Endless Leftism: A Recipe for Professorial Ignorance

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, has published an article in the Washington Post entitled Endless War: A Recipe for Four Star Arrogance. In it he claims that, due to the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the professional U.S. military poses a dire threat to our constitutional form of government. I invite you to read the full article at the following web address: http://tinyurl.com/26fefea.

As a military veteran I too agree with Sun Tzu's dictum that "there has never been a state which has benefited from a prolonged war." I pray that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will both come to a close that favors the interests of the United States as soon as possible. However, I find the crux of the professor's article ludicrous. The idea that the professional U.S. military poses a threat to our Constitution is ridiculous on the face of it. In general, U.S. military service men and women take their oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic' very seriously. The people who pose the threat to our constitution are the civilian politicians and bureaucrats who are bent on persuading the electorate that they can vote themselves prosperity and security at somebody else's expense.

Professor Bacevich bases his assertions on the recently exposed statements of General McChrystal and his staff to journalists from Rolling Stone Magazine. He makes much of the fact that McChrystal and his staff express pointed dissatisfaction with their civilian counterparts and leadership and even question their competence and fitness to lead. Professor Bacevich apparently believes that military professionals should be like automatons, neither thinking nor expressing anything critical of their civilian leaders. I have news for the good professor: The idea that professional soldiers of any rank revere and actually respect their militarily incompetent civilian leadership is laughable.

The majority of military personnel serving the the United States of America are smarter than the majority of civilians they protect. This has been demonstrated over and over again. Not only that, but on the whole, military people tend to be more honorable, honest, and trustworthy than the civilians they protect. If one is talking about politicians, then virtually all military personnel are more honest, honorable, and trustworthy than any politician, including the President.

Military personnel obey civilian authority because they love their country, they revere the constitution, and that is the way it must be for our nation to preserve it's heritage of freedom. They do not do it because they admire and respect the civilian authorities; they do it because under our constitution it is their duty to do so regardless of what they think of them.

The fundamental views foolishly voiced to reporters by "Team America" are not wrong, just shared with the wrong people. McChrystal and his team were stupid to say such things to anyone but trusted comrades, and incredibly so to say them to the one group of people who have even less honor than politicians and lawyers: Journalists.

Those are my thoughts; what are yours?

Securing Borders and Reforming Immigration

Samuel Clemens once said words to the effect that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same could be said of illegal immigration and immigration reform in the United States right now. Everyone realizes that there is a major problem, but seems unable to do anything but talk about it. “How can this be,” you ask? “Is there no congress to correct the laws?” “And the Border Patrol? Is it still in operation?” The answer to both is yes, but congress is afraid to move on the issue, and the Border Patrol is understaffed, underfunded, overworked, and patrolling an indefensible border.

Why is congress afraid? Simply because illegal aliens vote, illegally of course, but they do vote, and in some places may even be a majority of the electorate. In particular, the Democrat party caters to the illegal immigrants, particularly illegals from Mexico and Central America. Activists aligned with the Democrat party subvert and openly violate United States laws on a routine basis to aid and shelter illegal immigrants. Politicians from areas with large ‘Hispanic’ populations face tremendous opposition if they support sealing the border. As far as immigration reform goes, if they advocate anything less than full amnesty for the illegals they face the same implacable opposition. It is no mystery, then, why members of congress elected from such areas are usually Democrats who are dedicated to staying on the good side of their illegal constituencies, regardless of harm to the nation as a whole.

“Horatius,” you ask, “What can we do?” First, elect more Conservatives and practically minded libertarians to all offices of government; until then nothing useful will be done. Then, demand that the borders, particularly our southern border, be secured, from sea to shining sea, across prairie, desert, mountain, and swamp. And not with a pathetic metal mesh fence, but with a real high security buffer zone, complete with multiple fences, a wall of no less than 50 feet in height, raked sand zones, electronic sensors and a dedicated, 24 hour-a-day guard force. “My God,” you say, “That will be expensive.” True, but think about this: How valuable is it to you to live in a stable, prosperous, secure nation?

“But, Horatius, what of the illegal immigrants already here?” First of all, I do not like the term ‘illegal immigrants.’ The word immigrant lends an air of respectability to what they have done. They did not immigrate to our country legally, so they are not immigrants, but trespassers, international trespassers. However, we must keep in mind that most of these international trespassers have come here to enjoy the fruits of American greatness: good jobs with good pay, good roads, water that is safe to drink right out of the tap, and the like. Most of them are, with the exception of their trespassing, law abiding people.

It is a thorny problem we face. Here are the things I would do, in this order, if I had my way:

1. Secure the border.
2. Issue ‘smart’ national identity cards for all citizens and legally residing aliens and make presentation of them mandatory for all employment and any kind of service at any federal, state, or local government office or bank.
3. Amend the Constitution of the United States so that the children of international trespassers do not become U.S. citizens simply because they are born on U.S. soil, but retain the nationality of the trespassing parent(s).
4. Make international trespassing in the United States a felony, with immediate deportation the punishment.
5. Offer all international trespassers who are employed, not on government assistance, and who have no criminal record a chance to get a ‘green card,’ but never citizenship, IF they pay all back taxes (if any), refund all money ever obtained under welfare or any other U.S. Government or State program (if any), and then pay a fine equivalent to 5% of everything they have earned in the United States prior to accepting this opportunity. Upon accepting this offer they would be issued a special visa, not a ‘green card,’ allowing them to live and work in the U.S.A. on probationary status until they had met all the above requirements for obtaining a full green card. One misdemeanor conviction during this probationary period would result in immediate deportation without appeal. The minor children of such probationers would be eligible to apply for naturalized citizenship only upon the successful completion of their parents’ probation, and the most the former international trespassers themselves would ever get is a standard ‘green card;’ they could never become citizens.
6. Immediately deport all international trespassers who do not agree to the above conditions, are unemployed, on public assistance, or who have any criminal records whatsoever.

There you have my thoughts on the subject. What are yours?

Living in Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times.”  Whether that famous saying really is an ancient Chinese curse is questionable, but there is no question at all that it is our curse right now to be living in interesting times.  We are engaged in two wars overseas (one supposedly winding down, the other still in full swing), we have a massive oil spill threatening ecological devastation on our southern coast, we are mired in a recession so deep that many reputable economists are predicting its descent into a full-blown depression next year (as I write this the actual national unemployment rate is hovering around 17%), and the nation’s citizenry is more sharply divided along political/philosophical lines than at any time since the Civil War.

While wars, ecological disasters, recessions, and depressions make the times more interesting, they are not new, no matter how terrible they may be.  What is new (and therefore the most interesting) is the extreme political polarization of the nation’s population right now.  This political polarization is strongly affecting the debates about the wars, the oil spill, and the economy.  Many in Washington, D.C. think that this is a bad thing, that we must work together, “reach across the aisle,” and compromise in order to pass new laws and move on to a more collegial future.  They call the Republicans “The Party of No.”  People who say this, or even think this are all, without exception, left-wing progressives/liberals.  They do not want other people to have individual liberty because with liberty comes risk; people who have liberty may do harm with that liberty.  They want government to greatly limit individual liberty and thereby the harm that might be done by those exercising that liberty.  Those of the left are more afraid of their fellow citizens than they are of the government.  They forget that every character flaw, every vice that is present in the person who owns the local restaurant or runs the giant corporation is present in the politician and the bureaucrat.  They also forget that the politician and bureaucrat have much more power to do far greater harm than the grocer or even the corporate chieftain could ever dream of.  The bottom line is that leftist liberals/progressives are frightened creatures so desperate for protection from their peers that, in order to get it, they are willing to sacrifice everyone else’s life, liberty, and property on the altar of big government, despite history’s numerous cautionary tales against doing so.

“But, Horatius,” you may be thinking, “there’s nothing new there.  The left has always despised and feared individual liberty, and celebrated and cherished authoritarian, collectivist government.  Why do you think they all wear Che Guevara T-shirts?”  True, that part is not new.  However, what is new (in our nation at least) is the source of the polarization: the grass-roots political activism on the right that is quite assertively pushing back against the left-wing agenda.  Keli Carender, Rick Santelli, and Glen Beck have sparked a never-before-seen level of protest from the people who Spiro Agnew branded as "the silent majority.”  Well, they are silent no more; across the country, from town hall meetings to giant rallies in the nation's Capital, they have expressed their complete opposition to further expansion of federal government power.  Whether or not this will continue past the present election cycle is unforeseeable, however, for the present it is a force to be reckoned with.  Regardless of the left’s attempts to make an issue of Rep. Joe Barton’s politically stupid comments about BP, this November’s elections will wreak havoc with the left’s plans to ram even more coercive, liberty stealing, authoritarian, collectivist laws down the throats of the American people.  It is vital that we who value freedom more than security continue this fight for as long as the left tries to strip us of our inherent rights and liberties, and that means forever.

The Lumpen and The Rule of Thirds

The other day I was listening to Michael Medved, the moderate Republican radio commenter, and he was speaking about his belief that approximately one third of the electorate in the U.S.A. approves of Obamacare, one third does not, and one third is apathetic. I think that he is probably correct. In fact, I think that this is more than likely the case with most political issues.

We, as libertarians or ‘conservatives’, comprise the first third, and are, of course, opposed to socialism and its encroachment upon our lives and its curtailment of our freedoms. We believe in a nation of laws, ruled by the constitution, and administered by people. On the contrary, the second third, comprised of Democrat socialists/liberals/progressives, believes that the will of their political elite should be the law of the land, and that the constitution is but an archaic anachronism in today’s U.S.A., and an impediment to their socialistic agenda.

The final third, unfortunately, is what I call the lumpen, although they are more widely known in our day and age as independents or moderates. They are, by and large, gullible, unintelligent people who are completely absorbed in such entertainments as Jerry Springer, the Maury Povich Show, American Idol, and Cheaters. The lumpen are the people who were neither Patriot nor Tory during our revolution; they are the bane of the existence of people of principle and they will always be with us in one form or another.

It is necessary, in a society that has a representative government, for the people of principle, both those who favor individual liberty and responsibility as well as those misbegotten cretins who favor socialism, to try to sway the lumpen to support their cause. Unfortunately for libertarians and ‘conservatives,’ the lumpen are usually not intellectually equipped to deal with ideas any deeper than how to get paid more for doing less or how well their favorite sports teams are doing. They are, by and large, emoters, and the evil socialists prey upon this by appealing to their envy and greed. The lumpen are easily swayed by promises of a free lunch and security, and care not for intangibles such as the rule of law or individual liberty.

How do we, as libertarians and ‘conservatives,’ sway the lumpen to our advantage? I honestly do not know. They are not usually intelligent and they respond to appeals to emotion because they are not disposed to thinking deeply. This is, unfortunately, a nut I do not know how to crack.

The Polish Example

In 1795, the nation of Poland, which had existed in one form or another since 966AD, was erased from the Earth and its territory was partitioned and occupied by the Prussians, the Austrians, and the Russians. The Poles suffered abominably under the rule of their occupiers; at best they were second class citizens, most were effectively mere serfs. Except for a brief period under Napoleon Bonaparte, there was no nation of Poland until after the end of World War One, in 1918. Then, after a mere twenty one years of independence, Poland was again invaded by, and partitioned between, NAZI Germany and The Soviet Union. The Poles suffered even more terribly under these two evil occupiers than they had in all the years before 1918. Within weeks, tens of thousands of their political and social elite were murdered by the Soviets. By the end of the war, Polish Jews had been all but completely exterminated by the Germans, and hundreds of thousands of other Poles had been forcibly sent to slave labor camps throughout Europe to work for the Germans. After the defeat of Germany, Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which murderously exterminated all anticommunist opposition and erected a communist puppet government controlled by Moscow. Poland then existed only as a slave state of the Soviet Union, and the Poles were ruthlessly oppressed by their communist slave masters until 1990 and the triumph of the Solidarity movement, which was also the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Today, because of an economic shock therapy program in the early 1990s, Poland is a thriving nation with a sound economy, and vastly increased individual liberty.

Why have I bored you with a short history of Poland? Because there is something that Americans who cherish individual liberty and responsibility can learn from the Poles. Right now, all of us who love our traditional American liberties and who wish to take responsibility for our actions, rather than relying on the nanny state, know that we are looking down the barrel of a political gun. It is doubtful that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Obamacare as a result of the suit being brought by thirteen states' attorneys general. It is also doubtful that the Republican party will gain enough seats in both houses of congress to override Obama's veto of any attempted repeal of the entire bill. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Obamacare will be around for a while, although some aspects of it may be modified or even eliminated given a Republican dominance of both houses after this November.

My fear, and it is the reasonable fear of many others as well, is that Obamacare is merely the foot in the door for those who want federal control of virtually every aspect of our lives, and that a later Democrat/liberal/progressive/socialist dominated legislature will use it to open the door further, and eventually rip the door entirely from its hinges. Let me be frank: I believe that this is likely to come to pass. The reason I believe so is that most voters are not all that smart, unfortunately, and they have a irrefutable track record of giving away their freedom to politicians in return for the promise of security and a free lunch. It is no use quoting Franklin on trading freedom for security or Heinlein on the nature of the free lunch, those truths do not cancel out the historical fact that the majority of the electorate routinely behaves this way. This is of particular importance because we have, over the years, become much more like a true democracy than a representative republic. That is unfortunate because, when the will of the people becomes the law of the land, as it is in a true democracy, the majority will always vote for the politicians who promise them the most lavish free lunch, combined with the most security. As Norman Thomas said, “the American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." That is what we freedom loving Americans must brace ourselves for: a long dark night of socialistic oppression, brought down on us not by an attack by foreign invaders, but by the stupidity of our fellow citizens. Our children may even live to see the United States of America reduced to nothing more than a vassal state of a monolithic socialist world government; after all, that is what most progressives want in the end, whether or not they are bold enough to say so publicly.

It is because I believe that the above is all but inevitable that I point to the Poles as an example for freedom loving Americans of our time. They suffered almost unbelievable national and individual agony over almost two centuries of cruel and despotic oppression. Yet, by persevering, by never losing track of their identity as Poles, by indoctrinating their children in that Polish identity, and by rising up at the right moment, they not only triumphed over their oppressors, but were thereby instrumental in causing the complete downfall of their oppressors throughout Soviet occupied eastern Europe. We must begin now to indoctrinate our children in our core American values: Individual liberty, individual responsibility, individual property rights, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to self-defense, and underlying all of those, a constitutionally limited minimal government. We cannot let the progressive dominated public schools and mass media program our children to be good socialist slaves. We must program them to be good self-sufficient, freedom loving Americans. We must associate with each other, and begin to form a social framework independent of the main stream of popular culture, that will support our values and beliefs and carry them into the future. We do not need to break away from mainstream society, but we need to become a self-supporting, self- sustaining group within it. We must begin to do this immediately and we must sink the foundations deep, for when the time comes, this social framework will be all we have to sustain us, because the government will be against us, many if not most of our fellow citizens will be against us, and the long dark night of oppression may last even longer for us than it did for the Poles. However, if we can persevere, as the Poles did, if we never loose sight of who we are and what our values are, as Poles did not, and if we transmit those values to our children and they to their children, as the Poles did, we will triumph over our enemies in the end, just as the Poles did.

Declaration of War

Last night, appropriately under the cover of darkness, the Democrat dominated U.S. House of Representatives voted for Socialized Health care. Consequently, as Rush Limbaugh put it this morning on his program, the Democrats are now exposed, in fact if not in name, as the Socialist Party of the United States. We in the United States who believe in individual freedom and responsibility must now declare a full scale, socio-political war on the Democrat/Socialist Party and every single person who votes for members of that putrid organization, and we must prosecute this war ruthlessly and to the end.

There can be no more temporizing about "moderate Democrats;" there ARE NO moderate Democrats, they are ALL SOCIALISTS, and they and their Democrat/Socialist Party are our deadly enemies, because they are the deadly enemies of our cherished freedom. We must suppress them politically, we must marginalize them socially, we must exterminate them as a political force. Within our own ranks, there can be no more RINOs, such as John McCain, "reaching across the aisle." Reaching across the aisle is what put us in our present unfortunate position. Reaching across the aisle is nothing more than collaboration with the enemy and must be treated as such. McCain and his ilk must first be run out of the Republican Party by whatever means necessary and then, as the Democrat/Socialists they truly are, eliminated from public office through the vote and any other legal means.

How will we prosecute this war? On as many different fronts as we can. If you own stock in companies that support Obamacare or any other big government agenda, sell those stocks and put your money in other stocks. Refuse to buy U.S. Government bonds. Do not do business with people who support the Democrat/Socialist agenda. Support non-union businesses. If your state does not have one, push for a Right to Work Law; unions are a pillar of support for the Democrat/Socialists, and their stranglehold on the workplace must be broken if we are to win this war. Outside of your workplace do not associate with Democrat/Socialists or with "independents" who are in reality undercover Democrat/Socialists; those who vote for Democrat/Socialists must be publicly scorned, humiliated, and shunned at every oportunity. If you are a teacher, indoctrinate the children in your classes in the ideals of our nation's Founders: limited government and individual liberty and responsibility. Do not be ashamed to so indoctrinate them, after all, Democrat/Socialist teachers are vigorously indoctrinating their students in Marxist ideology in order to undermine our freedom and have been for decades. Join your local Republican Party organization, support them with your time and MONEY, eliminate the RINOs in the local party, and run real Republicans who believe in minimum government, and individual freedom and responsibility. Then, hit the streets, overwhelm the Democrat/Socialists, and vote and make sure that these real Republicans get elected. Then watch those real Republicans like a hawk, and if they deviate one iota from the path of opposition to big government, if they dare to try to infringe on your rights in the slightest, get rid of them at the very next election.

Always remember, we are now at WAR, and we must win it.