Lawless

After a constant stream of news following Obama’s “trade for terrorists” scheme made public May 31, we continue to see the most lawless President in the history of the Republic do what he said he would do before he was elected – transform America. We didn’t know trashing the Constitution was the transformation he had in mind.

George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, a self-acknowledged liberal and faithful supporter of Obama, was to the point in his criticism:

Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. He’s been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we fought [against] so many decades.

Unilateral indeed. Obama intentionally chose not to notify members of Congress of the “Bergdahl for Bad Guys” prisoner swap as required by the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. Both Republicans and Democrats are rightly torqued with yet another contemptuous demonstration that Obama believes Congress is irrelevant in the governing process. 

Again, Jonathan Turley:

What’s emerging is an imperial presidency, an über presidency, as I’ve called it, where the president can act unilaterally. He [Obama] told Congress he would go it alone. In our system, you’re not allowed to go it alone.

But Obama has gone it alone anyway. And not for the first time. In this case, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has accused the administration of breaking the law by failing to provide lawmakers with advance notice. Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) was also less than thrilled with how the White House has handled the situation: “I don’t like it when the White House says the Intelligence Committees were briefed. Because we weren’t.”

When Richard Nixon went rogue 40 years ago, there were placard-carrying demonstrations in the streets and the leading members of his own party in Congress told the Prince of Darkness that he had to go. So, where’s the public outrage now? Why aren’t Democrat congressional leaders banging on the White House front door to tell the Maximum Leader that, like it or not, they aren’t hood ornaments?

We are beginning to learn that between 80 and 90 people in the Obama administration knew that the Bergdahl “trade for terrorists” was going down before it was made public on May 31. Furthermore, for three days prior to May 31 the Gulf Times newspaper published in Doha, Qatar was reporting it. Even the inmates in Gitmo knew it. They had figured it out from the extraordinary activities going on in the prison with the “Five Awfuls.” Yet Congress was out of the loop. It wasn’t briefed – as required by law – because Obama was “concerned” a congressional leak might have gotten Bergdahl killed – or so his talking heads later said.

Mike Pompeo (R-KS) said, “It’s phenomenal. They couldn't brief a single member of Congress because they didn't trust us, yet the Qataris knew about it." And a lot of other folks too, Mike.

The law requires the President or his representative to “notify the appropriate committees of Congress … not later than 30 days before the transfer or release” of detainees from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. This wasn’t done because Obama knew the answer would be “no!” as it was every other time he has tried to engineer a release of Gitmo prisoners since 2010. The solution? Act unilaterally and hope that forgiveness will be easier to get than permission.

Of course, in the aftermath the Obots have given reasons for ignoring the law. There are always reasons why Obama does what he wants to do. Reasons for the unauthorized Libyan attack, reasons for the Benghazi slow-walk, reasons for the “Fast and Furious” illegal gun-running, reasons for IRS targeting, reasons for spying on citizens and reporters, reasons, reasons, and more reasons. And as critics exorcize the devils from the details of the reasons, the reasons change more often than Michael Jackson’s face.

Initially, Obama and his Obots said the health of Berghahl was failing so fast that they had to act without authorization. There wasn’t time to deal with Congress. Yet in testimony last week, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was asked whether Bergdahl's rapidly failing health meant that the exchange had to be expedited. "The intel wouldn't support that," he replied. Moreover, videos of the release showed an undernourished Bergdahl, but otherwise able to walk on his own to the helicopter that came for him. Oops.

Next lie, please. The situation negotiated with the Qataris was developing so fast that Obama didn’t have time to inform Congress. The Obot who tried to pawn that cheap Persian rug on the Sunday shows was told by the show host that we’d been in negotiations with the Taliban and Qataris since 2010. Oops again.

Then came the “We were afraid of leaks” lie which lasted until a delayed briefing of leaders in Congress revealed they were the only people in the universe who didn’t know that the “Taliban Dream Team” had been unilaterally released – er, uh – traded for a traitor. Hmm. Oops again.

Eventually Obama and his Obot team gave up on the lies and simply admitted that releasing the Gitmo prisoners and closing the prison was an Obama priority regardless of what Congress thought of the idea. He said as much in his 2014 State of the Union speech:

… this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action but by remaining true to our constitutional ideals and setting an example for the rest of the world.

True to our “constitutional ideals” and “setting an example for the rest of the world,” Obama released five of the meanest human beings (if you can call them human) alive to wreak murder and mayhem on the western world. Two of them are wanted by the UN for killing thousands of Shite Muslims and one is a drug lord that the Mexican and Colombian narcos aspire to be when they grow up.

Paul Rester, the former lead interrogator at Joint Task Force Guantánamo, said, “These are men who ran entire regions for the Taliban, they had thousands of fighters under their command. They survived the Soviets, they survived the civil war, they survived us, they survived Sam Scott’s Gitmo chicken.” Now they have survived America’s commitment to fight them on their turf instead of ours.

Even loyal Obots had recommended that out of the 149 current Gitmo prisoners, 48 should be held indefinitely. “The best military analysts on the planet looked at these [48] guys and they recommended against transfer,” one of them admitted. The 48 include the five Obama released.

Obama likes to beat his breast and boast that he – the warrior president – has broken the back of al Qaeda. Well, he’s hardly done that as the Benghazi raid demonstrated, but he did have five members of the al Qaeda Board of Directors locked up in Cuba (thanks to George Bush.) The reason the rules of war lock up enemy prisoners is twofold: (i) there is no practical way to prevent them otherwise from returning to fight again and (ii) if prisoners are high value types, as these five were, the enemy is less capable to continue the fight and thus has an incentive to end the bloodshed and bring the hostilities to a halt. The Taliban leaders knew this and that is why they negotiated so hard to get these five back. Now Obama has returned the five best commanders in the terrorists war against the west.

Our intelligence experts tell us that at least a third of the bad guys we’ve released so far have returned to fight us again. A classified assessment of the likelihood these guys would fight again has become public. The consensus of our spy spooks during the prisoner-swap negotiation concluded that two of the five would return to active leadership roles in the Taliban, while only one of the five was likely to retire from fighting to reestablish the Taliban and Sharia rule in Afghanistan. In a hearing on June 4, our chief spook, James Clapper, was asked what’s the chance these Nasty Boys will return to the fighting? On a scale of 1 to 10 Clapper gave one an 8 and the other four a 9.

Obama was quick to point out that we can monitor them. With what? Ankle bracelets? Moreover, the Naïve One assures us that they were released to the control of the Qataris. Wow! I feel better already. The Qataris are about as close an ally of the US as Vladimir Putin.

What should amaze any thoughtful person is Obama’s utter cluelessness in this entire affair. He justified the release by saying it is customary to return prisoners at the conclusion of hostilities. What? Is the war against terror over? Why wasn’t I told? 

The war against terror isn’t over. Obama decided that America should stop fighting it. He announced that fact last week in the West Point speech he gave to our future military leaders. However, the Taliban and al Qaeda have not surrendered, settled, or signed a peace treaty. They will go on killing our troops. And given their hatred for the west, they will kill civilians – as they did on 9/11 – in the US.

In the meantime, Obama held a Rose Garden photo op to announce that he had just released hell on the western world. He considered it an achievement worth taking credit for.

The Folly of a “Minimum” Wage

An obscure election last month in the small city of SeaTac surrounding the Seattle airport was little noticed in the national press. SeaTac is a mostly poor community of 27,000 whose economic engine is the airport that employs most of them. The cause for notice was SeaTac‘s November ballot initiative, Proposition 1. It would raise the minimum wage to $15 – 63% higher than the $9.19 minimum wage for Washington, already the highest of any state in the union. The jobs affected will be those in the airport and surrounding transportation and hospitality businesses.

Only 6,000 total votes were cast in the Prop 1 initiative and it passed by only 77 votes. The campaign for and against it was expensive, costing businesses and unions over $300 per vote cast. The losers, the business coalition, are calling for a hand recount so the outcome won’t be known until next week.

But will the SeaTac businesses be the losers in the end?

There is ample research to show that increases in the minimum wage by force of law rather than the force of the market always costs jobs. Job losses don’t happen immediately. Maybe that’s why those who believe they can defy economic law by willing it keep trying.

Setting a wage rate floor is simply price-fixing in a different disguise. Suppose your favorite restaurant raised its prices 63% across the board. Most likely you’d dine at a different restaurant. When gasoline prices rose to record levels last year, what did people do? They car-pooled, they substituted public transportation, they telecommuted from home. Gasoline inventories piled up forcing down the price. How is that any different than raising labor prices – labor that is no more productive after increasing its cost than it was before?

The laws of supply and demand are not voluntary. They weren’t established by ballot initiative or enacted by government. All of the cork-popping heard after the Prop 1 vote count came in will ultimately go for naught. The affected SeaTac businesses will not swallow higher labor costs and continue doing business as they were, which the Prop 1 advocates seem to think will happen. Some will relocate, as they threatened to do. Restaurants will replace wait staff with self-service buffets. Car rental customers will do more things for themselves which attendants once did for them. And automation will replace jobs. Service levels will go down, and prices will go up.

The concept of a “just wage” – advocated by the Prop 1 supporters – is rooted in the Middle Ages when wages and justice were affairs of the church before modern economies dictated prices and wages. But supporters of non-market mandates have continued to defy the will of the market. Australia experimented with minimum wage-setting in the late 1800s and couldn’t make it work. American wage reformers tried to impose their will on the market as early as 1912. But the US Supreme Court kept getting in their way by declaring unconstitutional any attempts to interfere with free bargaining by employers and workers for wages. Not until the socialistic New Deal passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was a federal minimum wage legalized by Roosevelt’s newly “packed’ Supreme Court. It reversed its previous rulings and upheld the minimum wage, deciding it was within Congress’ Commerce Clause rights. Go figure.

The Roosevelt minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. It was raised several times, the last change putting it at $7.25 an hour in July 2009. Minimum wage increases are always a battle to push through Congress, so in 2010 Congress gave states and municipalities the power to set their own minimum wages above the federal level, which the District of Columbia and 19 states have done. In his last State of the Union speech early this year, Obama made his customary appeal to Congress to raise the federal minimum wage almost 25% to $9, arguing that “No one who works full time should have to live in poverty.” Well, Obey, almost no one does.

But let’s take Obey a step further. If prosperity can be achieved by mandating it, why not raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour or $35? Any right-thinking person knows markets don’t obey mandates, Obey.

Setting a minimum wage has been the liberals dream since Roosevelt. The fact that it assumes employers won’t react and ignoring the damage it does to jobs never enters the liberal’s calculus. In 1950 only half the jobs were affected by the federal minimum wage. Blacks and whites were employed in equal percentage and teen unemployment was not a problem. Today virtually all jobs are subject to minimum wage limitations. Teenagers – the least skilled part of the workforce – are the most unemployed. The jobs they once performed – pumping gasoline at service stations, for example – have been replaced by self-service because of minimum wages. Go to a fast food restaurant and you’re handed a cup to serve yourself at the beverage machine, something an employee once did. I bagged groceries as a kid and carried them to the shopper’s car. Today, you’ll check-out your own groceries, bag them, and carry them to your car.

Minimum wages discriminate against teenagers because they lack skills and experience. But minimum wages discriminate against black teens most because they are even less skilled and less experienced than white teens. It’s not racism. Black teens are more likely to live in broken homes with poor role models. And absent parental support, they benefit less from public education, which is terrible on its own. Not surprisingly, then, the white teen unemployment rate is 21% and black teen unemployment is almost twice that – 37%. Laws that discriminate against low skilled workers, therefore, fall heaviest on blacks and Obama wants to increase that burden. Even if low skilled workers are willing to accept less pay, the minimum wage laws prevent it. There ought to be a law against the law!

The adverse impact of a minimum wage isn’t just economic. There’s more benefit in an entry level job than the money earned. Entry level employment introduces young people to the world of work. It teaches responsibility – and consequences. It teaches work habits, respect for authority, and that hard work usually earns rewards. Kids from broken homes with deficient education would benefit most from these experiences, but minimum wage laws discriminate against them.

Moreover, the belief that a minimum wage should allow their earners to support families and avoid poverty is fundamentally flawed. The wages paid to fast food workers, retail employees, and many other businesses whose business model operates on razor thin margins rely on a low-cost part-time workforce. Many jobs are seasonal. This is done to keep costs down and pass low prices to consumers. They were never intended to provide the financial support for a family. These jobs were designed to supplement a principal income – not to be a principal income.

Not fair? Fairness has nothing to do with it. That’s the business model and every competitor follows it. Should government outlaw business models?

So, are great numbers of economic slaves toiling away on the abyss of poverty to enrich their capitalistic overlords as advocates of the minimum wage would have us believe?

The national workforce which reports a minimum wage income to the IRS is under 3%. Of those people less than one in four are in their prime working years of 20 to 64 and less than a fourth of those people live below the poverty line. For the benefit of those who vote in Palm Beach County FL let me explain that that’s one-sixteenth of less than 3% – i.e. less than two-tenths of 1%. That doesn’t sound like a national disaster to me.

The rest are teens – half of the minimum wage workforce – who are primarily supported by their family income, and the over-65s – about one in four – who work to supplement retirement and Social Security or work simply to get out of their house a few hours a week.

We don’t know how many of those who earn minimum wages in the prime working years are between jobs that pay more than minimum wages. But we do know that the stereotypical single parent working full time at minimum wage to support a family is fallacious. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports only one in 25 minimum wage earners fit that stereotype, and those people are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit which raises their effective income well above the minimum wage. They are not living on the edge of economic destitution.

Hmm, if the minimum wage workforce is tiny and the portion of it fitting the single-parent-supporting-a-family stereotype is microscopic, and if raising the minimum wage primarily denies work to people not qualified to perform jobs paying the minimum wage, why do politicians keep raising the minimum wage?

I can think of a few reasons and I’m sure readers can think of more.

First, understand that the most common elements drifting around in the universal ether are hydrogen and stupidity. Those who advocate for raising the minimal wage would quickly admit that increases in the price of beer, cars, eating out, and electricity would reduce the consumption of beer, cars, eating out, and electricity. In fact, increased taxes on tobacco reduced consumption in half in less than three decades. But the same people freely park their wits at the door while convincing themselves that raising the cost of cheap labor won’t affect its consumption by employers.

New Jersey, renown for it high taxes, saw businesses and residents flee the state for years until Republican Chris Christie was elected governor and fought unions and legislators to make the state competitive with surrounding venues. The NJ politicians learned nothing from the experience. Christie denounced their recent proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.25. Nevertheless, the state legislature passed the increase by a margin of 61%.

Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $9.80 over two years – an increase of more than 35%. Obama, always undeterred by facts, wants Congress to raise the minimum wage by 23% immediately. This seems to prove the assertion that an ounce of a politician’s brains costs ten times more than an ounce from anyone else because ten times more politicians are needed to get an ounce of brain. Minimum wage laws are politically feel-good regulations. It never occurs to politicians to get proof that they are solving the problem they are trying to solve – something routinely done in business and science.

Second, the argument for a minimum wage is couched in the tired bromide of a moral wage. Wages are dictated by economics, not morality. However moral it might be to argue that Joe Blow should be paid $10 an hour because he deserves it, if his work produces $5 an hour in value that’s not morality. It’s stupidity. Morality can’t be legislated. If morality was the basis of politics there would be no politicians.

Politicians decry the outsourcing of work to other countries, allegedly exploiting a foreign workforce to build $500 flat screen TVs that would cost $1,500 if made with American labor. So here’s a question: ask American consumers if they’d like to pay a $1,000 “morality tax” to have TVs made in this country. I don’t think so.

Which brings me to the third reason politicians press to raise the minimum wage: unions. Unions are struggling to stay relevant while membership sinks to historic lows. Local ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, such as was done in SeaTac with Prop 1, may increase union membership and raise union wages.

Here’s how.

Many union contracts specify wages that are multiples of the minimum wage. If the minimum wage goes up, union wages go up. Democrats are the beneficiaries of union political contributions, so Democrats are the chief sponsors for wage increases.

The Prop 1 initiative was architected by the union and heavily promoted by union advertising, which outspent the business coalition three to one. Because it wrote the initiative, the union inserted a provision in it which requires paid sick leave, makes part-time work difficult, prohibits sharing of tips, etc. These provisions can be waived in a union contract, but businesses that aren’t unionized must comply with them. Obviously this puts non-union businesses at a disadvantage, which is an incentive to allow their workforce to unionize.

In Long Beach CA a similar initiative was on the ballot which required hotels with more than 100 rooms to pay a $13 minimum wage and sick leave. Two Hyatt hotels caved and were unionized. However, some hotels closed rooms to have only 99 available for rent and laid off workers. The remaining workers were paid $13 an hour but had their hours cut.

It’s too early to tell if SeaTac and Long Beach are new strategies for unionizing using the minimum wage as a battering ram. The effort may fail if businesses react smartly to offset the damage. Unfortunately, the local community will lose either way. It becomes a less attractive location for new business. And its unemployment rate will rise.

This past week, Obama’s favorite union, the Service Employees International Union, orchestrated demonstrations in 100 cities outside of fast food restaurants calling for doubling their hourly wages to $15 – twice the minimum wage – or face a nationwide strike. (Yes, SEIU was behind Prop 1 too.) Young fast food workers were interviewed by eager reporters. The workers’ complaints were predictable: they “deserved” to be paid $15 an hour or at least $10 for their work. Really? There’s no one forcing you young folks to work at McDonald’s or Arby’s or Burger King. So leave. Get yourself a job paying the $10 or $15 an hour that you say you’re worth.

Uh? … not qualified for jobs paying that much, you say? I thought as much. Too bad you don’t.

What If …?

Over a dozen years ago Robert Cowley compiled an intriguing book of essays under the title What If? The essay authors – all outstanding historians of the day – were invited to compose a credible outcome, a “what if” alternative, for a pivotal moment in history if circumstances had taken a different, often minor, turn of events.

For example, in 1889 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured Europe featuring Annie Oakley’s famous shooting skills with her Colt .45. Her act concluded with an invitation for a gentleman in the audience to step into the arena and allow her to shoot off the ash from his cigar at a distance far enough away to make it interesting. It was all show because there were never any real takers. Her husband, Frank Butler, was planted in the audience as a stooge. He would bravely step forward with a Havana clenched in his teeth, allowing Annie to bring the crowd to its feet with her keen shot.

When the show made a stop in Berlin for a performance at the Charlottenburg Race Track, Annie offered her customary dare. In the audience was the young and showy Kaiser Wilhelm II who immediately took her offer, much to her shock and the horror of the Kaiser’s security detail. Stepping on to the arena, the local police tried to intervene but Wilhelm waved them off.

Annie couldn’t back out without losing credibility, so she paced off her usual distance and took aim. Sweating under the pressure of shooting at a crowned head of Europe and wishing she hadn’t consumed so much whiskey the night before, she nevertheless shot away the Kaiser’s cigar ash to the crowd’s wild jubilation.

Cowley asks what if she had missed? There would have been no bellicose Kaiser Wilhelm II alive 25 years later to start war in Europe. When World War I did in fact break out, Annie wrote the bombastic Kaiser and asked for a second shot. He never responded.

History offers many “what ifs.”

In the aftermath of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was more punishment than peace treaty. It forced Germany to admit its ‘guilt” for the war as well as pay reparations for it. The Treaty’s major accomplishment was to invent Hitler.

Hitler rose to power in 1933 and obsessed over undoing the Treaty. He pursued this in a succession of trial provocations each intended to test the resolve of the former allies – primarily Britain and France. In 1934 he ordered the German home guard to arm for war and, the following year, reintroduced conscription – both flagrant violations of the Treaty. With no response forthcoming from the major world powers, Hitler was emboldened. In 1935 he began building tanks, planes, and submarines – further violations of Versailles. Still no intervention by England or France.

In 1936, Hitler ordered troops across the Rhine and created an armed threat in the demilitarized zone of the German Rhineland, the territory between the French border and the Rhine River, an unmistakable violation of the Versailles treaty. There his raw army recruits and 36,000 policemen faced nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions. France and Belgium were within their right to cross the Maginot Line and confront the Germans. But the French and English heads of state said nothing and did nothing. 

One of the Rhineland occupiers, General Heinz Guderian, said after the World War II that if the French had responded to their provocation in 1936, “…we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen." Another German officer confessed that the German General Staff considered Hitler’s move tantamount to a suicide mission.

I can tell you that for five days and five nights not one of us closed an eye. We knew that if the French marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match the French. If the French had even mobilized, we should have been compelled to retire.

Hitler himself said:

The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.

The head of the French army, General Maurice Gamelin, believed that a confrontation of the German Rhineland occupiers would be unpopular at home, costly, and would lead to war requiring full mobilization of French armed forces. He counseled against action.

In England, not only were there no anti-German Rhineland protests, there were peace demonstrations. One Member of Parliament observed "the feeling in the House [of Commons] is terribly pro-German, which means afraid of war." The Prime Minister during the 1936 crises, Stanley Baldwin, had tears in his eyes when he admitted that British public opinion would not support military intervention in the Rhineland.

Winston Churchill, a backbench Conservative MP in 1936, was the British Jeremiah – one of the few voices raised against German rearmament and its threat to future peace. He wanted his country to reinforce a French challenge of the Rhineland occupation under the coordination of the League of Nations. The League of Nations, however, was as useless then as the United Nations is now and nothing happened. Churchill predicted the Rhineland would become a hinge allowing Germany to swing its forces through Belgium to attack France. And that’s precisely what happened in 1940.

A “what if” opportunity thus passed unexploited in 1936 that could have prevented World War II.

An Austrian German by birth, Hitler provoked the 1938 Anschluss crisis two years after the Rhineland showdown. It was part of his plan to unite all German speakers in one state. "People of the same blood should be in the same Reich" he had written in his autobiography Mein Kampf.  Hitler’s annexation of Austria was accomplished by threatening invasion so convincingly that the Austrian government resigned and Hitler’s armies were invited in.

German-Austrian union was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. Notwithstanding, England and France did not protest, did not mobilize, and did not defend the Treaty.

When an aggressor senses his opponent’s lack of resolve to confront him, he will act without restraint. And that’s precisely what Hitler did. He was now convinced that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s successor, and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier were both appeasers – paralyzed by their nightmarish memories of World War I – and therefore loath to confront his militaristic aggressions.

His next move would exploit their fecklessness.

In 1938 Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland – that portion of Czechoslovakia on its north, west, and southwest border which was populated by German speakers. If his demand was not accommodated, he would invade Czechoslovakia.

It was all bluff. At that time Czechoslovakia had one of the strongest armies in Europe. It was well trained and well equipped, thanks to the country’s armaments works – primarily those of Skoda, the Czech equivalent of Ford or GM. Moreover, its military industries were protected by military fortifications on the German and Austrian borders – all in the Sudetenland – which explains why Hitler wanted it.

Czechoslovakia probably could have won a fight with Germany given the poor quality of the German fighting force at the time. In fact, senior German generals were horrified with Hitler’s plans to invade, convinced it would ignite a world war which Germany would lose. So convinced were the German generals of a bad outcome, that one of the earliest conspiracies was plotted to overthrow and arrest Hitler. Representatives were sent to meet with Chamberlain, telling him that the moment Hitler gave the invasion order he would be arrested and imploring Chamberlain to intervene militarily in support of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia had mutual defense treaties with France and Russia, and England was a defense partner of France. Poland too would likely have joined if France and England were in the fight.

But it was not to be. A meeting was held in Munich involving France, England, Germany, and Italy. Czechoslovakia was not invited. Chamberlain followed his appeasement instincts and the Munich Agreement was signed transferring the Sudetenland to Germany. Betrayed by its treaty allies, Czechoslovakia conceded. Hitler agreed not to invade Czechoslovakia – an agreement that lasted six months when Germany troops swallowed up the remainder of the country, now defenseless without its Sudeten armaments and fortresses.

The cowardly Chamberlain flew back to England and landed among the adulation of adoring pacifists. Deplaning, he waved the infamous Munich Agreement, assuring the crowd at the airport that he had won for them “peace in our time.” That phrase has gone down in history as a verbal monument to the gullibility of naïve world leaders who appease international bullies expecting conciliation to preserve peace. Think Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Chamberlain’s surrender to Hitler was criticized by some far-sighted British politicians, among them Winston Churchill who unleashed his rhetorical fury on the worthless document:

We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude...we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road... we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

Another “what if” moment was lost.

With the fall of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s territorial ambitions now became apparent even to the western fools of Munich. The English and French publicly assured Poland that they could be relied on to protect it against German aggression. But the time for red lines had passed. Germany could no longer be denied its long sought destiny. Equipped with the armaments stolen in the Munich treaty, Germany was rolling like a juggernaut toward the Polish frontier, which bordered the northern Sudetenland acquisition. Germany was now the best armed military force in Europe, ironically clad in Panzer tanks that had been built for the Czechs by the Skoda works. England and France, Poland’s outfoxed treaty allies, could do no more than watch the eight-month massacre of an ally in 1939.

Sixty million people would die before the German beast was slain in 1945.

History may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme. What can we learn today from this disgraceful episode of serial incompetence? One could certainly argue it teaches that preemptive military action, however unpopular at the time, is usually a winning antidote for an unbridled aggressor. Hitler had made his ambitions abundantly clear in Mein Kampf, assuming any of the western leaders had bothered to read it. And the provocations he initiated in 1936, twice in 1938, and in 1939 were straight out of his play book.

After World War II ended Churchill, whose resolve had saved the British, was ousted from office. So much for the thanks of a grateful nation.

However, a relatively unknown school, Westminster College in the small Missouri town of Fulton (population 7,000), wished to bestow an honorary degree on the statesman that got England into the war and kept it there to the end. And because Churchill was indisputably the best rhetorician of the 20th century, he was invited to be the keynote speaker. The audience numbered over 40,000 and his speech, which is often referred to as the “Iron Curtain” speech, alerted the world to a coming “cold war.”

Churchill’s speech presaged many of his thoughts that would later appear in his seminal recollection of the Second World War, most especially its first volume entitled The Gathering Storm. Here is an excerpt from the Iron Curtain speech that verbalizes the many lost “what ifs”:

Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

We surely must not let that happen again indeed.

Today we are once again confronted by the villainous face of evil. This time it’s Iran. Iranian leaders are as fanatical as Hitler but are many times more dangerous given nuclear weapons. Iran’s mullahs are believers in the 12th imam and hold the apocalyptic theology that bringing the world to an end will usher in the “second coming” of this imam. He will establish the Shia religion as the world religion and begin an unending era of peace. In short, a worldwide nuclear holocaust favors Iran’s theology.

Moreover, the west is once again afflicted with gullible leaders who believe appeasement is the answer to aggression. The recent “agreement” championed by Kerry and Obama does nothing to stop Iranian bomb-making. Worse, it deludes the America people into thinking that something short of military intervention will stop a nation intent on eliminating Israel, whose existence it won’t officially recognize. Israel will be our Poland.

Once again, our leaders believe that peace can be won without victory over disturbers of peace. We are standing aside while a replay of 1936, 1938, and 1939 passes before our eyes … while, as Mark Twain observed, history rhymes.

Once again the Left believes – and tries to convince the rest of us – that our choice is between war and peace when in fact it is, and always will be, a choice between fighting and surrender.

Vladimir Putin: Man of Peace

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multi-religious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations.

Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.

We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action.

I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

These excerpts, from Vladimir Putin’s recent New York Times op-ed piece regarding the Syrian crisis, are remarkable in at least three respects: (i) they are the words of the leader of a hostile nation speaking directly (through one of their major newspapers) to the American people over the head of their leader, (ii) they were published on 9/11 – a day which lives in infamy, to borrow a phrase from FDR, and (iii) they parrot the liberal anti-American drivel that Obama has been spewing since his 2008 election – i.e. the supremacy of the UN among sovereign nations, America’s unexceptional nature, America the bully, etc. Obama’s “blame America first” rhetoric was inevitably bound to be shoved in his face by our adversaries like a pie in a Mack Sennett comedy routine.

Asked by a reporter in 2009 if he believed in American exceptionalism, Obama answered "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, every nation is exceptional therefore no nation is. Three years ago I blogged on the origin of the concept, which was articulated in 1831 by Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary entitled Democracy in America describing the year he spent traveling this country. The fact that Obama doesn’t view America as exceptional speaks volumes about his political philosophy. That Putin doesn’t consider America as exceptional is understandable from an adversary.

America most certainly is exceptional, Obama and Putin notwithstanding. Its exceptionalism allowed Putin to publish his critical and disingenuous remarks even though he does not have the constitutional protection of our First Amendment. And he did so on the 12th anniversary of a sacred day when violence rained death from the sky in our country. I doubt that Obama would be accorded the same opportunity to speak to the Russian people in Pravda on the anniversary of, say, the Bolshevik or October Revolutions.

As exceptional as America is, it isn’t a license to do as it pleases in a world of full of neighbors. The Syrian face-off originated with an off-handed remark Obama made last year to a reporter about Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.… We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans.

Those are the words of war. They are at least an ultimatum that invites testing of the speaker’s resolve. Obama, however, didn’t engage in any credible activities to show Assad and the “other players on the ground” that he was prepared to back up his words with action. When the testing came, Obama blinked. He stalled for a year as the confrontation gained momentum. Putin saw a weak president, unpopular at home, who could be tangled in his own rhetoric and forced to sell a military strike to an unwilling Congress and American public. Putin’s offer of a compromise solution accomplished two things: it made him look statesman-like and it rerouted the matter through the UN where Russia can block actions not in its interests. Checkmate.

Putin can fret about the fate of the League of Nations and chide against “go it alone” actions of a sovereign nation, but the Russian president, an alleged expert in judo, used judoic diplomatic skill and judoic political leverage to exploit the corner Obama had painted himself into. Putin’s op-ed attempts to strike a chord among the war weary American public and their elected leaders by reminding them that “Afghanistan is reeling” and that Libya, which scandalously cost the lives of an American ambassador and three others, “is divided into tribes and clans” while “… in Iraq the civil war continues with dozens killed each day.” He alludes to al-Qaeda, which has infiltrated the Syrian insurgency, discredits the Syrian uprising as a democracy movement, and hints that Israel’s always-on conflict with the Palestinians could be destabilized. And then the pièce de résistance: “In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.” Well done, Vlad!

The op-ed comes across as a well-reasoned argument to give peace a chance. Hard to argue with that. But at what price? Assad’s use of chemical weapons is a violation of international law, the same law that Putin argues would be violated by an unprovoked American attack on Syria. Curious double standard there.

The US will have to agree not to strike independent of a UN authorization, which hangs a boat anchor around our neck. Assad will in return give up chemical weapons, or at least access to them, but otherwise suffers no international consequence for using them or for killing 100,000 of his people. Giving up his chemical weapons, if Assad ever does that, is like ordering a killer to surrender his murder weapon to the authorities but not arresting him for the murder. The op-ed is deceptively clever in its argument.

Meanwhile, don’t be swayed by a Trojan Horse wearing sheep’s clothing. Even as Vlad’s thought piece appeared in the New York Times, he was announcing to the world that Russia would be supplying a nuclear reactor to Iran complete with a picket fence of anti-aircraft missiles. What are we to think of this? But of course! Putin plans to be the major actor in the Middle East. Playing to the folks back home and for the eyes of the Middle East, Putin stood up to the bad ole US. He “saved” Syria from the legacy of American adventurism – which Obama broadcast in his first term apology tours as an American sin. And Putin invited Iran and its nuclear future to get under Russia’s protective blanket.

Obama’s presidential incompetence and the bumbling fecklessness of two Secretaries of State have led this region closer to a nightmare scenario that could ultimately pressure Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey to align themselves with America or its enemies in a fight for regional dominance that could mushroom into world dominance. If you believe in the literal meaning of John’s vision in Revelation 16:16 “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon,” this could be it. Armageddon is a corruption of Har Megiddon (Mount Meggido) that overlooks the Jezreel Valley  located in Israel and  surrounded by the Palestinian West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon – the hot spot of the Middle East.

On the heels of the op-ed publication, reporters rushed to get statements from Washington’s political class, curiously concluding that anyone would care. Most politicians were publicly put off by a foreign dignitary criticizing US policy directly to the American public. Who knows if their private thoughts jibe with public comments they’ve made in the past that sound strangely Putin-like. The White House blew the op-ed off as “irrelevant.” Obama said he was more interested in “getting the policy right” than in winning “style points,” whatever that means.

Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is key to Middle East affairs oversight, said the op-ed made him want to “vomit.” Interesting moralizing from a man who last year short-changed two underage prostitutes providing him room service in a Dominican Republic resort.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) denounced Putin’s argument as did Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who called Putin’s op-ed “an insult to the intelligence of every American.” An insult to the intelligence of every American? More than half of those intelligent Americans voted to reelect Obama.

Putin’s op-ed closes with a nice subliminal flourish: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” Ah, the audacity of the hopeful man.

Putin won this round of face-off handily. He got everything he wanted. We got nothing.

The War on Terror is Over!

History tells us that in the 11th century King Cnut – Anglicized in modern English to Canute –ruled Denmark. It’s said that a retinue of flatterers surrounded him who claimed the King capable of almost any feat. To prove them wrong, he had his royal chair placed by the edge of the sea where he ordered the waves not to break upon his land or wet his royal feet. When the sea ignored both orders, it showed his sycophants proof that kings have limited powers over the physical universe.

Unlike Canute, Obama doesn’t need a retinue of flatterers. He does a good job of the “mirror, mirror on the wall …” routine in solo performance as evidenced by the volume of personal pronouns in his National Defense University speech last week. Also unlike Canute, who modestly acknowledged the limits of his power, Obama is quite the opposite. By declaring in his speech that the 12-year war the US has waged against the clients of terrorism is over, then by Jove, it’s over. Somebody should let the terrorists know, however. One of them beheaded a British soldier on a London street the day before King Canute-Obama’s declaration. Doggone those waves!

Obama’s speech was unremarkable in content and puzzling in purpose. With his administration awash in three simultaneous scandals maybe the speech was his way of changing the subject.

I’ve read its grandiloquence and many commentaries on it as well. As in all spoken or written communications, I looked for the fulcrum – the “center of gravity” – around which all of the words rotate. It seems the fulcrum of Obama’s speech, which needed 6,500 words to support it, is this statement:

Today, the core of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They have not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11. Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al-Qaeda affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse …

The assertion that al-Qaeda is “on the path to defeat” is delusional. The evidence, like Canute’s wet feet, shows the opposite. The murder of our Libyan Ambassador, Chris Stevens, and his security detail were casualties of this kind of wrong-headed thinking.

Following Obama’s speech, Senator McCain held a press conference in which he challenged the “path to defeat” assertion, to wit:

I believe we are still in a long, drawn-out conflict with al-Qaeda. To somehow argue that al-Qaeda is, quote, ‘on the run’ comes from a degree of unreality that, to me, is really incredible. Al-Qaeda … is … expanding all over the Middle East, from Mali to Yemen and all places in between. And to somehow think that we can bring the authorization of the use of military force to a complete closure contradicts the reality of the facts on the ground. Al-Qaeda will be with us for a long time.

It’s laughable to believe that “remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.” Does Obama believe their suicide ideology has changed? I doubt that any “worry about their own safety” when they volunteer to blow up their underwear or shoes or hang around London after a beheading, knowing they will be shot (as two were.)

The Benghazi attackers were al-Qaeda affiliates, contrary to Obama’s claim that they weren’t, and while the Boston bombing wasn’t genuine home-grown al-Qaeda, it was a Muslim fanatical jihad group that showed Tamerlan how to make the bomb he used. Does their brand really matter? The Boston victims are just as dead or mutilated regardless of the terror brand on the bomb.

Finally, “They have not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11” shows how much time Obama has been spending on the golf course. Ten years after 9/11 Obama ordered Anwar al-Awlaki – a regional commander of al-Qaeda – to be vaporized in Yemen in September 2011. Two years earlier al-Awlaki masterminded the 2009 Ft. Hood attack that killed 13 and wounded 30. Major Nadal Hasan was the shooter but al-Awlaki called the signals. And before al-Awlaki’s atoms comingled with the eternal ether, he invited Umar Abdulmutallab to his Yemeni home to advise the youngster how to ignite his Fruit of the Looms en route to Detroit. Thankfully that 2009 attack failed. The next year in 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani graduate of Terror U., parked a car bomb in Times Square which failed to explode. Do any of these constitute an attack on our “homeland since 9/11” contradicting Obama’s confident assurance in his speech? The fact that we haven’t seen any more planes fly into buildings is not evidence that homeland attacks are over. One of the many attempts will slip through our security – like the Boston bombing.

As I read Obama’s careful parsing of who is and who isn’t al-Qaeda, I recalled a scene in one of the Pink Panther films. Spying a snoozing pooch at a man’s feet, the bumbling Inspector Clouseau asks “Does your dog bite?” Assured by the man that his dog didn’t bite, Clouseau bent over to pet the animal and it bit him. “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!” screamed the Inspector. “That’s not my dog,” the man answered without looking up.

If Obama believes the only participants in “the war on terror” are card-carrying al-Qaeda wearing tee-shirts with A-Q logos, we’re in trouble.

Obama, who has authorized 600% more drone strikes than the hated George Bush, showed new “no more war” restraint in saying,

… we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people … there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.

The first phrase referring to a “continuing an imminent threat” in the speech is significant. Before the speech, Obama staffers briefed reporters that the threat threshold for drones had been raised from “significant threat,” which the new CIA chief, John Brennan, had laid down in 2012 when he was the White House counterterrorism adviser to Obama. Now it must be a “continuing and imminent threat.”

“Larry, does that look like a ‘significant threat’ or a ‘continuing and imminent threat’ to you?”

“Why, Moe, that’s a ‘significant threat’ if I’ve ever seen one. What do you think, Curly?”

As if this silly, hair-splitting distinction wasn’t foolish enough, Obama added, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.” Can you imagine how the US military would have fared with that standard in any of the conflicts it has fought? Sherman didn’t mean “War is hell” metaphorically. He meant the civilian population is a fair target in order to get the other side to stop fighting. Ask the Japanese.

With about 80% of the speech behind him, Obama began his coda:

The [Authorization to Use Military Force] (AUMF) is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that label themselves al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

“This war, like all wars, must end” sounds nice. But wars don’t end when one side declares them over. They end when one side wins and the other side surrenders and thereby loses. That’s the way it’s always worked. I haven’t a clue what Obama’s allusions to “history advises” or “democracy demands” mean but I do know history a lot better than Obama. When there isn’t an undisputed winner, the conflict continues in a thousand disguises.

Continual warfare is, well, continual. Michael Adebolajo, the Nigerian Muslim who beheaded Lee Rigby in London last week and then waved his bloodied hands and showed his blood-stained shirt to nearby citizens who were video-recording him – citizens who had allowed him to live in their country – showed his gratitude by shouting on video "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you."

Obama may not have the stomach for continual war, but Islamic supremacists do. They believe they are divinely directed to conduct violent jihad against non-Muslims – that’s you and me – until we and the world submit to sharia and thereby a perfect society. Last week Obama repeated his standard mantra that most followers of Islam do not believe in practicing violence. Yet strangely, the Islamic community has yet to take a stand against it.

Before concluding his speech, Obama trotted out for the umpteenth time the tired old bromide about closing GTMO (Gitmo) – home to 166 of the world’s nastiest characters.

GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law. Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at GTMO. During a time of budget cuts, we spend $150 million each year to imprison 166 people –almost $1 million per prisoner. And the Department of Defense estimates that we must spend another $200 million to keep GTMO open at a time when we are cutting investments in education and research here at home.

There is no evidence that Gitmo is the scourge of the world. It isn’t a symbol that we flout the rule of law and people would begin to like us if only we’d close it. The fact is that Congress will not permit this detention facility – which treats its inmates better than they are treated at home – to be closed because two out of three Americans, aka voters, want it open. At least we know where the bad guys are … and will remain … unless they learn to swim the Florida Straits.

A million dollars per inmate involves some very creative accounting. Coming from a guy who ran up a $16 trillion debt against future American generations, his economic argument that we must choose between Gitmo or investment in education and research has no moral standing.

As President, I have tried to close GTMO. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries, or imprisoning them in the United States. These restrictions make no sense … there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.

Congress slapped a lid on Obama’s releases of detainees to Yemen and other countries who’d take them when they began showing up on battlefields again. No less than the New York Times, hardly a shill for conservative causes, reported at the foregoing link that one in seven former Gitmo detainees return to the battlefield. Politics had nothing to do with it. Releasing our enemies to kill more of our soldiers had everything to do with it. As for “a facility that should never have been opened,” Gitmo has been a US military post for over a century and most posts have a brig.

I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it. Imagine a future – ten years from now, or twenty years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?

The reason that the inmates at Gitmo have not been charged with a crime is that they are not criminals. They are prisoners of war. They have no rights under the US Constitution because they aren’t citizens of this country. No trial by jury, no civilian courts, no ACLU lawyers or rules of evidence, no bleeding heart pleas for their misunderstood terrorist childhoods. They were caught shooting at our soldiers. PERIOD!

As for “not a part of our country,” Gitmo is a part of a 1903 lease arising out of the Spanish American War. The US has absolute and unconditional control under that lease although the land belongs to Cuba, which belonged to the Spanish, whom we whupped! So while the Gitmo base isn’t on sovereign US soil, it wouldn’t be wise for Cuba to try to take it back. Fidel might want to talk to the Argentinians about the Falkland Islands first.

As for the Founders and future generations, I think both groups would be more shocked about our profligate government, its use of the IRS to target citizens, the criminalizing of news reporters by illegal violations of their First Amendment rights, ignoring our Libyan Ambassador’s cries for help, and high government officials in the DOJ, IRS, and State Department who have perjured themselves before investigative committees of the people’s Congress. Gitmo pales against these travesties.

Obama’s unilateral declaration that war against the forces of terror is over conveniently overlooked the fact that Iraq is about to collapse into civil war. The Middle East – Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan – have governments held together by chewing gum. None, including Iran, has a functioning economy that can employ its working-age male population to do something other than fight and engage in terrorism.

Militia groups – both armed and not – are forming throughout the Middle East and becoming de facto governments. A recent article noted that the Prime Minister of Libya “has to cross checkpoints manned by five different militias on his way home from office.”  Unless stable governments, even those not to our liking, are formed soon, the result will be similar to Palestinian society – a impoverished generation of uneducated young men who have known no life but war, who possess no marketable skill except that of an irregular fighter, who have no home and thus nothing to lose or to build a future on.

The Middle East is becoming a large “factory” for the production of terrorists – stamped out like Fords on an assembly line. And with the fall of governments, the ability to control them diminishes. They are homeless, hungry, and angry. Their problems can’t be solved by US foreign aid as Obama proposes in his speech. There isn’t enough money in the world let alone in the US to do that. What is needed is something we can’t provide – governments that reflect their multi-ethnic cultures, governments that often rule with an uncomfortably harsh stick. We better accept the fact that most of the world cannot remain stable with the degree of freedom Americans enjoy. To think otherwise is Little Goody Two-Shoes thinking … at home in nursery stories but not the real world.

The two greatest threats to our national security are a military designed for conventional war but unprepared to fight the only kind of war that can be waged against a superpower like us – i.e. an army of independent irregular units armed with unsophisticated weapons, possessing no central command structure, reliant on small scale terror attacks, and trained to have a fanatical willingness to die when their own deaths can be multiplied in their dastardly deeds.

The second threat to our national security is that we enter a new era of war with a president who believes that the war is over.

Ben Carson, MD: In His Own Words

I had never heard of Ben Carson until two years ago when I watched a movie starring Cuba Gooding as a doctor who endured racism as an intern and resident until he achieved respect as a neurosurgeon. Only at the end of the film did I learn this was the true story of a doctor who currently practiced at Johns Hopkins, one of the most esteemed hospitals in the country.

Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about Carson until last month when I heard that his keynote speech at last month’s National Prayer Breakfast caused a furor on The Left because he had the audacity to criticize our growing national debt and healthcare crisis while the architect of both problems was sitting a scant five feet away from the podium. Philosophically, however, they were separated by light years.

Ben Carson was born in Detroit 61 years ago to a functionally illiterate mother. Poor and black, Ben and his older brother Curtis had ready-made excuses to be victims. But they were blessed with a mother who refused to let either of them under-achieve.

I had a mother who would never allow herself to be a victim no matter what happened. Never made excuses, and she never accepted an excuse from us. And if we ever came up with an excuse, she always said do you have a brain? And if the answer was, yes, then she said then you could have thought your way out of it. And it was the most important thing she did for my brother and myself. Because if you don’t accept excuses, pretty soon [you] stop giving them, and start looking for solutions. And that is a critical issue when it comes to success.

Carson’s mother taught her boys the rewards of hard work by her own example.

My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn't want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. And, so she worked very hard. Sometimes we didn't see her for several days at a time, because she would go to work at five in the morning and get back after 11:00 p.m., going from one job to the next.

But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like, and she was also extremely thrifty. She would go to the Goodwill, she'd get a shirt that had a hole and put a patch on it and put another one on the other side to make it look symmetrical, and she sewed her own clothes.

She would take us out in the country on a Sunday and knock on a farmer's door and say, "Can we pick four bushels of corn, three for you and one for us?" and they were always glad at that deal. And she'd come home and she'd can the stuff, so that we would have food.

Ben Carson’s mother, Sonya, was one of 24 children. She had only a third grade education and had married at age 13, learning only after her two boys were born that the reason her husband traveled so much on his “job” was because he had another family. He was a bigamist. While the boys were only adolescents their parents’ divorce pushed the family deeper into poverty.

Where [we lived] you walk into a room and turn on the light switch and it looked like the wall was moving because there were so many roaches, and rats that were big enough to move garbage cans, and sirens and gangs and people lying in the street with bullet holes in their chest … [that’s] how my two cousins that we lived with got killed.

Despite his aspiration to be a doctor, young Ben Carson was not a good student.

I was a horrible student. But, you know, like many students, I kind of envisioned myself as a doctor anyway, despite the fact that I wasn't doing well. We lived in the inner city, single parent home, dire poverty… I was perhaps the worst student you've ever seen. I thought I was really stupid. All my classmates and teachers agreed, and my nickname was "Dummy."

The family’s extreme poverty caused Ben to have such low self-esteem that he developed a violent temper which caused frequent fights.

Another youngster angered me, and I had a large camping knife and I tried to stab him in the abdomen, and fortunately he had on a large metal belt buckle under his clothing and the knife blade struck with such force that it broke and he fled in terror. But, I was more terrified as I recognized that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing. I realized at that moment that with a temper like that, my options were three: reform school, jail, or the grave.

None of the options appealed to me. So, I just locked myself up in the bathroom and I started praying and I said, "Lord, I can't deal with this temper." And, I picked up my Bible and I started reading from the book of Proverbs. That was the first day that I started doing it, and I've been doing it every day since then because it had all these verses in it about anger, and it seemed like they were all applicable to me. And, while I was [in the bathroom], I had a revelation and that revelation was that the reason I was always angry is because I was always in the center of the equation. So, just step out of the center of the equation and then everything won't be directed at you, and then you won't be angry, and also, you'll be able to look at things from other people's points of view.

As a domestic servant, Carson’s mother observed that the wealthy families whose children she cared for watched little television. So she began rationing her boys to three TV shows per week and insisted that each boy fill his time instead by checking out two books from the Detroit Public Library and submit weekly written book reports to her. She appeared to read them and made checks marks in the margins. They didn’t know at the time that she couldn’t read.

I started to enjoy [reading] because we had no money, but between the covers of those books, I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything. And, I began to learn how to use my imagination more because it doesn't really require a lot of imagination to watch television, but it does to read. You've got to take those letters and make them into words, and those words into sentences, and those sentences into concepts, and the more you do that, the more vivid your imagination becomes. And, I believe that's probably one of the reasons that you see that creative people tend to be readers, because they're exercising their mind.

In time, the Carson family moved so the boys could attend a better neighborhood school – whose students happened to be mostly white. Eventually Ben’s grades improved to the point that he was making an “A” in every subject. While many of his teachers were supportive, some weren’t.

In the eighth grade, I was still at the top of the class and they would give a certificate out at the end of the semester to the student with the highest academic achievement. And, it turned out to be me, but I was the only black student in the class, and the teacher got up in the front and she basically chastised all the other students because they clearly weren't working hard enough. Because, how in the world could a black student be number one? I remember the band teacher tried to destroy my report card because I had all As and so he got to put a mark on it, so he gave me a C, and he figured by doing that I wouldn't get the award, only to find out that band wasn't included as an academic subject!

Yale offered Ben a scholarship. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in psychology and then attended the University of Michigan Medical School. Initially he planned to do his residency in psychiatry. But that changed.

I realized that I really didn't want to do psychiatry, and I felt that although cardiothoracic surgery was challenging, it didn't offer me enough variety of cases. And then I said, "Well, what's an area where you could become an authority very quickly?" and I said, "The brain, because nobody knows anything about the brain." And, I spent all those years thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist. So, I already knew quite a lot about the brain. So, it was toward the end of my first year in medical school that I decided that neurosurgery was going to be the right field for me.

Carson continued to encounter racism but had learned from his mother to ignore it rather than make an issue about it.

It wasn't difficult for me at all. And it remains not difficult today. I remember when I was an intern, and anytime I would go onto the wards with my scrubs on, one of the nurses invariably would say, you know, "Mr. Jones isn't quite ready to be taken to the O.R. yet," assuming that I was an orderly. I wouldn't get angry, I would simply say, "Well that's nice, but I'm Dr. Carson. I'm the intern." And, you know, they'd turn about 18 shades of red, but I would be very nice to them and understanding, and I had a friend for life. … Rather than blowing up and saying, "How dare you!" … I recognize that the reason they said that was not necessarily because they were racist, but because from their perspective the only black man they had ever seen on that ward with scrubs on was an orderly, so why should they think anything different?

Finishing his residency in neurosurgery, he decided to focus his medical career on children.

Pediatric neurosurgery became fascinating to me … With children, what you see is what you get. You couple that with the fact that I like to do complex things. You can sit there and you can do these enormously complex operations on old people, and it might be successful, and your reward is they live for five years. Whereas with a kid, you do this incredibly complex thing and your reward may be 50, 60 or 70 years. So I like to get a big return on my investment. So, I'd rather go with the kids.

Performing neurosurgical procedures on children is more complex because they are smaller and can’t tolerate the blood loss. On the other hand children have more plasticity than adults – i.e. their neurons haven’t all decided what they want to do when they grow up – so children tolerate radical procedures better. Blessed with extraordinary hand-eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills, Carson revived the practice of hemispherectomies in which half of a child’s brain is removed to correct intractable seizures. Because children can reprogram their brains in order to ambulate and use their limbs, most can lead seizure-free normal lives.

In 1987, Carson made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate German twins conjoined at the back of their Janus-like heads. Normally, one of the twins must be sacrificed to save the other. The parents begged him not to require them to choose which twin would die. But Carson had studied the use of hypothermic arrest which prevented blood loss in surgical procedures on baby hearts. So he applied the technique to separate these twins. In order to perform the procedure, he trained and led a 70-member surgical team which worked for 22 hours. A dramatic scene in the movie, Gifted Hands, occurs when Carson comes out of the surgery to meet the anxious parents and asks them which twin they wanted to hold first.

Ben Carson became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at age 33, the youngest major division director in Johns Hopkins history. He is Co-Director of The Johns Hopkins Craniofacial Center. In 1994 he and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund, a foundation that awards $1,000 college scholarships to students in grades 4 through 11 who excel academically and serve their communities.

While Carson’s surgical workload averaged around 500 procedures annually, as his popularity grew and he accepted more speaking engagements, he had to “cut back” to about 350 surgeries per year.

If you haven’t heard Ben Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast speech, this link will take you to the YouTube video of it. It’s been viewed by over 2.3 million people. He talks a good deal in the first half of his speech about the self-censorship that political correctness causes before getting to the remarks that, judging from his body language, displeased Obama.

Our debt situation …

I’m not politically correct, so I’m sorry, but you know – our deficit is a big problem. Think about it. And our national debt – $16.5 trillion dollars – you think that’s not a lot of money? I’ll tell you what! Count one number per second, which you can’t even do because once you get to a thousand it will take you longer than a second, but…one number per second. You know how long it would take you to count to 16 trillion? 507,000 years – more than a half a million years to get there. We have to deal with this.

Flat taxes …

What about our taxation system? So complex there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle of our tax system. If I wanted to get you, I could get you on a tax issue. That doesn’t make any sense. What we need to do is come up with something that is simple.

When I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the Universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called tithe. Now we don’t necessarily have to do 10% but … [God] didn’t say, if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithes. He didn’t say if you have a bumper crop give me triple tithes. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion dollars you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in $1 – of course, you gotta’ get rid of the loopholes, but now some people say, that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion dollars as much as the guy who made $10. Where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He’s just put in a billion in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him.

And healthcare savings accounts …

We’ve already started down the path to solving one of the other big problems, healthcare. We need to have good healthcare for everybody … but we’ve got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on healthcare, twice as much per capita as anybody in else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?

Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account (HSA) to which money can be contributed, pre-tax from the time you are born, to the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got six diseases, you’re not trying to spend everything. You’re happy to pass it on and nobody is talking about death panels. That’s number one.

For the people who are indigent, who don’t have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we have this huge pot of money … instead of sending it to bureaucracy – let’s put it into HSAs. Now they have some control over their own healthcare and what do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to learn very quickly how to be responsible. When Mr. Jones gets that diabetic foot ulcer, he’s not going to the emergency room and blowing a big chunk of it. He’s going to go to the clinic. He learns that very quickly – gets the same treatment. In the clinic they say, now let’s get your diabetes under control so that you’re not back here in three weeks with another problem. That’s how we begin to solve these kinds of problems.

A self-made black conservative pediatric neurosurgeon lectured an establishment black liberal politician on Bible-based fairness and commonsense last month. For once, Obama apologists couldn’t cry racism.

Ben Carson just announced he will retire from performing surgery in June. He will continue to teach surgery at Johns Hopkins.

Ben and his wife, Candy, he met and married while they attended Yale. Candy has an MBA. Ben’s mother lives with them in Baltimore.

Curtis is an engineer living in Georgia.