Machiavellia

At last, it’s official:  Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady of Arkansas and career scofflaw, is

running for President of the United States and counts her primary qualification the possession of X/X chromosomes.  This, of course, given the prevailing mood of the country for identity/victim politics, guarantees her a resounding win over whichever Republican candidate the GOP decides to field against her but for argument’s sake, let’s assume that the American public actually cares about things like character and integrity and offer them a few things to consider:

• It’s a plain fact that Hillary owes whatever status she enjoys to her husband.  She’s nothing without him and nobody would ever have heard of her after her Leninist commencement speech at Wellesley.  Bill, though an amoral, corrupt and licentious gonad, is a crafty politician with an innate ability to get people to like him, even when they know all about his slimy past, a gene that Hillary clearly lacks.  Cold, calculating and utterly ruthless, Hillary believes she is entitled to power but can’t get it on her own.  She believes that other people exist to serve her, something we expect from Commie dictators but anathema to elected officials in a healthy democracy, yet can’t persuade them to believe that she cares about them, which is easy to understand: she doesn’t.

• Whitewater.  This episode alone should have ended her career and landed her in prison for fraud, obstruction of justice and perjury.  Having lost $40,000 on the original real estate deal, Hillary’s firm was hired by Madison Guaranty to handle legal work associated with it, a clear conflict of interest that should have resulted in professional censure at the very least, and when Congress subpoenaed her billing records in 1994 so they could determine if she had handled work in which she had a personal financial stake, she ignored them for two years until they were mysteriously “found” in her White House office.  Her grand jury testimony was knowingly false and her confederates (Jim and Susan McDougal and David Hale) were convicted on Federal corruption charges.

• Cattle futures trading.  Hillary turned a $1000 investment into $100,000 in only ten months in 1979, using a broker later censured by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for shady business practices. Occurring as it did at the same time that the Clintons invested in Whitewater and were desperate for money – Bill made $26,500 as Arkansas Attorney General and Hillary made $24,500 as a junior associate at the Rose Law Firm – this was a bribe by Tyson Foods for future “consideration,” regardless of what they said at the time.  In fact, in a report published in 1994, the Journal of Economics and Finance found that the chances of an inexperienced investor achieving the same results as Hillary did at the same time and with the same transactions were 1 in 31 trillion, thus the only conclusion we can draw is that Hillary was guilty of conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery and perjury.

• Travelgate. Hillary wanted to give the White House Travel Office business to her crony Harry Thomason as payback for the $1 million in travel services he provided the Clintons during the ’92 Presidential campaign.  Based on the existing employees’ sloppy record-keeping and business practices, she ordered them all fired but that wasn’t enough: They couldn’t be fired for sheer political gain, oh no, they had to be fired because they were a bunch of Bush 41 criminals and they deserved to be fired.  She insisted on an FBI investigation and when the inevitable doo-doo hit the fan, she denied her involvement,  lied to Congress, the GAO and the Independent Counsel and tampered with evidence by having Vince Foster’s records seized after his suicide.

• Vince Foster’s suicide.  She enlisted White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum to seize Foster’s records and prevent the U.S. Park Police from entering his office for 24 hours after his body was found.  Foster had been a senior partner at the Rose Law Firm, had known Bill since childhood and had hired Hillary as the firm’s first female lawyer.  He knew all about Travelgate and all the dirty secrets from Little Rock, and Hillary should have been indicted for conspiracy, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice and perjury.

• The health care initiative fell on its ass because Hillary’s haughty, ham-fisted approach alienated not only the Republican opposition but members of her own party, excepting, of course, the Leftist fellow-travelers of the kook fringe.  Congress and the country sensed that Hillary was forcing something on them that they didn’t want, something so massive and dangerous to our democracy that it had to be stopped – kind of like Obamacare.

• “It Takes A Village” – A total joke.  Hillary envisions a culture in which children are essentially state property, indoctrinated and controlled by Leftist social engineers and bureaucrats in Washington. If you don’t mind your kids ratting you out as counterrevolutionary to the KGB, then you’ll love it. Hillary also refused to acknowledge that the book had been written by a ghostwriter who had been paid $120,000 for the project, which is typical – taking credit for someone else’s work is characteristic for an egomaniac like her.

• The Children’s Defense Fund.  Another left-wing outfit we don’t need.  Hillary has known Marian Wright Edelman for 45 years and has helped that nutbag grossly expand the welfare state, abort as many black babies as possible, and undermine the Second Amendment and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit. The CDF sees parents as a threat, a bunch of stupid, uneducated, toothless hillbillies who teach their children to pour Mountain Dew on their corn flakes as they clutch their guns and pray, a threat to the socialist paradise that surely must come if only the State controlled the children.  This is how the CDF and Hillary see the future and it’s a future that ought to terrify you.

• As a U.S. Senator from New York, where they apparently don’t care if their elected officials live there or not, Hillary distinguished herself by voting to authorize President Bush’s attack on Saddam Hussein and then bitching about it for six years (“I AM SICK AND TIRED…”), opposing the troop surge in 2007 that actually stabilized Iraq, and ramming through the SCHIP legislation so adults as old as 26 can stay on their parents’ health insurance policy and so people with income 200% of the Federal poverty level can be subsidized, the biggest expansion of Medicaid in forty years.  Of course, the whole point of her Senate tenure was to give her credentials for her Presidential campaign, so for liberals who adore indecision and failure, Hillary is pure catnip, but for the rest of us, her eight years in the Greatest Legislative Body in the World represent the triumph of mediocrity.

• Secretary of State.  An unmitigated disaster on a global scale.  She executed Priest-King’s vision of a weak, fawning, desperate America flawlessly, blowing the “reset” with Russia that led to invasion and annexation of the Crimea, invasion and destabilization of eastern Ukraine, the murder of 298 people on board Malaysia Flight 17 and diplomatic defeat in Syria and Iran; overseeing our paralysis during the Arab Spring and the subsequent backlash in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as during the pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009; watching China hack our computers and seize the entire South China Sea with impunity; and surrendering Iraq and Afghanistan to chaos.  Violent Islamic insurgencies now rampage from the Hindu Kush to the streets of Paris, kidnapping, torturing, crucifying, beheading and burning people alive, and, of course, we have Benghazi.  As SECSTATE, she deliberately posted Ambassador Chris Stevens in an exposed position and repeatedly denied requests for additional security because his mission of running guns to the Free Syrian Army demanded a low profile, and after he and three security staff were murdered, she lied as to the identity of the attackers, their motive and her own responsibility for the debacle, which lies we cannot refute because all of her communications ran through a private e-mail server installed in her own home in violation of the Federal Records Act and National Archives policy.  She then had the gall to tell us that “smart power” meant “showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible empathize with their perspective and point of view…”, as if the carnage ISIS wreaks could be cured with an encounter group instead of a cruise missile. Moron.

Hillary Clinton has spent the last forty years breaking the law because, as far as she’s concerned, she’s above it.  Her intellect is so lofty, her intentions so pure, her insight so penetrating, that the ordinary protocols of life don’t apply.  She’s beyond things like loyalty and integrity and justice, she’s entitled to wealth and fame and power and the Presidency, too, and how DARE you criticize her?  She attacks corporations and CEO’s and Wall Street and capitalism while taking a $14 million advance for a book that nobody read, she claims she was “dead broke” when she left the White House in 2001 while she collects $300,000 per lecture and flies around in a Gulfstream, she “fights for the middle class” as she wears Oscar de la Renta and won’t tip the staff at Chipotle, and she feigns sincerity and concern while hundreds of millions of people suffer because of her ineptitude, and while four Americans molder in their graves.  Her campaign is fake, her smile plastic, everything fanatically controlled and staged and choreographed so she looks concerned and looks amused and looks like she gives a damn while every fiber of her being rebels against the charade.  She hates being demeaned, she hates sitting and listening to the worries of other people because she simply doesn’t give a shit.  She hates that she has to persuade people to vote for her, hates that these peons control her destiny, and seethes at the humiliation she has to endure.  She hates that other people know this, she hates that campaigning was so effortless for Bill, that she lost to Priest-King seven years ago and had to serve him to keep her Presidential aspirations alive, she knows that there’s a chance she’ll blow this opportunity, too, so she demands $2.5 billion for her campaign, death-march loyalty from the Democrat Party and preening adulation from her amen corner in the legacy media.  Looking to history for some sort of parallel, she’s certainly as cunning and ruthless as Lucrezia Borgia but certainly not as hot, so Catherine de Medici comes to mind.  Homely but highly intelligent, determined and capable of astounding brutality, wielding power that belonged to someone else and never able to attain it for herself, Catherine dominated France for forty-five years until she was ultimately repudiated so we can only hope that America is so tired of Hillary’s shopworn charms that they deal her a similar fate: We don’t want you to go away mad, Hillary, we just want you to go away.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0

Source: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/hillary-clinton-wants-us-to-empathize-with-our-enemies-even-these-enemies/

Source: https://youtu.be/2zVHgqj8His

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hereas-a-tip-hillary/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3042448/Scooby-limps-Iowa-Secret-Service-parked-Hillary-Clinton-s-van-HANDICAPPED-spot-huddled-Democratic-leaders-high-stakes-meeting.html

Libellus

On 03 January 250, Emperor Gaius Messius Quintus Decius Augustus performed the annual sacrifice to Jupiter, king of the gods of the Roman pantheon, and in an attitude of restoring Rome’s former glory – reviving the office of censor, repairing the Collosseum, resisting the encroachment of the barbarian Goths in the Balkans – issued a decree that all Roman citizens, wherever they were (with the notable exception of the Jews), would be required to sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods in front of a commissioner employed for that purpose, burn incense to those gods and the emperor, consume the meat thus sacrificed and obtain a written certificate signed by the commissioner and witnesses attesting to the act.  To Decius, part of Rome’s decline was attributable to neglect of the old religion and traditions that had made Rome so dominant in the ancient world: The cult of Mithras, imported from Persia, was popular among the soldiers that defended the empire, druidism ruled the Celtic tribes from Brittania, Gaul and Germania, and there was this pesky superstition called Christianity that despite ruthless suppression, had managed to spread across the empire in the millions.  Decius’ decree, therefore, would serve as a common denominator, a shared platform of belief for all Romans and a foundation for future greatness.

The Christians, of course, saw it differently.  Having professed their faith in Jesus Christ as God Incarnate and their personal Savior, they could not then deny Him and sacrifice to idols and eat food sacrificed to those idols as the edict required, but refusing to obey the emperor exposed them to arrest, imprisonment, torture and death.  What could they do?  How could any legitimate government force them to violate the deepest convictions of their conscience?  In response, some Christians fled for their lives, others gave in and complied with the decree and others, standing on their faith, were martyred, and fortunately, Decius didn’t live long enough to give his order full effect: Like his thirteen immediate predecessors, he died a violent death, killed by the Goths at the Battle of Abritus in June 251.  Nonetheless, for seventeen months, the Roman Empire with all its might and cruelty sought to force Christians to abandon their core beliefs and swear allegiance to pagan gods and it was a watershed moment – the first empire-wide, officially-sanctioned effort to break the Christian faith.

In this country, the state of Indiana, of which I am a native, has sought to give protection not only to Christians but to others who hold deep religious convictions from legal action brought against them by the state and by private entities.  The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, SB 101, allows citizens and businesses to use their religious convictions as a defense if they are party to a court case, in essence restating and affirming our Constitutional right under the First Amendment which is by itself rather plain and unremarkable.  After all, whose interest is served by coercing people to violate their consciences? Who wins when a Christian photographer is forced to cover a homosexual wedding or a Christian church is forced to hire a Muslim secretary or a Christian business is forced to provide insurance coverage for abortions? Is it really in the public interest to create an adversarial relationship between Christians and the rest of society, including their government?

For the radical Left, the answers to these questions are unequivocally, “Mine, me and absolutely yes.” The idea that a bunch of self-righteous snake handlers can refuse to acknowledge one of their favored groups and hide behind “religious principles” is intolerable for them, though they make an exception for Muslims on ideological as well as practical grounds: Muslims are much more likely to cut off your head or burn you alive if they don’t like you.  For the Left, government is their golden calf and they bitterly resent anyone who worships anything else, anyone whose principles don’t change with the times – Paul Begala, appearing on MSNBC on 01 April, stated that, “People can have religious principles, they just can’t act on them,” the most patently stupid remark in the history of patently stupid remarks and emblematic of the Left’s attitude.  As far as liberals are concerned, all trust and confidence must be placed in a faithless, autocratic engine of liberal dogma that consumes and dominates everything, including freedom of belief, in an endless quest for “equality” and “fairness,” which are defined as anything that the Left wants at any particular time, and to have trust and confidence in something else, something changeless and permanent and unmoving and not the work of human hands, say, the supreme God of the universe,  enfuriates  the Left.  How dare you disagree with us?  How dare you refuse to recognize the supremacy of government over the individual and of man over God?  How dare you refuse to validate the absurdity of homosexual marriage as normal, even sacrosanct?  In our outrage (not moral, but an apish mockery of morality), we demand your surrender, we viciously insult you, we threaten to burn your business and kill you because in our pursuit of tolerance, we cannot tolerate disagreement, and we will do this during Holy Week and as Al-Shabaab carefully, systematically murders 147 Christian college students in Kenya.  We don’t care – we hate you and if you refuse to obey us, we’ll put you to death.

Forty years ago, the idea that homosexuals could legally marry each other was ludicrous, as was the idea that Christians would need legal protection for voicing their opposition to it, yet here we are, and who’s to say where we’ll be forty years from now?  From homosexual marriage, we could legitimize polygamy, pedophilia, groups of people marrying other groups of people, Christian ministers being  jailed for refusing to perform such perverse unions,  marijuana sold over the counter at your neighborhood drugstore, and to enforce acceptance of such practices, the government could establish a loyalty oath, administered at, say, the local DMV.  You’d raise your right hand and while the ceremony was recorded by video monitors and microphones, some bureaucrat would administer the oath, you and he would sign it, your driver’s license would be updated accordingly and on your way you’d go, having given the government your approval of whatever depravity they were so inclined to sanction, and in exchange for your approval, you’d keep your freedom.  On the other hand, if you refused such an oath and gave your Christian convictions as the basis for your refusal, maybe you’d lose your license right then and there.  Maybe your car would be impounded and you’d have to walk home.  Maybe you’d lose your job or your house would be confiscated or your financial assets would be frozen, or maybe it would get much worse than that.  Maybe your children would be declared wards of the state and forcibly removed a la Elian Gonzalez, maybe your wife would be arrested and maybe you’d be declared mentally incompetent and be committed to an insane asylum for “treatment,” and after a year or two, you’d be given a chance to recant.  And then, if you still refused, you’d be declared persona non grata and be internally exiled to Alaska because faith in an invisible, changeless, righteous God is incompatible with the wishes of a corrupt, hard-Left and dictatorial state, or, as has happened so often in the past and as happens so frequently now, you’d just be shot: Tolerance, after all, has its limits.

Sources:

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/27/text-indianas-religious-freedom-law/70539772/

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-inc/

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/elane-photography-llc-v-willock/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416297/high-school-coach-anyone-want-help-me-burn-down-pizzeria-wont-cater-gay-weddings

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/02/12/cnns-cuomo-our-rights-do-not-come-from-god/

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2015/03/23/yahoo-political-reporter-cruz-talking-about-god-given-rights-bizarre

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416289/memories-pizza-just-memory-google-least-ian-tuttle

The New Mythology

One reason behind liberals’ psychosis for higher taxes and spending is the persistent gap between

very prosperous and not-very-prosperous people.  Driven, objective-oriented, enterprising people always seem to find new ways to make money while others seldom do, in spite of the heavy taxes levied on those entrepreneurs and the generous subsidies lavished on the middle class and the poor.  This should illustrate simple human nature and the futility of the Big Government paradigm but for the Left, it stokes frustration and anger, frustration that higher taxes don’t stop rich people from getting rich and anger that they would dare to do so.  Don’t they know that a classless society would be best for everyone? If everyone shared the same staid, mediocre standard of living with nobody being super-rich and nobody being super-poor, then class envy would cease and a new era of human life would begin, and though this dream has mesmerized liberals for 100 years, it ignores basic human nature.  If I have no incentive to excel, to invent new things or start a new business or take any kind of risk, then I’ll sit on my hands and wait for my welfare check like everyone else; conversely, if I lack the intelligence or the training or the special skills or drive to excel and I’m one of the people who depend on risk-takers for my welfare check, then I’m in a very precarious position indeed.  The Soviet Union discovered this truth to its cost, China discovered it and adapted before it also collapsed. Cuba and North Korea and Venezuela and Bolivia and Nicaragua may rail against capitalism but they depend on it for their very lives while Europe grapples with the reality that hard-working and thrifty Germans cannot support the rest of Europe on their own: There’s something wrong with asking them to pay higher taxes so Greeks can retire at 45.

Highly intelligent and possessed of rarefied sensitivities as he is supposed to be, however, Priest-King insists that the problems that other countries have had with socialism are attributable to the fact that he wasn’t in charge.  If Great Britain was teetering on economic collapse in 1979, then the problem wasn’t egregiously high taxes and welfare spending but rather he wasn’t there to raise them even higher.  A devotee of the Keynesian school of economic thought, Priest-King believes that government spending stimulates growth, so if you want faster growth, you spend more.  This would be fine if government actually generated its own revenue but everyone, including Priest-King, knows it does not.  Government takes money from people and businesses who’ve earned it and redistributes it as the government sees fit, something like giving yourself a transfusion and about as likely to stimulate economic growth with the exception that, with a transfusion, you don’t incur debt.  It’s an inescapable fact that Priest-King and his coterie of hypnotized followers choose to ignore, instead choosing to believe that if the poor and the middle class are subsidized just enough,  they’ll attain a new level of affluence and security and if the rich are taxed just heavily enough, they’ll stop outperforming their neighbors and accept a lower standard of living for themselves.  Priest-King has vigorously exercised his belief over the past six years, spending over $20 trillion ($8 trillion of which was borrowed), creating a gigantic new Federal construct for rationing health care, spending trillions of dollars on stimulus projects that didn’t exist, home mortgage bailouts and car company bailouts and green energy projects that failed and yet the economy remains punch-drunk.  Over five million jobs have been eliminated during his administration and if unemployment has declined, it has declined because people have either given up looking for work entirely or accepted a part-time job because no full-time jobs were available.  Meanwhile, Wall Street sets records and the gap between rich and poor has actually widened, so given the results achieved, one would conclude that Priest-King’s policies have failed utterly to attain his goal, but that would require intellectual honesty which Priest-King does not have.  His political philosophy is founded on class warfare and using government as a cudgel to beat the bourgeoisie into submission, so rather than abandon an approach that has clearly flopped, he soldiers on, defiantly.  His FY2016 budget rests at $4.1 trillion with at least $438 billion of new debt, he proposes to cancel the sequestration cuts that have only moderately slowed government spending and instead raise spending by 7% across the board; he further proposes to increase taxes by $2 trillion over the next ten years (including a 14% tax on U.S. corporate profits held overseas) and to offer the first two years of community college for free, which of course means that someone else gets the bill.  This is a preposterous budget made more so by the fact that Priest-King suffered yet another punishing mid-term defeat only three months ago.  He faces strong Republican majorities in the House and Senate and in state legislatures across the country and rather than at least attempt to negotiate with the opposition, he raises his middle finger.  This may be red meat to his true believers on the Left but it also defies reason: Colossal taxes and spending have not helped and cannot help the poor because they do nothing about the natural ability some people have toward industry and prosperity and the natural inclination of others to stay exactly where they are.  Saying so may cause Nancy Pelosi’s head to explode but it’s the truth nonetheless.  We would all be better off if Priest-King proposed cutting the top individual and top corporate tax rates to 25% respectively, eliminating capital gains taxes and balancing the Federal budget by 2025, recognizing that doing so would energize prosperous people to expand existing businesses or start new ones, buy new equipment or floor space, hire more workers and invest and create better jobs and thereby help everyone, but he is indeed the Priest-King and he knows better than everyone else and that in a nutshell explains why the suffering will continue, unabated.

Ishmael's Fury

It had to be confusing for him.  He was thirteen years old, the only son of a rich and powerful man, a man who doted on him, who lavished time and attention on him, a man who talked to God.  His mother was his father's slave which wasn't unusual for the time but it didn't seem to matter, his father loved him all the same, spending time with him and teaching him things as fathers do with their sons.  He was shocked and frightened when his father announced that he had to circumcise him because of some promise that God had made to him, and it was painful, but the old man - he was 99 years old! - underwent the same trial, feeling the same pain that his son felt, binding them even closer together than before.  So when his father said that God had promised him another son by his wife, that God would establish a special covenant with this boy to bless him and his descendants forever and not with him, he had to have been bewildered.  What had he done?  Why wasn't he good enough?  Why couldn't God favor him instead of this new kid?  True, he had sometimes been unruly, disobedient, picking fights with other kids, but his mother had told him that was his nature, that God predicted he would be wild yet his father loved him anyway, so again, why wouldn't God choose him?

His father told him that he would be the father of a great nation, the father of twelve princes, but such promises fell short.  He was the oldest!  He was the first!  God should have promoted him, not someone else, and when his father gave a great banquet to celebrate the baby's weaning, he couldn't help but tease the little kid.  After all, what was he supposed to do, just sit quietly while someone stole his inheritance?  But then the old woman retaliated, demanding that his father throw him out, with his mother, right into the desert, like they were trash.  Where were they supposed to go, with just the clothes on their backs and only the food and water that they carried?  As I said, it had to be confusing for him.

Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, survived their journey into the desert, with God's help, and God kept His promise to make him a great nation.  He indeed fathered twelve sons and lived to the ripe old age of 137, the great-grandfather of all the Arab people.  But it wasn't enough.  That God would deliberately subordinate him to Isaac, giving him favored status, that he would be deliberately passed over and then exiled into the wilderness, kindled a bitterness that burns in his descendants to this day.  Year after year, century after century, the anger and envy and resentment seethed and bubbled and boiled until one of his number invented a religion to channel that rage, an ideology that rejected his younger brother's ascendancy and justified his destruction.  Ishmael was God's heir, not Isaac!  The Arabs were God's Chosen People, not the Jews!  The Jews and their cousins the Christians had it all wrong, in fact, Abraham was a Muslim and they were all infidels!  "We will subjugate the entire earth and force you to recognize us as your superiors, you infidel dogs!" they shouted, or words to that effect, and the slaughter of fourteen centuries began.

We face people who worship death, who gas children, who poison children, who behead and crucify children.  The Chechen thugs who machine-gunned children in Beslan, Russia, while they ran for their lives are kin to the Boko Haram thugs who burn children alive in Nigeria, who are kin to the Taliban thugs in Pakistan who shot Malala Yusufzai in the face for the crime of going to school, and are kin to the ISIS thugs who sawed James Foley's head off in Syria.  From Mohammed's first bleary vision, Muslims have killed and butchered and drowned and crushed anyone who resisted them, anyone who refused to convert to their bloody religion, anyone who just wanted to be left alone, anyone who wasn't exactly like them.  They reject our ideas of morality, individual worth and dignity, freedom of expression and democracy.  The concept of separating government from religion is absurd to them, as is independent thought and action.  They aren't students of postmodernism; they hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center.  They espouse the anithesis of Western, Judeo-Christian values:  Rigid, autocratic control of all human activity, the enslavement of the human soul and the dissolution of the self, and thus are our mortal enemies.

Priest-King doesn't believe this.

Priest-King believes that Islam's war against the rest of the world is our fault, meaning America.  We've antagonized them, exploited them, occupied their lands, interfered in their political affairs, supported Israel, invaded Iraq and waged war against them for over thirteen years.  We consistently disregard their complaints and impose our values on them, so his approach is to apologize vehemently for our past actions and then disengage from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria and anywhere where decisive American leadership is needed.  He always seems surprised when American withdrawal is followed by brutal Muslim violence, and the fact that he absented himself from the rally of world leaders in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet went out of his way to commune with the Saudi princes following King Abdullah's death speaks to his character and his worldview:  Opposing Islam is bad, embracing Islam is good.  Thus we have precisely the wrong man in charge at the moment Muslim savagery is escalating, a man who sympathizes with the perpetrators and who despises the very country he leads, the only country capable of destroying these sociopaths once-and-for-all.

But as I have said, the seething hatred that fuels jihadist atrocities predates Israel and the United States and even the West as we know it.  Muslims have been attacking and burning and pillaging since Emperor Heraclius first confronted them from the New Rome, so democracy and Hollywood movies have nothing to do with their anger.  This relentless drive to destroy has its root not just in a sense of impotence against Western scientific, technological, economic and military superiority but in the insane jealousy Ishmael had for his brother, the outrage at being considered illegitimate, inadequate, cast aside and forgotten.  His descendants want to build a new civilization on Isaac's bones, a civilization that exalts depravity and the subjugation of the human spirit, a civilization that denies freedom and grace and hope and offers bondage, tyranny  and despair instead, a civilization for whom Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban is a model society.  Regardless of ISIS terror and Priest-King's fecklessness, we must resolve to resist this onslaught, to defend ourselves by ourselves, to defend the freedom so dearly bought by our ancestors and lift up the Name of Jesus, by whom all things are possible.  God grant us the wisdom and the strength to do it.

The Starving Time

While the multiple overseas crises, the surge of illegals across our southern border and

administration scandals hold our collective attention, I thought I would take a step back and see how 66 months of Priest-King’s enlightened leadership have reinvigorated the economy since the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009.  (I put quotation marks around the phrase since I lived through the double-dip recessions of 1978-1983 and times were a lot tougher then, but I digress.) I’ve devoted quite a bit of effort detailing the failure of his socialist policies in a conventional sense and the success of his socialist policies in advancing his goals, namely the massive increase in the size, scope and power of government, the redistribution of the nation’s wealth and the restructuring of our economy from free-market capitalism to a central planning model, but after commenting on the Priest-King’s laughable management style and foreign policy, it’s time to beat the economic horse again.

First, let’s see what improvements have been made.  The unemployment rate as of 01 July 2014 was 6.1%, the lowest since September 2008 as the home mortgage meltdown began to bite and a marked decrease since October 2009 when the rate peaked at 10.0%.  The private sector has recorded net job growth for at least 22 consecutive months and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached an all-time high of 17,138.20, an increase of 260% from the rock-bottom mark of 6594.44 in March 2009, so at first blush, it would seem that we are steadily recovering from the recession but if we look at the big picture, things simply aren’t as rosy as Priest-King would have us believe. During this so-called “recovery,” the economy has grown at an average rate of 2.2% per quarter and a total of 11.1%, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the average GDP growth of all post-1960 recoveries is 4.1% and a total of 21.1%, so the recovery that Priest-King has managed is roughly half of what we would expect.  There are 5.6 million fewer jobs available now than there were seven years ago and because of the stark conditions, the labor force participation rate is 63.7%, the lowest mark since 1983: People have simply given up trying to find work. Even worse, if someone is able to find a job, it is more likely to be part-time as employers try to cope with the steep costs of Obamacare – as of December 2013, the full-time labor participation rate was 80.9%, a decrease of 1.7% from the pre-recession level, while the proportion of employees working 34 hours per week or less has climbed.

Taxes and regulations under Priest-King have strangled growth. As of 01 January 2013, thirteen new taxes took effect including six related to Obamacare alone.  The social security payroll tax went up from 4.2% to 6.2%, the top marginal tax rate for incomes over $450,000 went up from 35% to 39.6%, businesses will no longer be able to deduct the full cost of capital improvements, the deduction for corporate expenses related to the Medicare Part B subsidy has been eliminated and the deduction for individual medical expenses has been reduced, among other things.  Together with 157 new major regulations that cost $73 billion per year for compliance and we have a U.S. economy that is being choked into submission, crawling on the floor, unable to generate the revenue required to repay our $17 trillion in national debt, let alone create millions of high-paying, full-time jobs.

Contributing to the stratospheric rise in our national debt is the fact that 49.5% of all workers pay no Federal income taxes at all.  (People ridiculed Mitt Romney’s remark that he’d never be able to convince 47% of the voters to support him because of their dependence on government, but it turns out Mitt actually underestimated the figure.)  Combine that with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day and we face $45.9 trillion in obligations over the next 75 years with no way to pay it.  By 2024, 62% of the non-interest Federal budget will be devoted to Social Security and Medicare alone, resulting in a burden of $299,000 per working American which is clearly unsustainable, but we’re not done yet.

Since LBJ declared War on Poverty in 1964, the Federal government has spent over $17 trillion on means-tested welfare but poverty has actually increased.  One out of seven Americans relies on food stamps for basic survival, spending on food stamps has almost doubled from $39.3 billion annually to $75.3 billion and Priest-King, rather than help the poor transition from assistance to work, has accelerated the growth of welfare by excising that part of the 1994 Welfare Reform Act that requires welfare recipients to work in exchange for their benefits.  By providing cash bonuses to states that enroll more welfare cases and covering 80% of the cost of new enrollees, the Federal government gives the states powerful incentives to sign up more people to the public trough and undercuts the intent of welfare reform to transition people from dependency to self-sufficiency.  Adding insult to injury, the expansion of welfare destroys families: 72.8% of black children born in 2009 were illegitimate.

The facts speak for themselves.  In exchange for the suffering of 313 million people and permanent damage to our democracy, we have feeble growth and below-normal employment.  Calling what we have a “recovery” insults the definition of the word.  Priest-King believes that prosperity is only prosperity when everyone prospers, that success is only success when everyone succeeds, that equal results matter more than equal opportunity.  If someone is disinclined to work, then it is the duty of government to provide that person a safe, secure, stable living for the rest of their life.  Free-market capitalism with its emphasis on risk-taking, initiative, individual responsibility and self-reliance is anathema to his vision, it must be chained, shackled, taxed regulated and beaten into submission.  With huge tax increases, huge costs for Obamacare, hundreds of new rules, millions of people giving up on finding a job and a shrinking, overworked and ragged workforce, it is no surprise that the economy is gasping, wheezing and limping along.  This is the new normal whether we like it or not.  As in the Clinton years when liberal pundits told us that lying was actually beneficial, Priest-King wants us to believe that mediocrity is success, that unemployment is being productive and that destroying the world’s greatest economy is inspired leadership: God save us from more inspiration.  My friends, this state of affairs threatens our democracy.  The Founders envisioned a nation of self-starters, rugged individualists who only needed a clear set of rules to move out and make their dreams reality.  They supplied their own drive, their own resources, their own creativity and they were willing to sweat, they reached the Pacific Ocean and then the moon, they cured diseases,  they won two world wars, invented amazing technology, fed their friends and enemies alike and built the greatest nation in the history of the world.  The Founders certainly didn’t anticipate a nation where 36.3% of working-age adults sit idle, where half the population pays no taxes yet draws on the public treasury, where we pay people not to work and punish those who work too well, where the president not only doesn’t stop such misery but encourages it.  Even a liberal like Thomas Jefferson would be appalled at a society in which sloth is rewarded and prosperity is flogged in the public square, and would recognize that when the resources are gone, chaos will surely follow.  “He who does not work, neither shall he eat,” decreed Captain John Smith in the Jamestown colony, quoting Scripture, and by enforcing this simple credo, he helped save the colony from starvation.  I pray to God that we relearn it soon because Priest-King may be Messiah-in-Chief but he’s no John Smith.

Fighting Joe

Joe Hooker was a man poised for greatness.  The grandson of a Revolutionary War officer, he graduated

from West Point and served with distinction in the Seminole and Mexican Wars, earning three promotions in the process. In the first two years of the Civil War, he proved to be a brave, aggressive and effective division and corps commander, eliciting praise for his combat leadership in the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, Antietam (where he was wounded) and the debacle that was Fredericksburg.  Promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac, Joe Hooker was within reach of the ultimate prize: If he could destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and win the war, he would be acclaimed a national hero and the Presidency would be his for the asking.

Greatness has a price, though, and sometimes you have to step on toes to get it. Hooker testified against his old commanding general, Winfield Scott, during a court-martial proceeding in the 1850’s, resigned his commission, openly criticized Union generalship during the First Battle of Manassas and asked President Lincoln to reinstate him, brazenly highlighting his own qualifications for command. He mocked George McClellan in the press and was insubordinate to McClellan’s successor, Ambrose Burnside, during and after the Battle of Fredericksburg, going so far as to propose setting up a dictator.  Having been promoted to lead the Union’s premier land force, Hooker reformed and strengthened the Army of the Potomac to such a point that he boasted, “May God have mercy on General Lee for I shall have none.”  True, he was a hard-drinking man and a womanizer, but he had a great army and a great plan which, if executed, would indeed annihilate the Army of Northern Virginia, open the road to Richmond and end the war.

So far, so good.  In late April 1863, Hooker ordered a cavalry raid behind Lee’s lines which, although conducted cautiously, nonetheless distracted and confused Lee enough to enable Hooker to cross the Rappahannock River and appear on Lee’s left flank.  By dawn of Friday, 01 May 1863, he had 70,000 men on Lee’s side of the river and with light resistance, threatened to envelop the Rebels from the east and the west.  As the day progressed, resistance increased but by 2:00 PM, the Federals had pushed through to the eastern edge of the dense forest called the Wilderness and it was then that things began to come apart.  Hooker started to lose his nerve and rather than continue the attack, he ordered his men to withdraw and then dig in, hoping that Lee would be forced to attack his larger army.  Having witnessed Lee baffle and humiliate successive Union generals while outnumbered and outgunned, maybe Hooker was afraid of the wily Virginian, but for whatever reason, Hooker’s confused and frustrated subordinates fell back, passing the initiative to their worst enemy.

Defying all military logic, Lee had divided his army to hold the Federals threatening Fredericksburg and then deal with Hooker’s attack, and then did it again, sending Stonewall Jackson’s entire corps of 28,000 men on a looping march around the Union lines.  Besides noticing Hooker’s sudden timidity, Lee also saw that Hooker’s right flank was left exposed and vulnerable, so rather than attack Hooker head-on as “Fighting Joe” had hoped, Lee chose to assault Hooker’s weakest position and, if he was successful, roll up the entire Federal army and turn looming defeat into overwhelming victory.  For nine hours on Saturday, 02 May 1863, Stonewall Jackson’s II Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia marched across the front of the Federal positions, partially screened by Jeb Stuart’s cavalry but repeatedly observed by men of the Union III Corps and the reconnaissance balloon Eagle.  Reports of the Confederate movements reached Hooker who issued desultory orders to prepare for an attack but took no assertive action to either bolster his right flank or fall on Jackson’s corps while on the march, essentially allowing the Rebels freedom of maneuver until, at 5:30 PM while troops of the Federal XI Corps were preparing their supper, 28,000 screaming Confederates exploded out of the woods and the rout was on.  The Union right flank collapsed, and though Stonewall Jackson was himself mortally wounded that night and there was hard fighting the next day, the battle was lost.  To add insult to injury, Hooker was stunned by a cannonball that struck a roofpost at his headquarters on 03 May, knocking him senseless for an hour. At this critical time, while he was stupefied and probably concussed, he refused to relinquish command, paralyzing the Army of the Potomac when it desperately needed strong, professional leadership, and the Battle of Chancellorsville would become Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory and the Union’s most humiliating defeat.  Despite overwhelming advantages in men and materiel, Joe Hooker went down in history not as a national hero but as a national laughingstock.

Barack Hussein Obama, Priest-King of the Americas, Generalissimo of the People’s Revolution and Keeper of the Golden Flame, assumed office in January 2009 and inherited the world’s top economy and the world’s best military.  America was in the depths of a serious recession (caused by liberal social engineering as reported in detail in this space and elsewhere) but the underlying structure was sound, and rather than relieve the burden of heavy taxes and onerous regulations to spur growth, Obama defied logic by increasing taxes and issuing thousands of new rules and adding trillions of dollars in additional debt. While Joe Hooker’s highest level of competence was as a corps commander, Priest-King’s highest level of competence was as a social gadfly, a community organizer who spurs other people to action while assuming no responsibility himself, and also like Joe Hooker, a goad who found it much easier to criticize someone else’s leadership than to exercise command himself. Like Hooker, Obama had an ambitious plan that he couldn’t execute and when faced with a situation he didn’t understand or anticipate, he froze – his reactions to the Iranian elections in 2009, the comatose economy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt times two, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear program, Iraq, Europe’s financial crisis, the burgeoning conflict between Israel and Hamas, the invasion on our southern border and the various scandals plaguing his administration.  He has been outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad, by Iran and by everyone living in Central America, he can’t believe, he cannot accept what is happening right in front of him, he watches transfixed as the disaster unfolds, motionless, unblinking, “like a duck that’s been hit on the head” as Lincoln described Hooker.  The common thread running through all of these situations is a crying lack of leadership, the fumbling, slow-witted paralysis of a man outmatched by circumstances, a college professor whose ideas, so fashionable at liberal cocktail parties, are proven to be inadequate after five years of hard experience.  His bold promises and boasting are now known to be lies, his strategy of “soft power” and “lead from behind” is a late-night punchline, he is a proud man who can hear the snickering behind his back, the PhD who can’t change a tire. Yet he remains in charge, too arrogant to pass command to abler hands, and we have no Lincoln to relieve him, so we will suffer more, the world will suffer more, someone will carve him in marble to great acclaim and we will hope to God that we never hear of him again.

Sliding Toward the Abyss

My stepson called me last night to discuss Eric Cantor’s surprising loss in the Virginia Republican primary and that occupied our attention for a good while – it shows the establishment GOP that they have to deal with the Tea Party honestly or go down in flames – but the conversation turned when I told him that the city of Mosul had been taken by al-Qaeda, that 500,000 people were fleeing the city and that the Iraqi security forces, trained and equipped and supported at such a high cost in blood and treasure these past eleven years, had also fled the city, abandoning their vehicles, weapons, equipment and even their uniforms in their haste.  He was very sad at this news since he worked in Mosul as a contractor for Kellogg, Brown and Root for two years (he worked in Iraq from 2003-2007 during the worst of the insurgency) and knew military and civilian personnel who had been killed trying to secure the city, and the realization that all the sacrifices made toward that goal had been wasted struck him hard: The black flag of al-Qaeda now flew over his former compound.

America is repeating one of its worst traits in the loss of Mosul, that of abandoning a major strategic objective before the objective is met and leaving the affected people to their fate.  John Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and at a critical moment, withheld naval and air support that doomed the operation.  In 1975, despite firm and repeated assurances to the contrary, Gerald Ford denied military assistance to South Vietnam as it was invaded by the North, guaranteeing a Communist victory and the worst strategic defeat in our history. Jimmy Carter refused to support Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as he faced a fundamentalist Muslim revolution in Iran because Carter disapproved of the human rights abuses committed by the Shah’s security forces, though the U.S. had overthrown the previous government in favor of Pahlavi and the Shah had been a major ally against Soviet expansionism in the Persian Gulf for twenty years. This ensured the rise of the most radical Islamic regime in the world, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to Middle East peace ever. George H.W. Bush encouraged the Shiite tribes in southern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein in 1991, as well as the Kurds in the north, then stood aside and watched as they were slaughtered in the thousands by Saddam’s tanks and gunships.  Over and over, America fights and bleeds and dies for an objective and then goes home before the objective is achieved, with dangerous consequences for us and deadly consequences for the people we leave behind.

Maybe establishing an Arab democracy in Iraq was simply impossible, maybe overcoming the kleptocracy was simply too hard, but after 9/11, it was worth the attempt and was certainly worth a better effort than arbitrary retreat.  Thirteen years of combat and massive investment have failed to change the corruption inherent in Afghan tribal culture and having declared unilaterally that the war is over, America leaves that benighted country in the hands of a resurgent Taliban to complete its misery.  In both of these cases, we chose to walk away, we could have stayed and fought the enemy on his own territory and kept the worst of Islamic extremism from our shores and we could have done so indefinitely, but our President lacks the stomach for that.  He is interested, rather, in disengaging from conflicts, in disengaging from the hard and flinty work of defending our interests, in assuaging hurt feelings in the Muslim world, in exchanging five hardened Taliban commanders for one American deserter, in emptying the cages at Guantanamo to please his friends at Berkeley, in giving up.  Projecting American power into the teeth of our enemies nauseates him (as his commencement speech at West Point last month attests), and beyond disdain for the military – cutting their budget by $1 trillion by 2022, closing the National World War II Memorial during the government shutdown – he just doesn’t think that America and her commitments are worth fighting for.  Those Iraqis who welcomed the Americans in 2003, who trusted us and helped us and believed that a democratic Iraq was possible, who now are running for their lives, are simply gullible and eminently disposable fools.  Those Afghans who suffered under the Taliban’s savage rule, who cooperated with us against them, who wanted a brighter future for their daughters than mutilation, slavery, ignorance and an early death, who now face the return of those pitiless sociopaths to the seat of power, live in a country very far away, whose customs we don’t understand and who are so ungovernable that even Alexander the Great gave up and returned to Babylon. Those Syrians who believed the President of the United States when he said that use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line” that would invite swift retribution, whose children have been massacred by Assad’s poison gas and who lie in their graves unavenged, cannot be distinguished from the Hizbollah, Iranian and al-Qaeda thugs now overrunning the country and aren’t worth a confrontation with Vladimir Putin; ditto Ukraine.  Priest-King finds these people boring and tedious, their circumstances too complicated for his lofty intellect, annoying distractions from the important work of dismantling the world’s lone superpower and shaping his legacy.  So he looks away, maybe for political reasons but maybe because he knows the job is too big for him, maybe because florid speeches and empty threats are no replacement for guts, maybe because he is the wrong President for our time.  America deserves better, certainly Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine deserve better, but as we contemplate what could have been, Mosul burns.