Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
When we think about the nation’s domestic enemies, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the likes of George Soros, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Al Franken, Maxine Waters and Hillary Clinton.
When we think about the nation’s domestic enemies, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the likes of George Soros, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Al Franken, Maxine Waters and Hillary Clinton. We should never overlook Barack Obama, who went from being the worst president in U.S. history to being the worst ex-president, wresting both titles away from Jimmy Carter. Talk about records you never dream will ever be broken.
In case it escaped your attention, as it apparently has the attention of the mass media, Obama has created a gang of 30,000 traitors under the banner of Organizing for Action, and staffed it with many of the deplorables who did so much to make the eight years of his administration such an unmitigated disaster, including his very own Rasputin, Valerie Jarrett.
The mission statement of the group is the usual litany of left-wing lunacy, including gun control (confiscation), socialized medicine, federally funded abortions on demand, climate change legislation and immigration reform (open borders).
The way it works, as Thomas Sowell has spelled out, is that Trump issues a temporary ban on visitors from certain rogue states. Obama immediately signals his 30,000 goons to start protesting and calling for pro-immigrant groups to stage demonstrations. The ACLU lawyers file lawsuits in jurisdictions where activist judges continue to do Obama’s bidding. The volunteers are ordered to stage protests at airports and at Republican town hall meetings, and the leftist media springs to action in support of these nefarious activities. Next, the Twitter sphere lights up, and, as the night follows the day, violence ensues, all for the benefit of the TV cameras. Then, squaring the circle, Obama signals that he is heartened by the protests, because they prove to his demented satisfaction that America remains the land of the free and the home of the brave, when all they really prove is that the Republic has never been in greater jeopardy.
As Mr. Sowell writes: “If Barack Obama did not do enough to destroy this country in the eight years he was in office, it appears his future plans are to destroy the very foundation on which this country has operated for the past 241 years.”
It goes without saying that every American feels a deep sympathy for what the Texans, Floridians and those residing in a few neighboring states have had to deal with lately, thanks to the likes of Harvey, Irma and Jose. And as we are constantly reminded, their agony is not ended simply because the waters have receded and the winds have abated.
But, as usual, I find myself wondering how it is that, when retirees from the Northeast and the upper Middle West talk about settling in Florida because of the weather, they typically ignore the fact that hurricanes are every bit as much a part of the weather as sunshine.
Some wisenheimers might point out that I continue to live in a state where earthquakes have been known to occur. But here in California, we barely have the four normal seasons, and we certainly don’t have a special one set aside for earthquakes. But in Florida, they have five seasons — summer, winter, spring, fall and hurricane. And frankly, when you realize how regularly the disastrous storms occur, they often run through most of the alphabet naming the darn things. We’re already up to the letter J (as in Jose) and it’s only September!
I’m beginning to wonder what to make of President Trump. The Democrats come away from a dinner at the White House and Chuck Schumer tells friends “He likes me,” sounding almost as giddy as Sally Field when she won her Oscar, except that Schumer refrained from adding “He really likes me!”
In the meantime, Trump raises the debt ceiling without getting anything in return from the Democrats and then apparently signs off on DACA without ever mentioning the wall that he keeps promising to get built. But at least the president has voiced objection to chain immigration, whereby the extended families of the 800,000 “Dreamers” are also granted admission to the country and a pathway to citizenship, which would serve to expand the 800,000 to several million.
Something that the Democrats never bother explaining is why, if they are so infatuated with the notion of diversity, they appear so anxious to change the United States into Los Estados Unidos. Of course, the reason they don’t care to discuss it is because their sole motivation comes down to the fact that 70-80% of the Hispanics will automatically vote for anyone who has a (D) after his name. If those were Poles, Czechs or Latvians at out southern border — people who have had prior experience living under the boot of socialism — the Democrats would have erected a hundred-foot wall years ago.
For someone who boasts of his ability to negotiate and refers to “The Art of the Deal” more often than Franklin Graham refers to the New Testament, Trump seems to be working off the same playbook that Obama used when he dealt with Iran and Cuba.
If Trump were playing strip poker with the Democrats, by now he’d be down to his skivvies and his socks.
Trump’s recent capitulation to Schumer and Pelosi has been disheartening, but it’s not totally irrational when you realize that his reliance on a Republican Congress has been an exercise in futility. But what is one to make of his Department of Justice? If there’s an iota of difference between what it was under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and what it is under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, I’m not sure I could spot it using the Hubble Telescope.
The Department has made no move, so far as I’m aware, to investigate and indict Hillary Clinton, Lois Lerner, Susan Rice, James Comey, Samantha Power, George Soros or antifa. Couple that with Sessions recusing himself from the trumped-up Russian collusion nonsense, and it’s looking more and more as if in Trump, we may have elected ourselves a pig in a poke.
It recently occurred to me that Trump was already one-sixth of the way through his term. That thought made me a lot sadder a few weeks ago than it does today.
Although I’m not entirely opposed to Trump’s dealing with the Democrats — clearly an act of desperate necessity when the Republicans in Congress can’t even agree on the time of day — he’s starting to resemble a lamb among wolves; less like a tough New York real estate czar and more like a rube searching for the guy holding the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge so he can write him a check.
In the wake of the Pentagon suggesting sending an additional 4,000 troops to Afghanistan, as if that could possibly bring us any closer to victory than not sending them, I found myself trying to picture what victory would look like over there.
The last time we won a war, we knew it was over when Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a Berlin bunker and when the Japanese foreign minister, Shigemitsu, wearing his top hat, came aboard the USS Missouri and signed a paper acknowledging the Emperor’s unconditional surrender.
But when you’re fighting a cancer like Islam, whether a group calls itself Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah or Boca Haram, who’s in a position to surrender? And why on earth would we take sides in purely jurisdictional disputes between swamp creatures? If an entity poses an existential threat to us or one of our few allies in the world, my instinct would be to nuke them and allow Allah to sort out the remains.
Speaking of nukes, if our using them is out of the question unless someone not only uses them first but uses a lot of them, knowing the risk of retaliation, I’m not sure it makes sense for us to even maintain a nuclear arsenal. I doubt if the thought that we might be able to take North Korea, Iran or China with us would be as consoling as some people seem to believe if Boston, Atlanta, Miami, L.A., Denver, Dallas, Omaha, New York and/or Oklahoma City had just been vaporized.
I’m all for diplomacy and sanctions, but only if they work within a reasonable time frame. Allowing your existential enemies additional time rarely means they will come to their senses; more often, as we saw with Germany and Japan 80 years ago, it merely means they gain additional time in which to train their troops and perfect their weaponry.
Speaking of those who could stand a little nuking, I give you the congressional Republicans who, even after seven years of grousing about the Affordable Care Act, couldn’t bring themselves to do away with it. I keep waiting for Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan to explain their failure by insisting: “We never said we’d repeal ObamaCare. You misunderstood us. We said we would repeat it.”
There are two things I like about a government shutdown. The first is that Congress is prevented, at least temporarily, from getting into any mischief. The other thing is that they send home the bureaucrats they have the rare honesty to designate “non-essential.” It always seems like the perfect opportunity to prune the dead weight from the over-bloated federal government. But, alas, they not only welcome these cheeseheads back to their unessential jobs, they pay them the money they would have received if they hadn’t been on vacation.
Even after eight months in office, Trump, who made a lot of sense about our so-called allies becoming more responsible for their own defense, still has roughly 40,000 American troops in Japan, 35,000 in Germany; 24,000 in South Korea; 11,000 in Italy; 10,000 in Afghanistan; 8,000 in the UK; 3,000 in Spain; and 2,000 in Dibouti, and I dare you to find that one on the map.
While I’m sure having those Americans stationed in those foreign lands helps the local economies, I fail to see what it does for us.
When I consider the state of relations between the U.S. and North Korea, the presence of those 24,000 Americans seems less like a military deterrent and more like a hostage situation.
Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but so far as I can see, the troops appear to have been cast in the same thankless roles as canaries in coal mines.
