The American ‘Libya Model’ Of Denuclearization: Dishonor, Deceive, Kill

Bush, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Neoconservatism

No wonder John Bolton’s mention of the “Libya model” of denuclearization has put the negotiations with Kim Jong Un, leader of the hermit kingdom of North Korea, into speedy retreat.

Via UPI:

The Libyan program was dismantled during the presidency of George W. Bush. The process involved the transfer of Libyan nuclear equipment to a facility in the United States.
During the Obama administration, Col. Moammar Gadhafi was toppled from power and later killed by local rebel forces.

In other words, the US dishonored its agreement with Col. Gadhafi. In response to Libya’s denuclearization, America killed its leader, engaged in regime change and rendered that country ungovernable.

“We came, we saw, he died,” cackled Hillary Rodham Clinton. The gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department was gripped by a paroxysm of joy when a CBS News reporter informed her that Col. Muammar Gadhafi had been executed. “Veni, Vidi, Vici”: “I came, I saw, I conquered” is attributed to Julius Caesar in 47 B.C.

The hilarity unfolded on October 20, 2011. Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, our Libyan buddies, “the rebels,” apprehended Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte en route to Misrata, both on the Mediterranean Sea. As they lynched their former leader on camera, the rebels emitted their version of Hillary’s blood-curdling riff: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” Sophisticated enough to film their “justice,” these atavists had no qualms about tearing into a defenseless individual before summarily shooting him in the head.

FROM “Murder on Her Mind.”

Question: President Trump seemed to be looking forward to making the impressive leap toward disarming North Korea, followed by an uneasy peace with its leader—even minting a “commemorative coin of Trump and Kim Jong-un.”


Wasn’t the president aware that his national security adviser, Mr. Bolton, could destroy it all?

Didn’t Trump know about Bolton’s foreign policy bellicosity?

Vulgarity And Vanity Come To The Ancient St. George Chapel, At Windsor Castle

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Britain, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

… IN DECEMBER 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a disastrous matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House of Windsor, which had already begun a decline many years earlier.

But like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,” getting “with it,” so to speak, with all current fads, breaking with tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the survival of the nation. And if that means inviting a whole slew of remarkably disreputable Hollywood types, not to mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria Regina, then so be it.

And then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry, a few years back, was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, and distinguished himself for his left-wing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and prohibitions in the Pauline message!

And he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as admiring Fox commentator/airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the wedding. [Where, pray tell, does Fox get all these brainless blondes from?]

For thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yeah, cheater King was an expert on conjugal love!), civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.

The Windors, for the most part, set stony-faced, enveloped by the tide of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the ceremony
“combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the truth … about monarchy and monarchs in the modern world:

“They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.”

Our world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and King John Sobieskis who would stand manfully against the onrushing tide of Modernity and decay in our civilization. The awe and reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.

When the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as the Windsors have done, only Evil—the “rough beast”—smiles.

… READ THE REST. The complete commentary is “That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry, and the End of England.”

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

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UPDATE IV (5/22): ‘Haters Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate …’

Anti-Semitism, Family, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Law, Logic, Political Correctness, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

As my dearest first cousin says, “You need to duck, cuz, and let the sh-t hit the wall.”

Quit trying to convince pathological haters you’re a good gal or guy, because, well … “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

And they’ll hate you, even when you transform yourself in their image.

If people harbor hate for you—speak it and act it—there’s nothing you can do to transform that hate. Surround yourself with those who don’t think you’re drek. Surround yourself with people who know your heart and with whom you have reciprocal relationships.

In a related context, an articulate reader, a lawyer, reacted strongly to the habitual hatred this writer receives on the Unz Review:

imbroglio says:
May 18, 2018 at 2:00 pm GMT • 400 Words

Until recently, I’ve been an avid reader of the UNZ review one of whose leading contributors is Ilana Mercer. Ilana has great insight informed by natural gifts and the benefit of having lived in various cultures. Because of her (((background))), Ilana draws the mocking ire of trolls who hope to discount the value of what she says by means of their ad hominem attacks on her ethnicity. As we say in the legal world, argue the facts. If you haven’t got the facts, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, call your opponent unflattering names and argue to the jury that though the defendant didn’t commit the crime, he could have or at least he would have which makes him as guilty as if he had committed the crime.

Free speech enables people to say what they want. But there are consequences. When the UNZ Review lends itself to Jew-bashing, which is better done by those who write for Takimag and whose skill, in that regard, has been refined to a finer art than UNZ readers seem capable of; Ron Unz and his contributors lose credibility and start to become cliché and uninteresting. In addition, the men who engage in this business – I’ve yet to see a woman do so – come off as weasels and wimps. Let the P.C. crowd do as it pleases, its denizens are hardly avatars of healthy gender relations, but though a guy may take sharp issue with a woman, no self-respecting man would demean a lady with the kind of snide and baseless insults Ilana seems to attract.

There are two kinds of Jew-bashers: the ruthless, intelligent sociopaths who’d inflict violence on Jews if they thought they could get away with it. Their presence on this site is rare. More numerous are the clever but vacuous Jew-bashers who tend to end up as cannon fodder in their personal lives, conflicts and contests that have little to do with Jews. UNZ may find their comments useful, but why that would be so escapes me.

*****

Why, thank you sir—especially for fingering the unmanly men who suffer small-man syndrome.

Fact: There are other Jewish writers on the Unz Review. But they are men. They receive mostly obsequious, boot-licking adoration from the “weasels and the wimps.”

At play here is more than Jew-bashing. It is that the miserable, mediocre men in the Comments Section (for the most) hate it when a woman out-thinks men.

As a defender of men, this saddens—it’s been a huge disappointment—but it is, nevertheless, true.

Like the reader, I prefer the American Renaissance’s practice of a modicum of comments moderation. The Comments on said site are edifying even when negative.

An example of edifying criticism is the reader on Townhall.com. His comments yielded the 5/17 column, “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” with Our American Democracy?” (Part 2).

But hey, The Unz Review is private property. And weasels and wusses don’t scare me. I write my weekly piece, generally to positive reviews. (UPDATE III (5/21): Have done so since 1999, for almost 20 years.)

And I avoid reading the words of the weasels and the wusses as a real man would avoid email spam advertising penile enhancements.

BRING IT, BITCHES!

UPDATE I via Facebook:

Myron Robert Pauli Ilana Mercer: (1) There are, tragically, very few really good columnists of any sex M,F,LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ – and you are one of them. (2) Even among good writers, there are not too many women – not sure why {politically correct answer is the Intergalactic Sexist Conspiracy} – but there are just a few. (3) Can one find anti-Jewish/Zionist whatever stuff on the Unz sight – yes, and more than I would like to see but I try not to get into a pi$$ing contest with every skunky inference on the planet – one never “wins” these contests (4) Ironically, I am finding precious little to read in the Washington Post op-eds – I almost think it is the identically same op-ed “Trump Is Hitler” with a computer randomly toggling sentences and then putting a random name of Dana Milbank, Fareed Zakharia, Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Greg Sargent, Kathleen Parker, Richard Cohen, Fred Hiatt, R2D2, … whomever’s turn it is for the by-line of the “Trump Is Hitler” op-ed-du-jour (5) On the latter point, I am not claiming this because I think Trump is perfect but to quote Johannes Brahms when someone pointed out that the last movement of his first symphony resembled a theme in Beethoven‘s Ode to Joy, “Any ass can see that!”. (6) Thus, it is the people who point out that the Iraq war was an impending disaster – the people who have the foresight to not follow the “prevailing” stupidity that I admire the most (such as Ilana).

UPDATE II via Twitter:

UPDATE IV (5/22): Wanda’s generosity of spirit means more than she knows.

Wanda De Lange Zanzi With dictionary by my side, I adore reading the workings of your mind. As a female you inspire me as a female… You have already and continue to teach me to think logically and laterally without gender (class, culture and or race) emotion, on many issues. As a female South African that says a lot, which, perhaps, would be greatly misinterpreted by a gazillion other people. Thank you for inspiring me to think.

Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy? (Part 2)

America, Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, Government, Russia, States' Rights

THE NEW COLUMN is “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy?” (Part 2). The unabridged version is on WND.com. A slightly abridged version is on Townhall.com:

Not a day goes by when the liberal media don’t telegraph to the world that a “Trumpocracy” is destroying American democracy. Conspicuous by its absence is a pesky fact: Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy.

To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.

One of the ways in which the republic was destroyed was through the slow sundering of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. The 10th was meant to guarantee constitutional devolution of power.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The de facto demise of the 10th has resulted in “constitutional” consolidation.

Fair enough, but is that enough? A perceptive Townhall.com reader was having none of it.

In response to “Whodunit? Who ‘Meddled’ With Our American Democracy” (Part 1), the reader upbraided this writer:

“Anyone who quotes the 10th Amendment, but not the 14th Amendment that supplanted it cannot be taken seriously.”

In other words, to advance the erosion of the 10th in explaining who did our republic in, without mentioning the 14th: this was an omission on the writer’s part.

The reader is admirably correct about Incorporation-Doctrine centralization.

Not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to concede that the 14th Amendment and the attendant Incorporation Doctrine have obliterated the Constitution’s federal scheme, as expressed in the once-impregnable 10th Amendment.

What does this mean?

You know the drill but are always surprised anew by it. Voters pass a law under which a plurality wishes to live in a locality. Along comes a U.S. district judge and voids the law, citing a violation of the 14th’s Equal Protection Clause.

For example: Voters elect to prohibit local government from sanctioning gay marriage. A U.S. district judge voids voter-approved law for violating the 14th’s Equal Protection Clause.

These periodical contretemps around gay marriage, or the legal duty of private property owners to cater these events, are perfectly proper judicial activism. It flows from the 14th Amendment.

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of a judiciary. Yet not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to cop to this constitutional fait accompli.

The gist of it: Jeffersonian constitutional thought is no longer in the Constitution; its revival unlikely. ….

Into the Cannibal's Pot
Order columnist Ilana Mercer’s polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

 

… READ THE REST:  THE NEW COLUMN is “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” With Our American Democracy?” (Part 2). The unabridged version is on WND.com. A slightly abridged version is on Townhall.com.