Friday Afternoon Roundup - You Never Know

ON THE BLACKBOARD

I have gotten the occasional request to read an article or two in a podcast, but while I never got around to acting out one of my articles, Glenn Beck did. For anyone who wants to see one of my articles acted out with props and cameras, watch the video. It's nice to see my work up on that blackboard and to know that it influenced the political process.

The original article, Ron Paul's Soros Defense Plan, appeared here and at Front Page Magazine, and was mentioned at websites like Noisy Room. It's nice to see that it made its further into the pipeline and may have even changed some minds.

The research isn't new, and I had commented on it in a Friday Afternoon Roundup a year ago, and would mention it from time to time, but two weeks ago I picked it up again, dusted it off, did more in depth research and decided it deserved to be an article of its own.

For a political writer the best reward is knowing that you have made a difference. It's why I got into this, it's why I go on doing it day after day. My computer died on Sunday. I'm getting by this week with a netbook and an old dusted off dinosaur still running Windows ME until UPS brings the new one one over. It's why I may not have been able to get back to some of your emails, and I'm cut off from Facebook and Twitter completely, so I can't respond to anyone there for which I apologize. But there's so much to write about and no matter what technical problems get in the way, when your fingers are flying over the keyboard to get the message out then all other things are forgotten.

Still when an article provides useful material to build on, showing appreciation by commenting on it, sharing it, linking in to it or citing it is a good thing to do because it encourages the author to write more of the same. If you like an article enough to make extensive use of it in your own article or video, then crediting the author of it is a good way of making sure that more material like it will be produced that you or others can use. It enriches the ecosystem of ideas on our side and that benefits everyone.

We're all fighting the good fight against a common enemy. And that's what really matters. Solidarity in that fight derives from a common cause, but it also derives from how we treat each other.




A SYRIAN PUNCHLINE

The Arab League, which partially backed NATO action against Gaddafi, sent a team of observers to monitor Syria's human rights, with the different factions pushing them one way or another. The Arab League's word could justify all sorts of interventions which would then appear to have the backing of the Muslim world, or at least those parts of it that have most of the oil money.

Heading up the superteam of human rights experts was Lieutenant General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi who is an expert at human rights because he was the commander of Sudan's Arab Muslim genocide against its native population back in the 90's. And Al-Dabi and the team found nothing too serious going on in Syria, which is true compared to what Dabi and the boys were doing to Christians and Animists in Sudan.

Speaking out against the team's conclusions is Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jasim Bin Jaber Al Thani, who has even more names than Al-Dabi does, who said that the Arab League team was inexperienced and needs help from the United Nations.

Qatar's Al-Jazeera has been backing and propagandizing the Arab Spring and Al-Thani was telling Al-Dabi, "You got it wrong the first time. Go back and join up with the UN and determine there's genocide so we can overthrow Assad."

Al-Thani is a member of the local royals overseeing a dictatorship or monarchy if you want to be romantic. Al-Dabi is the pet thug of a genocidal totalitarian state. And Al-Dabi and Al-Thani are debating how bad a third dictator and his totalitarian state are and whether they should be overthrown in the name of human rights.

To sum up. Bashar Assad of Syria is a dictator. Sudan's Omar Hassan Al-Bashir is a dictator. Qatar's Al-Thani clan is another dictatorship. They're all dictators, they all have zero regard or belief in human rights and the idea that any of them have any standing to talk about human rights is a joke. But Western governments and media are taking this nonsense seriously.

Al-Dabi is the messenger boy of an internationally wanted war criminal, but we take the Arab League which sent him seriously. Sheikh Hamad Bin a bunch of bins Al-Thani overthrew his own father to rule Qatar. What the two of them know about human rights could be put in a thimble and have plenty of room left over.

The Arab League does not care about human rights. Al-Jazeera does not care about human rights. They have no independent existence. They are pawns of local Arab Muslim dictators who use them for their own agendas.

And NATO? If NATO cared about human rights they would have been bombing Sudan a long time ago.




ANOTHER DAY TO REMEMBER THE REAL VICTIMS

Perhaps the most odious aspect of this is the incorporation of the Islamophobia theme into a day of remembrance for the dead, until the very act of remembrance becomes tarred with accusations of bigotry. Every commemoration of the day by Muslim leaders seems determined to not only foist the Islamophobia myth on us, but to also associate it with some national overreaction to that day. Like the family of a cop killer arriving at a memorial determined to make their own sense of victimization the center of attention, the need by some Muslims to turn their own sense of victimization into the focus of September 11 is inappropriate and flies on the face of what should be basic decency.

From my Front Page article: All-American Muslim’s Very Special Tribute to 9/11




OBAMA THE KNIFE

You've got to give Obama some credit. Sure he may have run up spending in every other way, but when it comes to the military he's got his red pencil and axe on the desk. While every other part of government has grown unrestricted, the military has gotten cut over and over again.

The latest plan is to fire soldiers and replace them with unmanned drones. It's a strategy so genius it only could have come from Joe Biden and undoubtedly did. Drones are neat and all. If you want a low risk way to take out an Anwar Al-Awlaki without sending in the marines then a drone is great. If you're stuck fighting an actual war though drones are not going to be anything but a supplement.

Dumping a hundred thousand troops is going to leave the United States less prepared for a conflict and will weaken its global posture. It's also "peculiar" that at a time when government jobs are growing by leaps and bounds, there's suddenly no money for an army.

But there is a solution. Just retask a battalion as an EPA SWAT team fighting the war on Global Warming and suddenly there will be a lot of money in the budget for them.

Now if you were wondering why Panetta was sent over to be Secretary of Defense, you know why. You need an ignorant party stooge in the driver's seat to sell an ignorant and irresponsible plan.

Rep. Allen West says the military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent.” 

“We’re not talking about a coherent national security strategy — what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding national security strategy,” West said. “He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield — the ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.

after World War II we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to my friends and also one of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.”

But it's not like we have to worry about North Korea anymore. In other good news the strategy makes it all but impossible for us to counter it in a new conflict.

To understand what's really at stake here read Major General Scales' piece in the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history. Some facts: Harry Truman seeking to never repeat the costs of World War II reduced the Army from 8 million soldiers to fewer than half a million. Without the intervention of Congress, he would have eliminated the Marine Corps entirely. The result was the evisceration of both land services in Korea, a war Truman never intended to fight.

With Dwight Eisenhower came the “New Look” strategy that sought to reduce the Army and Marine Corps again to allow the creation of a nuclear delivery force built around the Strategic Air Command. Along came Vietnam, a war that Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson never wanted to fight. But by 1970 our professional Army broke apart and was replaced by a body of amateurs. The result was defeat and 58,000 dead.

After Vietnam, the Nixon administration broke the Army again. I know. I was there to see the drug addiction, murders in the barracks and chronic indiscipline, caused mainly by a dispirited noncommissioned corps that voted with its feet and left. Then came Jimmy Carter’s unique form of neglect that led to the “hollow Army” of the late ’70s, an Army that failed so miserably in its attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.

I've excerpted only a portion but the entire thing is well worth reading to understand the situation. This isn't about saving money, this is about retaining a military that's still large enough to cost a lot of money, but can't win wars on the battlefield.

As far as the leaner meaner force is concerned. Obama's plan delays the Joint Strike Fighter again. 120 planes are being postponed. So lean yes, mean no. 15 billion dollars is being saved by retarding the program which will make the planes more expensive, which will make them harder to sell to our allies, which will set back American military capabilities further.

15 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's about what this administration spends on ice cream. Hey you know who could use that 15 billion dollars that we aren't spending upgrading our air force?

ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law.

All this is about what you would expect from Reverend Wright and Billy Ayers' boy.

Trevor Loudon at New Zeal has his own thoughts on the subject.




A PROGRESSIVE JIHAD

A more accurate name for CAP would be the Center for Islamist Progress. There is no Islamist thug or regime too awful for the Center, whose number one priority is backing Islamist takeovers in the Middle East. Its number two priority is fighting military action on Iran, and even decrying sanctions against Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs, and its number three priority is portraying Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the region.

But if the Center wanted to avoid allegations of anti-Semitism it would have been wise to also avoid picking a fight with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a non-partisan organization started by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that tracks expressions of hate against the Jewish people. Instead, in response to a simple policy statement from the Wiesenthal Center against returning to the indefensible 1948 borders, ThinkProgress’ Ben Armbruster called it a “far-right” organization and accused it of branding Obama a Nazi.

From my Front Page article: The Center for American Progress’ Jihad Against the Free World




THAT'S ALL FOLKS

 In issuing his ruling, Davis said, “Counting the signature of Bugs Bunny is something only a lawyer could make seem OK.”

FIRE AWAY

In the dumbest reason to ban a gun ever...

Owners of the Armi Jager AP80 .22-calibre rifle received a letter from the RCMP in December saying the registration certificates for the firearm would be revoked and they had a month to dispose of their weapons - with no compensation.

As of Dec. 20, the once legally owned gun would be classified as prohibited.

According to the letter, the decision was made because the AP80 is cosmetically similar to the AK-47 rifle.

In New York, home of gun control related insanity, where two visitors who brought legal firearms with them and asked to check them are facing hefty jail sentences, water guns can't remotely resemble actual guns.

The above case is taking place in Canada and a 22 rifle is about as dangerous as a water gun, no matter what it looks like. A robber who walks into a bank with a 22 rifle will be laughed at. But this is what happens when bureaucrats make the rules. And when gun registries are used to seize weapons.



AFTER THE PURGE

Phyllis Chesler has an interview with Professor Subramanian Swamy after his purge by Harvard for opposing Islamic terrorism.




A BRIEF HISTORY OF ISLAMIC NARCOTERRORISM

During the 1970s and 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s and Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO controlled clandestine laboratories in Lebanon, laying some of the foundations to the current narcoterrorism infrastructure, which boosted the PLO’s stashed bank accounts. According to Western law-enforcement agencies, 40 percent of the PLO’s weaponry acquisition was then financed by the trafficking of heroin, hashish or morphine. Much of the heroine consumed in the U.S. and Western Europe was provided by Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the PLO and other terrorist organizations, in return for Soviet Bloc military supplies. In a March 1988 interview with the El Paso Times, Tom Smith, a retired FBI deputy director for intelligence, stated that the PLO’s large contingency in Nicaragua was there in order to facilitate a narcoterror offensive against the U.S.



BAD STRATEGY

Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) has achieved a middling reputation among people who don't know any better as the go-to organization for intelligence and analysis on just about anything. There's rarely a topic in the news that the organization doesn't sound off on, either through its own website or in the form of published "reports." (Stratfor also used to be quoted quite a bit by legacy news organizations, though that seems to have died down in recent years.)

So says J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. Copies are still available of George Friedman's 1991 book, "The Coming War with Japan."

From Library Journal

Friedman and Lebard remind us at the beginning of their book that this century has already produced unlikely turns of events. Who in 1960 could have predicted that America 20 years later would be in retreat, defeated by the Vietnamese and reeling before the Iranians? If war with Japan seems impossible, the authors nevertheless deliver on their book's title with an alarming and usually plausible scenario that takes Japan and the United States on a downward spiral from trade friction to protectionism to armed showdown over markets and raw materials. Friedman and Lebard do not shrink from categorical assertions in the future tense--words like "inevitably" and "inexorably" dot the landscape 

Maybe there should have been a few less inevitablys in the mix considering that around this time the United States found itself drawn into growing conflicts in the Middle East.

 If the worst-case scenario is the basis for planning, then Israel must reduce its risk and restructure its geography along the more favorable lines that existed between 1949 and 1967, when Israel was unambiguously victorious in its wars, rather than the borders and policies after 1967, when Israel has been less successful. The idea that the largest possible territory provides the greatest possible security is not supportable in military history. As Frederick the Great once said, he who defends everything defends nothing.”

The latter might make more sense if we were talking about the Sinai. How any strategic expert could argue that the 1948 borders are more defensible than the 1967 borders is beyond me considering that we are talking about a relatively small amount of territory that is potently strategic.

Does George Friedman really think that splitting Israel's capital in half and handing over the other half to the enemy will make the country easier to defend? An inevitable war with Japan seems downright sensible compared to that.

The idea that Israel was winning wars because of the 1948 borders, but losing them because of the 1967 borders is plain bizarre. Israel only fought one conventional war on its territory since then and it won that war despite some strategic blunders at the outset. The determining factor in the Yom Kippur War was not the size of its borders, but the lack of preparation and the failure to launch a preemptive strike.

If Israel had started out with 1948 borders in the Yom Kippur War it would probably never have survived. It barely survived its War of Independence. It won the Six Day War by pushing outward.

Preparing for a worst case scenario by retreating back to indefensible borders is like preparing to be attacked by tying your hands behind your back and downing a handful of sleeping pills.