Saturday, May 28, 2011

Spirit Of American Youth Rising From the Waves



"Spirit Of American Youth Rising From the Waves"

By Donald De Lue

At the First Infantry Division Museum at Cantigny Park
Wheaton, Illinois, Outside Chicago

Replica of the Original That Stands In the Normandy Beachhead in France,

Honoring Young Americans Who Gave Their Lives For Their Country

Monday, May 16, 2011

Democrat Politics Ain't Beanbag

Thinking about the ongoing vicious Democrat/union tactics in the recent Wisconsin supreme court election campaign and recount, and in recognition of the usually timid and accommodationist Rep. Senator Hatch's recent comments that the Democrats “play politics very, very tough, they play it well, and they don’t give a damn about what’s right and what’s wrong”, Michael Walsh at National Review Online writes (link):
For years now, I’ve been saying that the modern Democratic party is the unholy issue of thirties gangsters and sixties Marxists, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, composed of thugs, lawyers, layabouts, and guilt-ridden dupes, and motivated entirely by a lust for power disguised as the phony virtue of “compassion.”
His comment reminds me of an interview I saw of former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, in which he talked about the astonishment felt by a couple of Democrat Senators who switched to the Republican party -- astonishment at how respectfully Republican senators were treated by their leadership behind closed doors, without the harsh, strong arm, and threatening tactics they were used to from leadership on the Democrat side.  An interesting insight into comparative values and mores.

Walsh says that with the fate of the nation at stake the Republicans must adopt some of that Democrat ruthless moxie, and I couldn't agree more.  I believe that the only partially-hidden agenda of the Democrat party elite -- the thinkers, the writers, the financiers, the union leaders -- is to move further toward a socialist future in which elites control all aspects of society ostensibly in the name of promoting and maintaining equality.  In their quest they are aided by useful fools who swallow the equality mantra and don't realize at all the threat to individual liberty.

The only way big government can make everyone equal is by making everyone equally miserable, and equally repressed by dictatorial elites who become more equal than others.  Socialism is as socialism does.  All dreams of forced equality have and must destroy liberty and end ultimately in tyranny.

John M Greco

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Obama’s Chief Lawyer: Obama Can Kill an Unarmed Terrorist Just Fine, But Waterboarding Under Bush Is Morally Reprehensible

How deep does the moral turpitude of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder go? How can Obama and Holder possibly reconcile killing the unarmed bin Laden with their desire to prosecute (link) Americans who waterboarded a few Islamic terrorists to gain information that helps protect Americans?

A few days ago Attorney General Holder defended (link) before a Congressional Committee the Obama Administration’s assassination of bin Laden. "It was lawful .... [and] justified as an act of national self-defense," he said.

Mind you, I am heartily pleased that American troops have killed bin Laden. But I find it despicable that Obama and Holder now try to claim that by their own legal and moral principles a targeted assassination of a foreign national in a foreign country by commandos illegally in that country is morally and legally fine, justified by their newly announced standard of “national self-defense,” while they simultaneously assert that it is morally reprehensible and illegal for American investigators to waterboard captured Islamic terrorists to obtain information that might save American lives. This is the essence of this Obama principle – OK to kill an unarmed bin Laden in cold blood but illegal and immoral to waterboard his fellow Islamic terrorist.

There is no logic to this because the bin Laden assassination reveals what many have always suspected – that all this anti-waterboarding moral posturing and threatening has been just a cynical political show to harm Bush and his supporters in the fight against Islamic terrorism. If Gitmo has been in any way a recruiting tool for terrorists, as Obama has said, it is because of the distorted, inflammatory rhetoric of Obama himself and other ultraliberals about what goes on there.

Obama and Holder are morally unfit for their offices – they must immediately stop their disgraceful political persecution of some of the brave Americans who have been fighting to keep us as safe as humanly possible from Islamic mass murderers.

Related post: 
The Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence

John M Greco

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Bin Laden is Dead, But Western Civ Is Losing the Home Front

Western Civilization, at least still in America predicated on individual liberty, free enterprise, the rule of self-determined law, and separation of church and state, continues to be slowly eaten alive from the enemy within -- the unholy alliance between radical Muslims and self-loathing hate-filled Westerners who agitate and conspire for socialism.

I recently commented (link) on the disgraceful behavior of Barack Obama, whose administration continues to investigate the military and CIA heroes who obtained, partially through "enhanced interrogation techniques", the very information that helped Americans locate Osama bin Laden, who Obama just ordered killed (thank God) in cold blood and with very dubious legality in an assassination raid that violated the sovereign territory of an erstwhile American ally.  And how many more citizens of the world has Obama killed, whether by intent or as collateral damage, with drone missiles, which don't read Miranda rights before dispatching their targets.       

The incomparable Mark Steyn rounds up some other evidence of the scope of the liberty-hating enemy-within today in a post (link) at National Review Online, including this one -- reporting on a street clash in Londinistan, a British newspaper referred to the pro-bin Laden demonstrators as his "supporters" and to the British natives who staged a counter-protest as "extremists."  Says Steyn: "[W]hen even a Fleet Street tabloid covering a pro-terrorist-vs-English-nationalist protest reflexively labels the latter as the “extremists”, you know we’re losing the very language in which we can even discuss the issues.

Western Civilization has much more to fear from its enemies within than from those without.

John M Greco

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence

A while ago three Navy Seals were almost court martialed (link) for allegedly giving a fat lip to a terrorist, according to the latter. But now Obama sends in a Seal assassination team that kills an unarmed Osama bin Laden. So let’s see if I have the Obama operational principle now -- targeted assassinations by American troops on orders from the President are OK, fine and dandy, and legal too, but Seals must undergo the third degree about a punch alleged by a terrorist. I think I have it.

Obama has told us that Islamic terrorists have corrupted Islam and are not true Muslims, but then assures the world that bin Laden’s body was buried with respect and handled according to Muslim tradition and requirements.

As for the Seals, per the emerging Obama Doctrine they can be heroes or villains, depending on who is giving the orders. In the raid against bin Laden’s compound, which incidentally violated the territorial sovereignty of a country supposedly our ally, Obama used the very Navy Seal team that some of his supporters have called “Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad.” But now that we have actual evidence of an assassination, one ordered by Obama and not Cheney, the Seals are heroes to the anti-military ultraliberals.

On terrorism generally, Obama and many ultraliberals assert it is primarily a law enforcement issue, and not a war. But to get bin Laden, Obama sent the military, not a gaggle of federal lawyers.  Where is the anti-war left now?  Where have they all gone?  Did they not really believe what they were saying?

Obama has told us that enhanced interrogation techniques to discover information on Islamist terrorist activity has caused us to “lose our moral bearings”, but he uses that information, obtained at the Guantanamo Bay prison, to eventually track down and kill bin Laden and likely save many more American lives. So by the Obama Doctrine it’s bad to obtain information that way, but heroic to use it to protect Americans.

And speaking of Gitmo, ultraliberals tell us it’s a moral outrage to detain captured suspected terrorists there, and the facility serves, says Obama, as a recruiting tool for even more terrorists. But it’s fine to kill suspected terrorists in the field with drones or men (which risks the deaths of innocent bystanders as well). So by the Obama Doctrine it’s a moral outrage to capture terrorists alive and detain them, but fine to kill them, along with any unlucky bystanders, in the field without a reading of Miranda rights. Maybe one rationale, inter alia, is that killing suspects in the field rather than taking them captive avoids the liberal embarrassment of the human rights violation inherent in captivity, though it does deprive us of any chance of obtaining intelligence through interrogation (and could that be the point?). Better to kill them than to capture and question them (I wonder if all the Muslims that Obama has ordered killed with drone missiles also feel that way).

Closing the Gitmo prison for suspected terrorists is “a matter of fierce moral urgency,” says team Obama, but after two years Obama keeps it open, with no closing in sight.

In the Libyan war Obama started, Obama says we’re supporting the rebels but also says we’re “leading from behind”. We occasionally bomb something of the Qadaffi government but don’t (usually) tactically support the rebels in the field.

Thus the Obama Doctrine on Countering Islamic Terrorism – Tactical Confusion and Strategic Incoherence.

Why such? Well, it must be obvious to all that Obama, born of and raised by communist fellow travelers in an environment that was for years culturally Muslim as much as anything else, is very conflicted about all of this anti-Islamist stuff. One even wonders if his hand was forced to OK the bin Laden assassination operation – did the military come to him with a strike opportunity he could not pass on, at the risk that his refusal would eventually become public and ruin his chance for reelection? No doubt Obama does not want to see Americans killed, but by every indication to all sentient observers he has a great deal of sympathy for the anti-American point of view espoused by the Islamists – that America is a severely morally compromised power that needs to be taken down a few notches and fundamentally transformed. In other words, in that point of view, we’re getting what we deserve for our past sins, real or imagined, mortal or venial, and definitely not graded on a world curve.

John M Greco