Of politics, scoundrels, and war at summer’s end

On a hot and wet September afternoon in northern Virginia, a number of interesting matters appear in the day’s news.

  • I searched for “Donald Trump” on GOOGLE News about 1330 and a page of 2o items came up, 19 of them anti-Trump and ranging from negative to scurrilous. The 2oth item is a piece reporting that the latest IBD/TIPP Poll — said to be the most accurate poll in each of the last three presidential elections — has Trump and Clinton in a dead heat, meaning that Hillary has blown a seven-point lead. One would think that turn-around would merit GOOGLE putting the story on its “Top Stories Page,” but it is not there. Trump is a consigned to a page that includes such vital news as “Democrats troll Donald Trump with a Taco Truck in Colorado” and an interview with a harrowing, pink-haired creature named Cindy Lauper who claims Trump is “like Hitler.” I guess you do not need to be sane or talented to work at GOOGLE so long as your are a Democrat and amoral. And who knows, maybe it is not Trump that cost Hillary her lead. Maybe its just that Americans are catching onto the fact she’s a felon, or perhaps they have heard Michael Savage’s priceless and hilarious question about her: “Why would you vote for someone who looks like Stalin’s housekeeper?”
  • The news also says that Henry Kissinger and George Schultz may endorse Hillary Clinton. We will see whether they do, but it would be nice to have two more war-mongering, Israel-Firsters aligned with Clinton under the tent that now houses nearly all of the republic’s internal enemies. I have to admit that I am amazed how many of these purported foreign-policy gurus have endorsed a felon and a woman who the FBI Director said is “recklessly careless” about the handling of highly classified intelligence materials. We know the lying scum Hillary and her family are, but what are we to make of this pool of men and women — say, the fifty who signed the anti-Trump letter and the generals who said the U.S. military would not obey a President Trump — who have spent their careers in responsible defense and foreign-policy posts and who now feel compelled not only to to support a lying felon, but to claim that the republic’s security and future can be entrusted to her care? Surely, their choice ought to disqualify them from any future employment by the national government, and it ought to foreclose the national government from doing business with any company they own, work for, or sit on the board of directors. No need to fret over these folk finding work, however, they have exactly the kind of avariciousness and moral vacuity that will find a lucrative home at GOOGLE or FACEBOOK.
  • It also occurred to me today that it is a little more than two years since Obama reintervened in Iraq, arguing that what is going on there has something to do with genuine U.S. national security interests. Well, we are now two years into this Obama mistake and less than 20 U.S. service personnel have been killed in Iraq. Those lives were, of course, wasted; none would have been killed there if Obama had not reintervened. Indeed, IS has killed far more Americans inside the United States, those in San Bernardino who died because Obama’s immigration system is criminally negligent, and 45 in Orlando, where one IS shooter inexplicably was able to kill that group — while he was texting and speaking on the phone — without being overpowered. Juxtaposing these events must lead to the conclusion that our chief national security interests are here in North America, and that the national security interests that are at risk in Iraq and Syria belong to others for whom we need not be concerned.
  • On this same issue, it is only fair to tote up the pluses and minuses that have occurred since Obama re-intervened. On the plus size — if you are wearing rose-colored glasses — IS has lost Palmyra, al-Ramadi, and may lose Mosul, although it is worth noting that since IS defeats were declared in the first two cities, the regional media have consistently reported fighting raging in and around both, and the same phenomena is occurring vis-a-vis the much touted IS defeat in Sirte, Libya. Now if you think that the West had a reason to to fear the growth of a mighty IS Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and its subsequent expansion worldwide, the fall of the cities may well look like a great development. Well, the IS Caliphate was never a threat to U.S. national security interests; indeed, the more it grew, the more IS wanted to keep it, and — given its static physical assets — the more capacity the U.S. military would have to to destroy it. Without that project on their hands, IS will return to what it does best, and what the U.S. military unquestionably does worst, namely, insurgency. By any commonsense assessment, an IS insurgency is very much more likely to expand internationally — witness the deadly attack in Davao in the Philippines on 2 September 2016 — than is an IS-led Caliphate, which creates nothing but that which can be easily destroyed by conventional weaponry, if the America and the West could just identify and then elect and appoint political leaders and general officers who are champions of “America First” and not politically correct cowards.
  • On the minus side of Obama’s military reintervention lies an array of nightmares. The London Mail Online reported this week, for example, that after all of the West’s efforts in Syria and Iraq, Iran now commands Shia forces in Syria that out number the the Syrian Army; 60,000 to 73,000 for the former, 50,000 for the latter. How is that for success? Iran now has the strongest military forces in both Syria and Iraq, a success that would have been utterly impossible for Tehran to attain if George W. Bush and Tony Blair and not invaded Iraq in 2003, and if their U.S. and UK successors had not mindlessly continued to reinforce defeat there. And there is more. Turkish President Erdogan’s Islamist government has now invaded Syria, less to hurt IS than to exterminate Kurds. Erdogan and his sidekicks also have long dreamed of reviving the Ottoman Empire and restoring its sway across the Middle East, and they now have the chance to give it a go. The Ottoman Empire, of course, is not a happy historical memory for any Arab and so more war is on the way. And then there is Russia — another power hated by Sunni Arabs for its conduct in Afghanistan and its atheism during the Soviet era — which now has military bases in Syria and Iran, though access to the latter appears to be on-again, off-again. Now, a commonsense view would be one of delight in seeing Moscow assume responsibility for the mess in the Middle East at a time when its own rapidly growing Sunni population is radicalizing and causing problems at home, and when Islamist forces will soon be advancing into Central Asia from Afghanistan. Talk about too many irons in the fire. But our bipartisan governing elite — that is, Israel First, the Neocons, the media, and the academy — will see this development as a “dire national-security threat to the United States [read Israel],” and, if Hillary is elected, will make sure that the United States relieves Russia of its coming, well-merited disaster, and will then see to it that Americans will pay for more lost interventionist wars with their taxes, the lives of their children, and, ultimately, their liberty and republic.

All told, it was not a totally agreeable afternoon of reading and thinking. Trump’s rise in the polls brings a smile, but the willingness of prominent Americans to advocate the election of a felon, to behave disloyally in favor of a foreign country, and to seek to involve America in endless war is deeply disturbing. That said, the utter fecklessness of continuing U.S.-led military interventionism — always championed by those grandees who oppose Trump — and the chaos it has created in the region may yet save the republic by facilitating an all-out Shia-vs-Sunni war. I, for one, will pray for that happy event, as well as for Black Americans deciding at long last to try and unshackle themselves from the chains clutched by Democratic overseers, men and women who have given them, and all-Americans, only slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, and poverty-producing socialism.

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