Category Archives: Foreign Policy

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.

The Bogus Bush Doctrine Alive And Well-Exploited By All Demopublicans

Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, Terrorism

The aversion Americans have of dying by Muslim in America, all politicians assuage by promising to bomb Syria and Iraq or to brainwash Middle Eastern populations about democracy. Tying attacks like San Bernadino in the US to a war on ISIS and proxies in the Middle East is The Bush Doctrine.

The dumb Bush dictum of fighting them over there so they don’t come here is alive and well-exploited by every fork-tongued politician on the Republican and Democratic sides, other than Donald Trump, who distills the issue logically.

Barack Obama routinely deflects questions about death by Muslim in San Bernadino with answers about keeping “up the pressure, our air campaign will continue to hit ISIL harder than ever.” And oh, “It is very difficult for us to detect lone wolf plots or plots involving a husband and wife, in this case, because despite the incredible vigilance of our law enforcement and homeland security, it’s not that different from us trying to detect the next mass shooter. You don’t always see it.”

Every time John Kasich or Chris Christie or Marco Rubio and the interchangeable rest are asked about death by Muslim in the US; they too whip out the Bush Doctrine. Over to the disgusting Kasich:

BLITZER: Governor Kasich, one of the killers in San Bernardino was an American who was not on anyone’s watch list. How are you going to find that radicalized person and stop another such attack?

KASICH: Well, first of all, Wolf, I said last February that we needed to have people on the ground, troops on the ground in a coalition similar to what we had in the first Gulf War.

I remember when the Egyptian ambassador to the United States stood in the Rose Garden and pledged Arab commitment to removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Before we came out here tonight, I am told that the Saudis have organized 34 countries who want to join in the battle against terrorism.

First and foremost, we need to go and destroy ISIS. And we need to do this with our Arab friends and our friends in Europe.

And when I see they have a climate conference over in Paris, they should have been talking about destroying ISIS because they are involved in virtually every country, you know, across this world. …

Americans must reject this illogic.

GOP Debate: America-First Alliance Emerges, Neoconservatives Neutralized

Constitution, Elections, Foreign Policy, Islam, Terrorism

“GOP Debate: America-First Alliance Emerges” is the latest column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… On the foreign policy front, an alliance emerged that saw Trump, Paul and Cruz unite to advance an America First foreign policy, and to volubly oppose the foreign policy forays of Rubio, aka Genghis Bush aka Dick Cheney aka Jeb Bush aka John Kasich aka Carly Fiorina.

Thus when Chris Christie – who also shares the ideological cockpit with the neoconservatives – vowed to down Russian planes if they crossed a no fly zone he’d establish in Syria, Paul was quick to interject: “There’s your candidate to start World War III.”

“If we want to defeat terrorism, the boots on the ground need to be Arab boots on the ground,” insisted Sen. Paul splendidly. Then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, “If we ban Muslim immigration, the terrorists will have won.”

“The terrorists win if Americans don’t do as the politicians say” is reverse psychology and cliché rolled into one. The prez also keeps saying, “Dare do x, y or z on matters Muslim, and you guaranteed that ISIS wins.” Or, “ISIS wants you to do x, y, and z.”

First, how do these asses know what ISIS wants? Or, are Barack Obama and Sen. Paul simply ass-uming they know? It is more likely the two politicians are using reverse psychology to get Americans to comply with their own wishes.

In any event, if ISIS wants you, America, to do what in your estimation is best for you–perhaps ISIS is right and the president is wrong. Perhaps ISIS is right and Rand Paul is wrong.

So, Sen. Paul, we’ll take that long moratorium on Muslim immigration. It’s a winner for Americans. If ISIS approves, too, so be it. ISIS is happy; we are happy; everybody is happy; we all win. …

Read the complete column. “GOP Debate: America-First Alliance Emerges” is now on WND.