with broadcast and print news reporters scouring the pages and covering the sordid Monica Lewinsky affair and the Paula Jones allegations and civil case. However, hidden in the historical documents is evidence that Associate Justice Elena Kagan achieved her position on the nation’s highest court as reward for being a “good soldier” in the “war to defend President Bill Clinton.”
Elena Kagan and Sen. Patrick “Leaky” Leahy holding a photo op during her confirmation hearings.
Elena Kagan and Sen. Patrick “Leaky” Leahy holding a photo op during her confirmation hearings.
US Senate Photo Gallery
According to a section on Kagan, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, she served in the Clinton White House as a associate counsel to the president in 1995-96 and then deputy assistant to the White House Domestic Policy and then deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) from 1997-1999. While Justice Kagan performed duties with regard to AIDS, budget appropriations, campaign finance reform, education, health, labor, race, tobacco, Native Americans, and welfare, her most important job was the handling a lawsuit brought against President Bill Clinton by a woman who claimed then Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had sexually harassed her.
The released documents touch on how Elena Kagan as a White House counsel defended Bill Clinton against allegations in a civil suit brought by an ex-Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones. In one May 1996 memo, Kagan appeared to be more concerned with how it looked “unseemly” for the president to be represented in court by so many attorneys, but made no mention of how unseemly it was for a sitting U.S. President to be accused of bullying a defenseless low-tier employee.
In the documents submitted to the opposing counsel and to the judge in the case, Kagan had many of the attorney’s names — who worked on the case — removed from the cover-sheets for all documents and correspondence. “While not a criminal act or even a serious breach of civil law, [Kagan’s] actions in removing those names could be considered unethical. Let me put it this way, if you or I did such a thing with legal documents, the judge or judges would not act kindly towards us,” said political strategist and attorney Laurence Collier-Stevenson. “Ask yourself: is this the kind of person you want passing judgement on the entire government and nation?” he asked rhetorically
There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.
They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.
What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.
The sharp demarcation between cultural issues and economic ones is ultimately bogus.
Dear Reader (and the escort from Ipanema, who might feel ignored by this “news”letter),
As the Cartagena hooker said after getting paid up front, “Where should I begin?”
I love that even Jimmy Carter is turning on Obama. The headline from Time magazine:
Jimmy Carter: Obama Dropped the Ball on ISIS Threat
First of all, having Jimmy Carter out-hawk you is like having Joe Biden attack you for being verbally undisciplined. “He really should be more careful about what he says,” Biden advised, then added, “A great way to cool down on a hot day is to shove lime Jell-O in your pants. Be sure to remove the pants-squirrels first, though.”
Jimmy Carter is like a veterinarian who specializes in male puppies: He knows his ball drops. Just for Giggles (Giggles is a guy I know without Internet access), I googled “Jimmy Carter dropped the ball.” Among the results about how Jimmy Carter dropped the ball on Iran, the Soviet Union, the Metric system, etc., I found this Yahoo Answers page from 2011. The question:
“What did Jimmy Carter do as Chief Diplomat? Any example even if he did a horrible job at it.”
The “best answer” was: “Saying Jimmy Carter dropped the ball is a BIG understatement.”
Throughout the history of the American Republic, there has been a tension between two virtues necessary to sustain republican government: vigilance and responsibility. Vigilance is the jealousy on the part of the people that constitutes a necessary check on those who hold power, lest they abuse it. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”
But while vigilance is a necessary virtue, it may, if unchecked, lead to an extremism that incapacitates a government, preventing it from carrying out even its most necessary and legitimate purposes, e.g. providing for the common defense. “Jealousy,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, often infects the “noble enthusiasm for liberty” with “a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.”
Responsibility, on the other hand, is the prudential judgment necessary to moderate the excesses of political jealousy, thereby permitting limited government to fulfill its purposes. Thus, in Federalist 23, Alexander Hamilton wrote that those responsible for the nation’s defense must be granted all of the powers necessary to achieve that end. Responsibility is the virtue necessary to govern the republic and to preserve it from harm, both external and internal. The dangers of foreign and civil war taught Alexander Hamilton that liberty and power are not always adversaries, that, indeed, the “vigor” of government is essential to the security of liberty.
Lincoln and the War Power
Lincoln’s actions as president during the Civil War reflected his agreement with this principle. Owing to the unprecedented nature of the emergency created by a serious domestic rebellion, Lincoln believed that he had no choice but to exercise broad executive power.
The steps Lincoln took are well known. Under his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief of the military, he declared martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in certain locations. He blockaded Southern ports. He shut down some opposition newspapers. He created tribunals similar to the ones that George W. Bush established when he was president. At one point early in the war, convinced that the Maryland legislature was poised to vote an ordinance of secession, he ordered Federal troops to arrest and detain pro-secessionist lawmakers. Lincoln justified this last step on the grounds that there was “tangible and unmistakable evidence” of their “substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion.”
Indigenous Peoples’ Day Is Offensive to Indigenous People By Tim Cavanaugh
If you want honor American Indians, then honor an American Indian.
It was either Francis Parkman or Frederick Jackson Turner or the composer of the theme from F Troop who first laid down an essential truth about the American experience: In the end, Paleface and Redskin both turn chicken.
Now the same white male power structure that made Black History Month the shortest month in the calendar and sabotaged the Susan B. Anthony dollar by making it indistinguishable from a quarter is at it again. And the oppression is coming from the supposedly sympathetic, progressive side: The city of Seattle, Washington, has designated an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” on the second Monday of October — a day already reserved for the federal Columbus Day holiday.
Seattle’s City Council unanimously passed the proposal for a non-official city holiday earlier this week. Mayor Ed Murray will sign Indigenous Peoples’ Day into law Monday, and he noted to local media that the day is only an homage that has no municipal weight (no parking relief). The legislation “will honor local Native-American tribes,” the Seattle Times reports. Murray claims Indigenous Peoples’ Day will “add new significance to the date without replacing the Columbus Day tradition,” according to the paper.
Something bothers me about the first and only hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Something I haven’t been able to shake.
It was a desultory hearing. That’s not the main thing that bothers me, but it grates. Many Americans still seek real accountability for the jihadist-empowering policies and recklessly irresponsible security arrangements that preceded the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack — to say nothing of the fraud and stonewalling that followed it. We were thus cheered when the GOP-controlled House finally appointed a select investigative committee . . . although we were equally puzzled why it took so much prodding, why Republican leadership seemed so reluctant. Five months have elapsed since then, and the committee has not exactly been a bundle of energy.
The panel is chaired by Representative Trey Gowdy. We were buoyed by that, too: He is an impressive former prosecutor from South Carolina. To date, though, he has convened just the one, remarkably brief public hearing. It was on September 17, a few days after the second anniversary of the Benghazi massacre, during which terrorists killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans: Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty.
The hearing seemed to be a futile quest for buy-in from committee Democrats, whose mission is to undermine the legitimacy of an investigation their party opposed — one that, if thorough and competent, cannot but damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. Representative Gowdy agreed to the minority’s request for a session that would explore the recommendations of the Obama State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) and the administration’s diligent implementation thereof.
The ARB probe, conducted by Washington fixtures handpicked by then–Secretary of State Clinton for damage-control purposes, was hopelessly conflicted. It failed to interview key witnesses — including, natch, Mrs. Clinton herself. Its recommendations are thus of dubious value. More to the point, they are far afield from the salient matter: accountability for the disastrous decisions, actions, and omissions before, during, and after the attack.
Mistaken Identity, Not Aboriginal Heroes
Depicted as martyrs in the cause of Aboriginal resistance, convicted killers Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner are to be honoured with a statue in Melbourne’s CBD. Once again, popular myth is about to trump documented history
The Melbourne City Council has decided to erect a memorial to commemorate the two Tasmanian Aborigines who were hanged in Melbourne on January 20, 1842, in the first public executions at Port Phillip. The decision coincided with its publication of a thirty-nine-page booklet by Clare Land entitled Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner: The Involvement of Aboriginal People from Tasmania in Key Events of Early Melbourne (2014). It is a beautiful booklet, in full colour with numerous illustrations, on glossy paper, obtainable from the Melbourne City Council and available, free, online. If the intent was to pay respects to the two executed Tasmanians, then it is successful.
Our problem with it is that it is history-lite, based mainly on secondary sources, with little primary research. It reads as an argument that Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were resistance fighters deserving of memorialisation. Our research, based only on primary sources, demonstrates conclusively that they were not resistance fighters: on their own personal testimony, they shot and killed two whalers by mistake.In the late 1830s and 1840s, these two Tasmanians were known to society in Melbourne, and recorded in contemporary accounts, as Bob and Jack, so, without intending any disrespect, we follow the usage by which they were recorded in the primary sources at the time, and use their European names in this account. On the same principle, we sometimes use the term “blacks” because that was the language of record. “Blacks” is not a pejorative term, but today’s more respectful consciousness usually uses “the Aboriginal people”. But to apply today’s heightened sensitivity to the records of a distant past amounts in our view to a distortion.
Are imams advocating that the faithful focus on the nice Meccan part of the Koran, rather than the advocacy of violence in the nasty Medinan part? It would be nice to have that questioned answered, but the only responses we hear are sophistries and dissembling
Seek them here Seek them there Are there moderates anywhere?
Mark Durie in Islam, Human rights and Public Policy (2009) refers to a poll taken in 2006 which found that 58% of Indonesians believed adulterers should be stoned to death; up from 39% in 2001. Apparently the polled respondents in this “moderate” Muslim nation were not asked whether adulterers should simply get a damn good thrashing. I assume there would have been even greater support for that. In 2010, the Pew Research Centre found that 84% of Egyptians, 86% of Jordanians and 76% of Pakistanis favoured death for apostasy.
In early 2011, the governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated. He was killed for opposing blasphemy laws which had resulted in a Christian woman facing execution. Pope Benedict publicly opposed the laws. A number of Pakistan’s political leaders, including then-Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, made it clear that the Pope had no business interfering in Pakistan’s internal affairs and that the blasphemy laws would remain in place. Thousands were reported to have showered the alleged assassin with rose petals.
Clearly, Enlightenment thinking is a little way off in Pakistan and in other Islamic states. But then, if that is the case, where are those moderate Muslims that I keep hearing about? Where are they hiding out? Andrew Bolts seems to be in the know. He attests, presumably as a result of some kind of revelatory insight, that “the vast majority of Muslims reject [terrorism]”; in other words, a jihad interpretation of Islamic scripture (Herald Sun, 6 October). Hmm, I wonder, wherever they are, what is going on? Have their imams told them to concentrate on the nice Meccan part of the Koran and ignore the later words of Allah in the nasty Medinan part? Are there large numbers of foolhardy imams preaching this heresy?
Perhaps it is a question of definition. What is a moderate Muslim? Can he or she be identified? One problem in coming from a Christian background is the absence of a contemporary reference point in the Christian world for moderates.
As I pointed out in “Moderate Muslims are the Problem, Not the Solution” (Quadrant, May 2013): “Christians don’t go around bombing people in the name of Christianity or envisioning a restored Christian empire, akin to a caliphate, in the Western world.” Without an immoderate and warlike comparison, the term “moderate” has no meaning. Christians don’t go around axiomatically describing themselves as moderate. It would be silly. Not so with Muslims.
