Did Hillary Hawk Lose Because She’s A Lot Like Chucky Krauthammer?

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

A new study makes the case that Hillary Clinton lost because the poor, largely white communities which pay for war forevermore, got sick of paying.

… professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.

By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.

The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note:

I hope so. And let’s hope Trump remembers running on a plank of no more unwarranted, aggressive unconstitutional wars. (Good move today in initiating cooperation with Russia.) However, whenever I watch soldiers selected to appear on Fox News, they’re cheering loudest for war, and damning those who object.

POTUS In Poland And The Neoconservative Threat

Donald Trump, Europe, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

The president began his address to the Polish with praise for his wife, long-overdue: “… no better ambassador for our country than our beautiful First Lady, Melania.”

Of concern is that President Trump’s powerful address to the People of Poland, on July 6, 2017, has become a repository for neoconservative fantasies of world domination.

What President Trump said is hardly a Rorschach blot: fuzzy, hazy verbal vapor, designed to absorb the listener’s projected emotions and reflect them back soothingly. The neoconservatives, however, are back. And the Never-Trumpsters have stepped into their former positions in media.

Chucky Krauthammer rides again.


The Poles Like Gen. Lee’s Battle Flag:

READ: Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland | July 6, 2017.

See it.

North Korea Is Dangerous, But Hardly Irrational

America, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, War, WMD

What happened when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi voluntarily rid Libya of weapons of mass destruction? The US dishonored a previous promise to lay off Libya, and sanctioned an invasion by proxy and a regime change. That turned out as wonderfully as America’s other regime-change adventures (yielding a refugee invasion of Europe, among other things).

Talking to Brooke Baldwin of CNN, DAVID E. SANGER, expert on North Korea, seconded that fear of the US’s regime-change habit is a factor in the frightening displays of military might of the ostracized North Korean regime.

“… This is all about survival for Kim Jung Un. He’s not likely to give up his only ticket to survival. His view of the world is that the US is out to topple his regime. [Is that an unrealistic view?] He looks at a country like Libya which gave up its nascent nuclear technology [but got finished off by the US]. Thus the refrain of many administrations—that Kim should give up his nuclear weapons—is unlikely to happened.”

The Declaration Of Independence Has Been Mocked Out Of Meaning

America, Britain, English, History, Liberty, Multiculturalism

The Declaration Of Independence Has Been Mocked Out Of Meaning” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. It toasts The Declaration, Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon tradition, from which Jefferson drew.

An excerpt:

For most Americans, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—doesn’t feature in the celebration. Contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it’s easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

It is fair to say that the Declaration of Independence has been mocked out of meaning.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, urged that the “people be universally informed.” (They were!)

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the collective mentality of contemporary Americans and their leaders (Rep. Ron Paul excepted) “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English, Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Come to think of it, Jefferson would not recognize England as the home of the Whigs in whose writings colonial Americans were steeped—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others.

The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, explains David N. Mayer in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance. …

… READ THE REST. The complete column is “The Declaration Of Independence Has Been Mocked Out Of Meaning,” now on Townhall.com.