Category Archives: Foreign Policy

The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet (Part I)

Bush, Crime, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Justice, libertarianism, Republicans, Ron Paul, UN

“The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet” (Part I) is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

If Donald J. Trump wishes to lessen the impact of his disappointing second in the Iowa caucuses and walk back the tack he’s taken with Ted Cruz—he must begin to think big and talk big.

Loud in not necessarily big.

Call it triangulation, a concept associated with Bill Clinton’s successful strategies, or call it “the art of the deal”: It’s time for Trump to DO IT.

To this end, Trump must quit the “we don’t win anymore” formulaic rhapsody, and start fleshing out substantive positions. A pragmatist does so by introducing the people he’ll be recruiting to “Make America Great Again.”

To Cruz belongs the Trump Department of Justice portfolio. Offering Justice to Cruz allows Trump to both put Ted in his place as unsuited to the presidency; while simultaneously making him part of Team Trump and repairing that relationship.

Ted is too soft to be US president in these troubled times. But he’d make a spectacular attorney general in charge of DOJ.

There’s a reason George W. Bush hates Ted Cruz. In 2008, Cruz gave America reason to cue the mariachi band and celebrate the death of detritus José Medellín.

As part of a gangbanger initiation rite, Medellín had raped (in every way possible), strangled, slashed, and stomped two young Texan girls to death.

“In Texas,” to quote another Ron from the Lone Star State, “we have the death penalty and we use it. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.”

Bush 43 would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Backed by Bush—and on behalf of Medellín and other killer compadres awaiting a similar fate—Mexico promptly sued the US over procedural technicalities in the International Court of Justice. The president ordered Texas to halt the execution of murderer and rapist Medellín.

Texas’ heroic solicitor general said no.

Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court. There, he bested Bush and his lickspittles. As the Conservative Review gloated, Cruz “won the case, 6-to-3.” He had sought justice for Americans against a president who subjugated them to international courts. Ted, moreover, was forever gracious about Bush; Bush and his bambino bro routinely slime Ted. (In trashing Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Trump is in bad company.) …

…Read the rest.“The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet” (Part I) is the current column, now on WND.

Iran Prisoner Swap Likely B/C Of Loss Of Face/Shaming Stateside

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iran, Military, Politics, The State

It would appear that the prisoner swap with Iran had not been written into the nuclear agreement with Iran, as the Obama administration is trying mightily to imply. “We’ve been engaged in tortuous negotiations” for 14 months,” say surrogates for the Obama team, all too eager to depict cabinet members and special envoy doing the impossible for their countrymen.

Not for one minute is this believable. The bastards were going to let those Americans rot. Obama thought he’d get away with touting the diplomatic accomplishment of the nuclear deal above all else. Like all politicking, the Iran deal would be a legacy for the political class involved; a loss for the people whose betterment the pols are supposed to strive.

It’s hard to tell from the veiled language used in reports. Journalist can’t think clearly and therefore are unable to ask a clear, pointed question like this:

Was the release of the American prisoners stipulated in the nuclear deal? Provide the text, please.

As I asked yesterday:

As for the implication on Twitter that Obama, his stellar bureaucrats and their predecessors have been busy for years in negotiations, because, well, that’s the way things are done (faith in government runs eternal). Not quite. Mother of decapitated hostage James Foley attested to being threatened with legal action by the benevolent functionaries if she attempted to independently retrieve her son. (DIANE FOLEY spoke to Anderson Cooper about that haunting regret in her life.) So the bureaucrat (Bush’s or Obama’s) is forever frenetic, but because he’s saving American lives.

RELATED “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS” (9/30/2004)

Another dynamic in operation is the humiliating specter of the American sailors being toyed with by the Iranians. Obama didn’t so much mind what befell those young men and woman; but he couldn’t tolerate his pride and vanity being further damaged in the US.

UPDATED: State of Disunion Stars Two Chief Dividers

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Politics, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

A most divisive president, Barack Obama, will be devoting his last State of the Union extravaganza to dispelling the conviction that he, Obama, has been an extraordinarily divisive and antagonistic president. Even Obama’s decision not to mention the capture, today (1/12/2016), by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of 10 American marines will prove divisive. But hey, legacy before loyalty. In that tradition, hubristic Obama will be speaking to the things that unite America, namely his legacy.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’ll be delivering the Republicans’ SOTU response, is an equally divisive figure, having chosen, last year, to excise a part of Southern history: Haley tore down the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from the State House grounds, even though the Confederate flag “never flew over an official Confederate building,” and “was a battle flag intended to honor the great Robert E. Lee.”

I won’t be dignifying Il Duce’s last SOTU address. Instead I’ll excerpt the 2010 WND column about this “Stalinesque Extravaganza.” Just about everything in the column, “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State,” still obtains:

Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)

“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

“We Are Doomed” deconstructs this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and the trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.” In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is essential to reinvent the state. Since Obama has no understanding of how the economy works and why it collapsed, he honestly thinks that centrally planned political projects are every bit as productive as profit-driven investments of private property.

Ever the source of deafening demagoguery, the president promised pay dirt to businesses that heeded his call to greatness. Should a company “relocate to a community that was hit hard when a factory left town,” the president will plunder (private property), print (funny-money), and beg (borrow) in order to help these friends-in-fascism to “finance a new plant, equipment, or train for new workers.”

In the spirit of brute-force statism, the POTUS also promised a Trade Enforcement Unit to police “unfair trading practices,” and a “Financial Crimes Unit to “crack down on large-scale fraud.” And he, BHO, will corral corporations into “model partnerships” with community colleges, while simultaneously redesigning the curricula and websites of said colleges.

Il Duce’s next derring-do? Send him the bill, and Obama will even instruct the provinces to incarcerate local kids in high school “until they graduate or turn 18.”

To keep the student-loan bubble afloat, America’s potentate wants to mandate more loans at fixed prices, as well as expand federally financed research and development. Nowhere is it authorized by the Constitution, but—don’t you know it?—without “federally financed labs and universities” and “public research dollars,” the Internet and assorted “technologies to extract natural gas out of shale rock” would never have come about.

Having used the military to great political effect, Obama now intends to deploy the Department of Defense, no less, in the “clean energy business.” In Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary—the DOD is bound to do a bang-up job.

From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.

And so the president forges ahead with plans to grow the Dead Zone of government.

(From “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

UPDATE: So was it good for you? Did the earth move? Barack Obama’s presidency was to be, by his account “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.”

Those were the words of the Messiah himself, excerpted from the nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Saudi Arabian Execution Is A Good Excuse For the US To … Leave The UN

Foreign Policy, Middle East, Nationhood, UN

The role the US should play in the execution by Saudi Arabia of a Shiite cleric is twofold:

First, make clucking sounds and issue empty statements. Here’s an example, via RT:

“Human Rights Watch strongly criticized the Saudi executions. Regardless of the crimes allegedly committed, executing prisoners [en masse] only further stains Saudi Arabia’s troubling human rights record,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the group’s Middle East director said, adding that al-Nimr was convicted in an “unfair” trial and that his execution “is only adding to the existing sectarian discord and unrest.” “Saudi Arabia’s path to stability in the Eastern Province lies in ending systematic discrimination against Shia citizens, not in executions.”

Next, use the occasion to get the hell out of the UN, where Saudi Arabia plays a prominent role in … human rights affairs.

Through its many agencies, the U.N. works tirelessly to undermine the values of economic freedom and individual responsibility and to consolidate a coercive global economic order. If the people ought to govern, then it seems obvious that a centralized administration like the U.N., with considerable sway over “sovereign” nation-states, is a danger to the freedoms of all nations and their individual subjects.

That the UN is a terrible enterprise with too much power over the US is nothing new. “The mass execution of 47 including the Shia cleric,” by a mover and shaker of the UN’s Human Rights apparatus, would have simply afforded any moral government the diplomatic opportunity to say adios to the UN blight, for once and for all.

The second response is as likely as a snowstorm in the desert. “That the U.N. is working diligently to homogenize laws the world over is a source of delight to national leaders. These leaders don’t want to have to stay competitive in order to keep productive people and their capital in their jurisdictions. The real U.S. sovereignty violators then are successive American governments. By becoming signatories to global wealth-distributing agreements and assorted schemes that place Americans under U.N. jurisdiction, our own governments continue to betray us.