Tea Party: Silent No More

Continued from here.

Let's return to the 1960's, when Richard Nixon famously courted what he called America's Silent Majority. He insisted that there was a vast swath of the American electorate that was center-right in its proclivities that was largely ignored in political circles in favor of a more vocal minority.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and so too did the loud trumpeters of the Left get the media coverage. 

Richard Nixon attempted to give voice to these heretofore undetected voters, but met with mixed success. Ultimately, it was his Southern Strategy (attracting an entirely different type of voter) which bagged him the White House in 1968. The Silent Majority itself never really fell for Mr. Nixon's dubious charms, nor for Gerald Ford in 1976. But it existed, and a good case can be made that the Christian Right was a major part of it, finally coming out of the closet in the late 1970's. 

In my opinion, the Tea Partiers are the remainder of the Silent Majority, finally awakened from their slumbers by the political seismic shocks visited on America by President Obama.

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An Internet Test

Do not be alarmed.  This is only a test. BARE BREASTED WOMEN!! PICTURES TO FOLLOW!! This has been a test of this blog's Internet profile. If this announcement had been real, you would now be looking at pictures of bare breasted women instead of this cool, calm, and collected prose. In the following days, the Web Geeks in the basement will be perusing our Google Analytics report to determine what impact, if any, this test has had on blog hits. For those of you that may be interested in the technical details, the Geeks will be using the last 48 hours of posts as a baseline, wherein three old guys battled it out tooth and gum over Obama's War.  The prevailing hypothesis is that Internet America really likes three old guys with, collectively, four teeth, and some inexpensive (read: cheap) bridgework, and that there will be little difference in hits due to this test. I on the other hand differ, and am willing to back it up with hard cash at 10-1 odds. This should be interesting. Or, if not, it should be something. And if not something, its at least another day. So stay tuned!

Re: Obama's War

Correctamundo, Ezra!  Cheers!

Re: Obama's War

Well, Chaz, Churchill was in Chamberlain's own party. It would have been difficult to refuse the appointment to the Admiralty under the circumstances.

I don't think you, Whit, and I are in that much disagreement. It's a matter of emphasis. I will certainly support President Obama's troop surge, on both strategic and patriotic grounds. But support should not mean glossing over any detrimental features of the President's execution of the war-plan, like his tendency to put a political spin on his strategy which in fact undermines American and World support for the war.

In retrospect, I think we all fell too much into defending George Bush in Iraq over the last eight years, and did not critique him enough when he deserved it. That he was under savage, ill-considered political attacks from the Left is no excuse. If we had been more forthright in criticizing Bush, I think he might have gotten the right Iraq strategy years before he did.

I take you to be saying that we should not let our critiques of Obama overwhelm our support and devolve into partisan political sniping. On that we can all agree; such things are inappropriate in war-time.

Click here for all posts in this thread.

At the Summit of Jobs

For those of us who are not interested in following a knock-down, drag-out, sucker-punching, cage-style debate on Obama's War between three  old guys pumped up on caffeine, testosterone injections, and nostalgia, the White House Jobs Summit that began yesterday is what's really happening. Summits on the nation's employment, or lack thereof, have not been very productive in the past. But that is because Jobs themselves have never been willing to put down their work and participate. Instead, human beings attend on Jobs' behalf, and these meetings inevitably bog down due to the inherent slowness of organic chemical processes and the essential irrationality of anything that takes its  marching orders from a random agglomeration of protein molecules. The notion that Jobs alone, bereft of human personification or instantiation, might actually be willing to get together to discuss things, is the kind of outside-the-box thinking this Administration has always talked about, but no one believed possible. But Obama declared, "Yes, We Can!" and Jobs of all types and stripes streamed along the highways and byways of America to the Summit, lighting up Washington yesterday like a three-ring circus on steroids. As economists have pointed out in both the peer reviewed literature and the literature read mainly on piers, Jobs react almost instantaneously to changes in the economy.  Your distribution network at capacity? Zip! Truck driver Jobs jump up as if goosed by a cold handed proctologist.  Professional hockey suddenly more popular than adult circumcision?  Zap! Zamboni servicing Jobs to the rescue faster than the Flash on upppers.  Obama's poll numbers blasting past 90% approval? Zowey! Rev. Wright collection plate Jobs race forward like greased ... Uhrm .... uh ... like greased really fast things. Continue ..... In the real world, the only thing holding back Jobs on doing what they do best is the interminable wait while carbon based life-forms finish their Fantasy League season. As near as I can tell, the Jobs Summit has started off without incident, which is encouraging given that not all Jobs get along with each other. There is an historic tension between Management and Labor Jobs, of course, but little noted has been the animosity between Nurse and Doctor-Spouse Jobs. There is also a certain professional envy between Dentist and Gitmo Torturer Jobs, and a vast cultural divide separating the religiously fundamental Amway Sales Jobs from all other Jobs, humans, animal, vegetable, and mineral in existence. The last Summit of this magnitude involving Jobs did not begin well. In 1999, the negotiations of a labor dispute with the miners of Trion ore on Dregocia was seriously imperiled when a shuttle carrying Dregocian Diplomats exploded amidst suspicions of sabotage. That crisis was resolved within an hour (for better or worse, I will let the historians decide). But the lesson we learned then is equally applicable now: "Only with the realization that what we share with our enemy is greater than what divides us, can peace ever be won." President Obama couldn't have said it better. Well, he might have, or maybe he did, but in any event I never heard it.  And that's the important thing.

Re: Obama's War

Well, Whit, you bring up a nice point.  Let's review the situation in Britain in 1939. When Parliament declared war on Germany, Chamberlain asked both opposition parties, Liberal and Labor, to join his government. They refused.  But what did his biggest critic Winston Churchill do? He accepted appointment to the Prime Ministers Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. In other words, Winston Churchill supported and encouraged Chamberlain, in an effort, no doubt, to stiffen the spine of the Government at a time when Britain was in such peril. We should do no less. After all, history tells us there may not be many opportunities to reward Democrats for right behavior in foreign policy matters.

Re: Obama's War

Chase, since Easy invoked Winston Churchill in a comparison with President Obama, it might also be instructive to look at the Prime Minister preceding Churchill, Neville Chamberlain. Known as the Great Appeaser, Chamberlain nevertheless far surpassed President Obama in forthright military action. After all, he led England to declare war on Germany and sent hundreds of thousands of British troops to the Continent to defend France -- just in time, of course, for Dunkirk. So, everyone should have "supported and encouraged" Chamberlain because he was more of a hawk than the rest of the appeasers? I don't think so. War-time leadership is or ought to be evaluated on an objective standard. And objectively, President Obama has gone to war in Afghanistan without conviction, other than the sordid political conviction he will lose public support if Afghanistan - and Pakistan - fall into the bloody hands of Islamic terrorist.

Re: Obama's War

I don't mean to pick on you Ezra, but I and many commentators on the right have a different take on the President's speech.

I think you must begin from the standpoint that the President is a man of the left, heir to the extremist anti-war McGovern wing of the Democrat Party. As such, his decision to ramp up the American commitment to Afghanistan is a bold step away from the defeatist war-politics of the Democrat Party over the last 40 years. As some have noted, this is the first Democrat Administration to send American troops into combat for the explicit purpose of defending America and furthering global foreign policy interests since Lyndon Johnson.*

No one would describe President Obama as a neo-conservative, but this is most certainly a welcome change in the long-term downward spiral of Democrat leadership as a responsible voice in foreign affairs. As such, President Obama needs to be supported and encouraged in this endeavor. In particular, we ought to cut him some slack for playing to his leftist base with timetables for withdrawal and the like. As Defense Secretary Gates and others in the Administration have made clear since the speech, those were rhetorical flourishes, not substantive Afghan policy deadlines.

*Please do not cite me Bill Clinton's humanitarian troop deployments and ineffectual, bellicose missile strikes. These were particularly unserious attempts at war, done more for triangulation political purposes than for any grown-up foreign policy rationale.

Obama's War: A Surge to the Exits

In a major foreign policy speech last night, President Obama explained his Administration's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan with 30,000 more American troops. Remarkably, he was able to do so without once using the word "victory." Although I am not given to quoting Vice-President Biden on any subject outside of hair-replacements and baseball, he aptly summed up the President's speech this morning as outlining a "Surge and Exit" strategy.

With emphasis, I might add, on the "Exit." After three months of intense study and debate within his Administration, the best the President could come up with to describe his Afghanistan policy was as follows:

... as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

For contrast, let's see what another newly installed leader said, in the face of a much darker moment in his nation's history. In May of 1940, with French and British forces teetering under the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France, Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minister just days before, appears before the House of Commons and is asked what his Government's war policy will be. He says,

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be ...

Churchill's is the language of war-time leadership; Obama's the language of pre-meditated defeat. Faced with the clear and present threat of Taliban terror, it's hard to imagine why the Afghan peoples will choose to side with us, when the American Commander-in-Chief manifests such diffident ambivalence about this war.

This is now Obama's war, to lead where he will. And he is leading, it seems, a surge to the exits.

Myth of Machiavellian Brilliance

The latest Obama Administration dust-up with Fox News is instructive. The Old and New Media is perplexed about the whole affair, primarily because they are unable to clarify just what the White House strategy is. What are the Obami's goals? What would constitute victory in this little war?

But these are the wrong questions. That the Fox News gambit is a loser for the White House is well-nigh irrefutable. Fox News is gaining viewership at the expense of the White House's allies in the Media, and at the same time, those allies are compelled by the last shreds of journalistic ethics they retain to come to Fox's defense. Additionally, among the larger electorate, the stark contrast between the truly important issues, like unemployment, Afghanistan, and a nuclear Iran, and the Administration's obsession with a news organization, further depresses the President's already plummeting poll numbers.

So, what is so instructive about the situation? It is another instance where the Administration reveals that it is clueless about how to govern the country. Take the latest incident in the Fox News war. The Obami make the new Pay Czar available for press interviews, but stipulate that Fox News will not be allowed to participate. Now, if it was the Administration's intention to marginalize Fox News, then the smart play would have been to make the Pay Czar available to specifically selected Media reps that would not include Fox News. Instead, the Obami offers the interviews to the White House press pool as a group, which has an agreement among all the participants that there will be equal access to White House events.

In other words, the Administration put their Media allies in a situation where they would have to come to Fox's aid and refuse the interviews. The result? A stunning rebuke of the White House from Major Media that heretofore has been nothing short of nauseatingly obsequious.

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That the Administration would put their own allies into such an untenable situation when there was a perfectly good alternative, indicates that this Administration is all but terminally amateurish.

Add this fiasco to the embarrassing failure to secure the Olympics for Chicago. There again, it was a failure that did not have to occur. Basic due diligence indicated that before sending the President with loud hoopla to Copenhagen, the Administration should send out a few Ambassadors to poll the Olympic committee members on Chicago's chances. That they didn't do even this minimal preparation bespeaks a naivete unprecedented in Presidential Administrations.

Other examples abound. The silly idea of having Doctors dress up in white coats for a White House photo op, (note to White House: Doctors now wear green fatigues instead of white coats); the stunning abandonment of missile defense without getting Russian concessions on Iranian sanctions; the decision to "put some daylight" between the US and Israel, thereby emboldening the hard-line Palestinians and dooming any chance whatsoever for peace talks; the attempt to defend the Administration's Afghanistan dithering by lying about the analytical and policy conclusions it had received from the Bush Administration (as if no one from the prior Administration would expose the lie); and the attacks on citizens protesting the Administration's policies.

And this only scratches the surface of the last few months. Early on this Administration decided to out-source to Congress the preparation of legislation on all of President Obama's most important objectives: the Stimulus, Cap and Trade, and Healthcare. Splintered, contentious, and beholden as it is to myriad interest groups, Congress is just not equipped to tackle hugely complex legislation like this without a strong Chief Executive leading the way. Instead, this Administration relegated the President to the role of Cheerleader in Chief, apparently thinking the President could thereby remain above the fray, unsullied by the nitty gritty of politics, and still get his major policy initiatives passed.

Unbelievable. Naivete and cluelessness, all in one Administration.

Part of the problem for the national Media commentariat is that it continues to believe the prime myth of this Administration, that it has a Machiavellian brilliance about it, moving public opinion where ever it wills. In fact, there is nothing brilliant about this Administration, Machiavellian or otherwise. It is just a bunch of typical Chicago politicians who have risen far beyond their capabilities.

But what's more, the Administration is stubbornly clueless about its own cluelessness. It believes in its non-existent brilliance, and thereby adds fatal hubris to its terminal ignorance.

There's a combination for you, hubris and ignorance. As a result, this country and the world are powder kegs waiting to explode, until we can get this Administration out of Washington and back to Chicago where it belongs.

Obama Anachronistes

Last Sunday, the New York Times wrote about President Obama at Columbia University in the 1980's. The article opens:

"In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University [Barack Obama] wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads."

I don't think the Times reads The Mercurial Pundit, so it must be a coincidence that I wrote a week ago:

"[President Obama] is locked in a 1980's ideology of the Left that he learned as a young man, that Reagan's "Star Wars" was the mad plan of a Cold War ideologue."

The Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980's, which is what Mr. Obama was cheering in the 1983 Sundial article, is a classic example of the completely ahistorical nature of Leftist ideology. It formed itself on an undeviating moral principle "Freeze Nuclear Weapon Development Now!," which was chosen for no other reason than (1) it was a great sound-bite, and (2) in application it could be used to oppose every aspect of Ronald Reagan's agenda. It's often unstated premise was that Reagan, and every other Republican who viewed the Soviet Union as a massive threat to world peace and security, was a war-monger, locked in the Military-Industrial Complex with their rich buddies, hoping against hope for some chance to use nuclear weapons against somebody (x-ref. numerous Hollywood cartoon caricatures).

However, the actual history of the public and private debates within the serious sides of the Democratic and Republican Parties of the 1970's paints a different story. These debates revolved around complex and nuanced differences over just how the Cold War competition between East and West could be stabilized and deep dangers like the Cuban Missile Crisis avoided. Sounds like a goal worthy of the idealists of the Nuclear Freeze, right? If they were idealists, yes. Unfortunately they were ideologues, and idealogues couldn’t care less about what might really be going on in the world.

Another historical nicety the Left missed was in assuming Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce/puppet of others. This was all so much hooey. Reagan left the Governor's mansion of California and immediately established himself as a powerful voice on foreign affairs. All during the 1970's he was the focus and spokesman of opposition to the foreign policy Realism strategy of the Nixon-Kissinger types. And he gave much better than he got from the educated elite of the foreign policy establishment.

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His views on our strategic posture were typically simple and yet powerful. Fueled by a gusher of oil revenues from the world-wide oil shocks of the early 70's, the Soviets were becoming increasingly aggressive and belligerent around the world. In the face of this, we had adopted a weak negotiating strategy on nuclear weapons which culminated in the SALT treaties of the 1970's that allowed the Soviets, for the first time, superiority in the number of nuclear warheads. As a result, Reagan believed the SALT treaties only emboldened the Soviet's further in their adventurism around the world, and that from a nuclear standpoint, the situation was untenable. It would only be a matter of time before the Soviets provoked a nuclear showdown through arrogance, ignorance or negligence.

Now you can accuse the Democratic-Republican foreign policy Realists of being wrong, or Reagan of being wrong, but you cannot accuse any of them of being war-mongers. That is just not what the debates of the 1970's were all about. They were all about how to stabilize the world during the Cold War and make nuclear confrontation less likely, not more.

Here is an example of how the Nuclear Freeze ideology blinded the Left. In his 1983 article, young Barack Obama quotes approvingly the opinion of one Mark Bigelow of the campus group Arms Race Alternatives that the deployment of Pershing II's and Cruise missiles in Europe needed to be stopped. Mr. Bigelow said,

"Because of their small size and mobility, their deployment will make possible arms control verification far more difficult, and cut down warning time for the Soviets to less than ten minutes. That can only be a destabilizing factor."

Mr. Bigelow overlooks, of course, the fact that the destabilizing factor was not the proposed deployment of these nuclear missiles by the United States, but the hundreds of SS-20's already deployed by the Soviets, aimed at Europe, China and Japan. Each of these missiles had three nuclear warheads, were reloadable, and highly mobile to insure survivability in the field. Mark Bigelow should have been asking the same question Reagan was: how do we get the Soviets to back away from this crazy ham-handed nuclear confrontation strategy they were embarking on? But Mr. Bigelow couldn't ask such a question, because his ideology told him Ronald Reagan and the rest of the war-mongers were the problem.

A more rational version of Mr. Bigelow's opposition to Reagan's nuclear strategy might have been that it was too dangerous to ratchet up the confrontation provoked by the Soviets with our own Pershing II deployments. But now we have the benefit of historical hindsight, which shows that Reagan was correct in his strategy and marvelously adept in negotiations with the Soviets. The Pershing II's were deployed, and within five years, dismantled, along with all of the Soviet SS-20's.

History vindicates Reagan on the Pershing II's, SDI and on his vision to reduce nuclear arms in the world via his START treaty with the Soviets. As such, this "war-monger" did more to advance the ideals of the Nuclear Freeze movement than Mr. Obama and his friends could ever have hoped for. Before START, the Soviets and the United States had almost 20,000 nuclear warheads. Today, after 20 some years of START, the number is 2,200.

But as I said last week, “ideologues like our current President are not much interested in history that doesn't conform with their prejudices.” Reagan was bad, SDI and START were feints designed to continue the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex, and our President has nothing to learn about negotiating with the Russians from old war-mongers.

Mr. Obama has a bold new goal, the elimination of nuclear weapons forever. But prior to his summit meeting with Russian President Medvedev this week he unilaterally made drastic cuts in spending on SDI and on deployment of missile defense in Eastern Europe. Presumably, he’s channeling his inner Mark Bigelow in his concern over how “destabilizing” these things are.

So, he goes to Russia with negotiating leverage of … what? Old bumper stickers from his Nuclear Freeze days? Putin and the like will chew him up and spit him out, and somebody like Reagan will then have to come along and clean up President Obama’s nuclear mess.

Hopefully before anyone gets hurt.

Hawaiian Assured Destruction

See previous post on this topic here.

Let's begin with the basics. A President's job, in major part, is to protect the American people from external aggressors. That's why he is the head of the military. So if a foreign country with nuclear weapons announces its intention to test-fire at the United States a long range missile, it would seem the President would be required to take some immediate action to deter a belligerent threat to the the safety and well-being of American citizens.

The North Koreans have scheduled for July 4th weekend just such a missile test aimed at our 50th State, Hawaii. President Obama's response was to deploy missile defense assets to the region, which is certainly prudent, but seems inadequate to the situation. In nuclear confrontation matters, rope-a-dope defensiveness is not quite the strategy that will deter North Korea from its mad ambitions.

And now we learn that the President's missile defense deployment might not even be sufficient as rope-a-dope. Because of the Obama administrations budget cuts on missile defense technology, the SDI assets being deployed are not capable of stopping the type of missile being sent our way by the Norks. The Washington Times quotes a missile defense expert,

"that the sea-based SM-3 missiles now deployed to "protect" Hawaii are not equipped with adequate software and communications to intercept a missile traveling from North Korea to Hawaii, which would reach a terminal velocity of Mach 23 to 25. The SM-3s are effective only against targets traveling at up to half that speed. It would take about $50 million to upgrade the software to enable a Mach 25 intercept. The Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile, which also has been activated after successful tests at Barking Sands on Kauai, "doesn't come close" to being effective against this type of threat"

If this is anywhere close to true, then the President is engaging in saber-rattling of the worst kind. Rattling sabers works at all only when no one calls the bluff. But here, the Norks are already planning to test the adequacy of our missile defense technology. Should our defenses fail, as the Washington Times article indicates it might, then the President's actions will only serve to embolden North Korea in its nuclear diplomacy.

Let's remind ourselves of the grand vision of President Reagan in proposing missile defense: to make ballistic nuclear weapons obsolete. If we have viable defenses against ballistic missile attacks, then major aggressive powers like the Soviet Union of the time, and also pipsqueaks like North Korea and Iran, would not bother to expend the billions of dollars necessary to develop and stockpile ballistic nuclear missiles.

After billions already spent on missile defense and for a mere $50 million more, President Obama might have an occasion to follow through on Reagan's noble dream, and demonstrate the futility of the Nork's mad ambitions. But instead he adopts a rope-a-dope strategy in which there is no rope supporting us from behind and Hawaiians are the dopes.

Why? Because he is locked in a 1980's ideology of the Left that he learned as a young man, that Reagan's "Star Wars" was the mad plan of a Cold War ideologue. History vindicated Reagan, but ideologues like our current President are not much interested in history that doesn't conform with their prejudices.

And so we go from the successful policies of the 1980's involving the Strategic Defense Initiative and Strategic Arms Reductions, back to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine of the Cold War, as modified by Obama into Enemy God Awful Destruction (EGAD). And now, picking up speed on the nuclear slippery slope, we come to this July 4th when history might write that Hawaiian Assured Destruction became the order of the day in Washington. That's Hawaiian Assured Destruction as in HAD as in we've been had.

EGAD! Obama's Nuclear Terrorism Policy

Let's see. Last June, President Bush takes North Korea off the list of terrorist countries, and says that progress is now "promising." Early in the Obama administration, North Korea demonstrates its ballistic missile capability by sending one over Japanese airspace into the Pacific ocean (hint, hint: look what we can do, Japan!). Yesterday, North Korea conducts another nuclear bomb test, in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and sanctions.

So, what does our President do amidst all of this nuclear provocation? He reduces funding for America's missile defense program, citing the fact that the costs are too high for "unproven" technology. This is a grand old Democrat Talking Point, dating to almost 30 years ago (!!) when Ronald Reagan proposed SDI, the so-called "Star Wars" missile defense program. At least President Obama’s recent actions verify that Democrats actually do believe their own Talking Points, despite, you know, 20 years of solid evidence that missile defense works and is a fearful technology to those who would conduct nuclear terrorism against its neighbors (x-ref the decline and fall of the Soviet Union).

So with respect to North Korea and other newby nuclear terrorists in this world, what are we to do? Deterrence is the only option left, which returns us to the pre-Reagan years and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD for short. Except in these modern times the doctrine would be something like EGAD, Enemy God-Awful Destruction, which is only half as bad as MAD because it only annihilates the other guy.

It's funny the way Liberals were always so supportive of the MAD doctrine. I think sometimes how different everything would have been if Liberals had only been able to come up with a good Talking Point denouncing MAD, perhaps something like this: It is abhorrent "that we rely on the ability to 'wipe each other out' as the means of keeping the peace. We must do better, and we can." -Ronald Reagan, first Summit with Gorbachev, as recounted in the Memoirs of George Shultz.

But EGAD is where we are, so I have a proposal to finely tune the doctrine so as to make the deterrence value more transparent to offending governments.

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Japan provides a nice example of what I am talking about. Japan already enjoys the benefit of our nuclear umbrella under various treaties wherein we are committed to retaliate with our nuclear arsenal, if necessary, if Japan is attacked.

I think we should publicly announce that, if Japan is attacked with nuclear weapons, then we will respond against the offending country by targeting every legislative and executive political leader with one or more ICBM's. We might even publish publicity photos of mock nuclear missiles with, say, Kim Jong Il’s name painted on the nose. At the same time as this announcement, we should blanket the country with leaflets, a la World War II, advising the citizens that if their government should launch nuclear missiles against a neighboring country, they will have exactly 6 hours to move at least 150 miles away from any political leader to avoid the primary blast area. We might also distribute memos to that affect to every government bureaucrat, military enlisted man and officer, secret service type protection personnel, secretaries, limousine drivers and anyone else who happens to work with any political leader on a day to day basis.

This should have the nice effect of isolating the political leadership from any help in carrying out their nefarious purposes. Imagine Kim Jong Il down in the bunker, waddling around trying to figure out which button to push to send bombs at Japan.

In the face of this, I imagine that even Ahmahdinejad and the Mullahs might have a little trouble getting help annihilating Israel, even though they tell us that all Iranians look forward to dying in a world wide apocalypse. That may be true, but I think lower level officials and citizens would favor running for the hills when confronted with mad actions by their mad rulers.

HANDS UP! Obama Gets Tough on Terrorists

"Tough," but not against those fake muslim terrorists the Bush administration prosecuted in its War on Terror. The Obama Department of Homeland Security has identified real terrorists: militia-minded people already in the United States who " ... reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority ...[and may] ... include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as ... abortion or immigration." The Department of Homeland Security Assessment dated April 7, 2009 goes on to cite other characteristics of true American terrorists, such as efforts to " ... recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal," and a belief that "recent gun control legislation" is a "threat to their right to bear arms ..."

More on this later, but for now, let me note that this curiously ridiculous report - you might want to compare it's propagandistic hysteria to a more wonkish and sober Assessment about possible Leftwing Extremists promulgated by the DHS in January of this year (ie just prior to the installation of the Obama crew in the DHS) - comes out just as the most significant grass-roots movement of my lifetime occurs, the so-called Tea Parties scheduled for today, April 15, 2009.

These Tea Parties are mostly right-ward leaning, but are definitely not aligned with any political party whatsoever. But even so they are targeted by another department of Obama's administration, ACORN activists, who intend to pass themselves off as grass-roots Tea Partiers, and disrupt the proceedings.

My prediction: the ACORN activists will act like the stupid stereotypes of conservatives depicted in the DHS Assessment, and on Thursday, the Major Media will "report" on the extremism of the Tea Partiers and use as their evidence - surprise! - this Assessment by DHS, which will be praised for its prescience about the new terrorist threat to the United States revealed in the Tea Parties.

Am I talking about a Grand Government Conspiracy to trash the Constitution, like all the wing-nuts have been talking these last 8 years? No, I am talking about the Obama Administration, through its agents at DHS and ACORN, staging a political event to dominate the news cycle with a particular spin that will marginalize its political opponents. This is standard politics as practiced the last few decades, with the only new thing being the sophistication of the operation and the sheer reach exhibited by the Obama administration in coordinating its efforts with outside groups like ACORN and the Major Media, and with its own DHS.

Not a Grand Conspiracy, just politics as usual, of which I am sick and tired.

I need a pick me up. Can someone pass me some tea?