Reagan, Obama and Afghanistan

Let’s cut through the crap.  There is only one war fighting strategy worthy of America.  It is summed up by Reagan, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.”  It is ideas like this, simply expressed that will make Reagan’s presidency a touchstone for the next century.

These ideas are not really new.  They are simple and, frankly, boring.  They hold no attraction to those who regard as profound the clutter of deconstruction that is oh so vogue  on our college campuses these days.  Usually, by some trendy Marxist professor spewing pseudo-pithy remarks with intent to look cool enough to bed some dewy-eyed coed.

Moreover, such ideas are based in reality right from the start of our Republic.  Benjamin Franklin didn’t just negotiate a cease fire with the British to end our war for independence.  He negotiated a country who’s western boundary would stretch to the Mississippi river.  Say what you want about Polk and Manifest Destiny, but he negotiated a peace with Mexico that expanded our country’s size by one-third.   And, note, no one seems to refer to the city of Houston (or Brownville) as sitting on the occupied north bank of the Rio Grand.

The Civil War ended on Lincoln’s terms; a united United States and no slavery.  The initials of General U. S. Grant were said to stand for unconditional surrender.

And, to the extent that World War II cleaved to the dictum of unconditional surrender as the U.S. saw it, it was a success.  Where it didn’t, well, we got the Iron Curtain.

The fundamental is that, as Commander-in-Chief, you have a moral obligation to the troops you command that stands out from and above all other obligations.  It is an awesome power to have people such as our soldiers who will serve at the pleasure of the president; even if that pleasure means charging into the jaws of death.  It is also a profound moral obligation that if you are going to ask such sacrifice, you owe it to those soldiers that their lives will be place at risk for only one goal.  “We win, they lose.”

To the extent that Cold War strategy was mired in the policy of ‘containment,’ it was immoral since it more than tacitly endorsed the status quo of the mass enslavement of people in the bonds of that vicious ideology of communism.  This was the ultimate failing of our conflicts in Korea and Vietnam; moral failings that would bring down the presidencies of Truman and Johnson.  It had nothing to do with the performance of our armed forces; for our soldiers, sailors and airmen performed admirably.  Nor, it is not to say that the specific strategy or tactics specific to the execution of either war was suspect.  It was in the context that our leadership at the time, by not thinking beyond containment, ultimately mired their efforts (and the expenditure of American blood and treasure) in an immoral conundrum.

It was only when Reagan defined the Cold War in the clarity of victory did our efforts fall into a clear set of morally unambiguous constructs.  It was Reagan who would say this is evil and it will not stand.  And, the Soviet Empire would come crashing down in 1989; a mere eight years after Reagan’s inauguration.  “We win, they lose.”

Obama will fail in Afghanistan for this very lack of moral purpose.  He, as noted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews went to the “enemy camp” of West Point.  And, Matthews put into words what, I think, Obama really believes.  He, Obama, the ultimate Philosopher King, approaches the presidency and his duties as commander-in-chief as distractions beneath him.  His duties as President are beneath the man who is really the Prime Minister of the world; except when bowing and scraping before the king of Saudi Arabia and the emperor of Japan.

Obama will fail because he cannot bring himself to say the word victory.  He cannot fathom Americans winning in a contest of arms. Because, no, our soldiers will not  fail us.  Like in Korea, like in Vietnam, our soldiers will win on the ground.  They will put forth all manner of sacrifice.  They will bleed and die to bring victory.  But, their sacrifice will be for naught because Obama does not understand the concept “we win, they lose.”

The reason for failure is that Obama has more important things on his mind than his soldiers; ‘bitter’ yokels from red-state America at that.  He has to show that American Exceptionalism is dead.  And, he has to do only what is necessary to shore up a Chicago political machine recently transplanted to Washington.  Obama, with his nuanced ivy league sophistication cannot comprehend the simple truth and obligation to his troops; “we win, they lose.”

Copenhagen Cool-Aid

I think grape was the flavor served by Jim Jones.

The analogy is apt bacasue any veneer of science on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGM) has been stripped away by the fraud scandal over massaged data and cooked books at East Anglia’s CRU.  It was further heightened by the fact that the raw data of a compilation of 150 years of climate data was discarded with only the ‘enhanced’ data, derived from this raw data, now remaining.

So, as the jets of the worlds leaders, prime ministers, presidents, strongmen and potentates darken the skies over Copenhagen next week, we find we have a meeting that will discuss all sorts of new extra-national governmental bodies mandating economy and job killing mandates.  The convenient excuse of global warming, now ‘climate change’ since the earth has been cooling for the last ten years, is now gone.  Gone because any basis in scientific research, by the admission of some of the ‘scientists’ at CRU, have been cooked.  Gone because the raw data to support this bogus research has long since been placed in the dumpster behind the CRU.

By the way, notice, despite the fact that ‘climate change’ is a tacit acknowledgment that the earth has been cooling, not warming, the proposed solution remains unchanged; the regulation of carbon dioxide.  A good liar needs a good memory.

And, another aside.  I read that when then vice-President Al Gore flew to Kyoto in Air Force One, he burned up some 69,000 gallons of gas.  Moreover, every time Air Force One flies the President or vice-President, another two or three Air Force cargo planes accompany Air Force One to carry extra security gear and personnel, the presidential limo, other security vehicles and, of course, the TelePrompter.  Carbon footprint anyone?

So, we come to a utterly pointless meeting, to discuss an alleged environmental problem, that has no basis in fact.  Those facts are now moldering in some anonymous landfill.  So, we now have to believe made up facts based on our trust of ‘scientists’ who destroyed data and fabricated research.  Take it on faith.  We go from the realm of science to religion.  Faith to drink the UN Cool-Aid and spend trillions of dollars for a problem that doesn’t exist.

First, you don’t throw out raw data.  And, the excuse that there wasn’t room when moving the CRU from one building to another simply doesn’t hold water.  Universities have vast libraries to archive millions of books and other matter.  For heaven’s sake, my alma mater, Northwestern University, had room to hold a comic book library.  Seriously, if the space problem was so bad, you could have rented a space in some local U-Store-It facility near the campus.  Yet, somehow, 150 years worth of climate data, acquired at the cost of billions of dollars–tax dollars I might add–was just thrown out.  Real scientists do not throw out raw data.  Period.

Something else is going on.  I think the real Cool-Aid is the fact that this whole crisis was ginned up to create an excuse to create a regime of further taxation and governmental control.  Carbon dioxide is the perfect vehicle for the ultimate VAT tax.  Tax and regulate our breath.

Moreover, the fix was in even a decade or more ago.  This massaging and destruction of data was done by climate experts who knew the weaknesses of their assertions.  These people knew and had to be prepared to explain away periodic warming and cooling periods for the last two millennia; the Roman and Medieval warming.  The cooling that started in 400 A.D. (and coincided with the fall of Rome and the ushering in of the dark ages) and the Little Ice Age that just ended in the 1850’s.  They had to anticipate the fact that these warmings and coolings would not have the convenient explanations of the industrial revolution and the internal combustion engine.  In order to nail down carbon dioxide as the culprit, these ‘researchers’ had to conjure up data that downplayed or ignored two millennia of warming and cooling.  And, simultaneously play up this latest warming as particularly exceptional.  The ‘hockey stick’ graph is the most egregious example of this systematic fraud.

The whole field of climate research is suspect.  None of its researchers any longer deserve a presumption of innocence or the benefit of the doubt.  Every piece of research needs to be carefully re-inspected.  The stuff out of East Anglia’s CRU is categorically useless.  Without the raw data and the clear dishonesty of its key researchers these is no way you can go through the archives of ‘enhanced’ data and back track to the raw data.  How can you?  How can you know how each data point was massaged?  Did one data point have some value added to it?  Another, some value subtracted?  Perhaps yet another data point was divided by the square root of the sum of Raquel Welch’s vital measurements from her 1967 movie One Million Years B.C.

And, since similar climate data sets at NASA and NOAA are under the care of the same cabal of climate groupies, this data and research is suspect as well.  Hopefully, the raw data is preserved and not being cared for by your local Browning-Ferris guys.  If this data has been destroyed, I hope some enterprising DA will be asking our ‘scientists,’ under oath, before grand juries, pointed questions as to how it came to pass that government property was systematically destroyed.