25 September 2013 –

Our Family Needs to Hash This Out. 

Will y’all please sit down?  Would somebody please park Aunt Crystal’s wheelchair near the front so she can follow the discussion?  Thank you getting’ together in this family council.  We have a lotta issues to discuss.  Since Cousin Victor insists that we no longer start meetings with a prayer, let’s get right into it.  

Our agenda has a bunch of important issues.  1) Constant crime and violence in nearby neighborhoods, committed by ethnic gangs on each other and on innocent neighbors, are threatening our family’s security.  2) The family compound gates are left open all hours of the day and night, with no one watching who enters or leaves.  3) We need to tidy up our family compound since most of us create some garbage and smoke running businesses out of our sheds and garages.  4) Our kids’ marks in school ain’t stacking up against those in other neighborhoods.  5) Is Cousin Waylon getting his meds delivered on time? 

Before chewing on these, I say that our number one issue is the family’s finances.  Ever since we hired Uncle Sam to help us deal with all our issues, we have had good times and bad times.  But, we find ourselves in a new mud hole, and we are digging it deeper every day.  Very soon, if we don’t climb out, we will bury ourselves.  Then, others’ cows will graze on our lawns.  We need to talk about how much of our money Uncle Sam is spending.

Right now, we pay Uncle Sam about $275,000/year to do all this stuff for the family.  This amount has gone up a lot over the years.  OK, we get a lot for the money; but, in the last ten to fifteen years, Uncle Sam has been spending far more than what we pay him every year.  Last year, he spent over $350,000.  In fact, he right now has over $1,700,000 in credit card debt.  That is more than the entire family makes in a year.  He spends at least $40,000/year on the debt interest alone.  Just how long Uncle Sam is gonna be able to sweet talk the bank into handling that debt is debatable.  Family: we gotta rein in Uncle Sam or the bank will demand that we pay that debt with our money and our property.  Our good name is gonna be worthless.  Then, what are we gonna get done? 

I, therefore, put to a vote that we demand that Uncle Sam every year submits a list of stuff he can do for us, how much it’s gonna cost, and makes sure that the cost is the same or less than what we are payin’ him.  That’ll keep the bank off our back as we figure out how to start payin’ on the debt itself.  I vote for it.  Whatty’all think? 

Aunt Mabel?  “Crystal and I don’t think we need a vote.  Uncle Sam is a good man.  He cares for the family, especially those in need.  Everything will work out if we trust him.  Against.”

Cousin Cletis?  “We need to borrow more money right now anyway or Uncle Sam won’t be able to pay today’s bills.  I am sure the bank also is under a lot of pressure to extend more credit.  We don’t need a vote until later, when things get really hairy.  Against.”

 

Cousin Earl?  “I’m sorry, Cousin, I was on my phone talking to my foreman.  I gotta go to work. But, I’m all for it.  ” 

Aunt Agnes?  “I’ll vote for anything that’ll keep my monthly check comin’ in.  I am afraid.  Against.” 

Cousin Waylon?   “He’s your Uncle Sam, but he’s my Daddy, and he got me my job.  I’ll vote to keep things the way they are.  Against.” 

 

Cousin Buford?  "It seems that we are spending a lot of money for things we can do better for ourselves.  For." 

Cousin Sue?  "We’re getting’ some fancy things, but it’s like we don’t need to be a family no more.  For. "

Finally, Cousin Syvie?  "I can take care of myself better than Uncle Sam ever can.  What’s more, he just dumped a bunch of our money in a health spa membership that will cost our young’uns a ton of money for something they don’t need and I can’t even get me an appointment in the next two weeks.  For. For. For."

   

Thank you, family.  Hmm…until we solve this, is the rest of the agenda even worth going through right now?  

12 September 2013 –

Where Is The Islamic Jihadist Threat Coming From?

In April 2001, five months before 9/11, I attended a Middle East Orientation Course before deploying to Turkey as part of Operation NORTHERN WATCH.  Our job there would be to enforce the no-fly zone above the 36^th parallel in Iraq—a vestige of DESERT STORM’s defeating Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991 and liberating Kuwait.  The course included presentations on the governments, cultures, religions, economies, and histories, of the countries from Morocco to Iran.  In military parlance, we were drinking from the fire hose before being thrown into the fire.   

An Air Force Moslem chaplain was one of the presenters.  A Catholic convert to Islam, he completed religious training under an American program funded by the Saudi Arabian Wahabist sect of Islam.  What bothered me immediately was a bearded civilian of middle-eastern descent who stood at the edge of the stage and monitored the chaplain’s presentation. The chaplain often turned to him for silent approval. 

During the question and answer period, I asked about the extra man on stage.  The chaplain said that he came from a local mosque in Florida and was there to approve his, the chaplain’s, remarks.  I asked why a trained Air Force chaplain, in uniform, talking to other Air Force personnel in an official setting, would need a local civilian to approve what he said.  No other religion’s chaplains had such a requirement.  The chaplain said that his authority to counsel Air Force Moslems and to preach Islam came from his imam and not from the Air Force.  He said that he was always under such control.  The local imam on stage scowled at me throughout the explanation. 

I then suggested to the chaplain the following scenario:  Suppose a Moslem fighter pilot was deploying to Turkey to fly combat missions over Northern Iraq and came to his chaplain for spiritual guidance.  This pilot may indeed be ordered to attack and kill Iraqi soldiers on the ground.  These Iraqi soldiers would most certainly be Moslems.   How would he, the conservative Moslem chaplain, advise this pilot?  A dreadful answer followed.  The chaplain looked at his imam handler and then said that as a Moslem chaplain he would tell the fighter pilot to refuse to attack fellow Moslems on the ground.  I reminded the chaplain that this USAF officer voluntarily bound himself by oath to execute the missions given him.  I also reminded the chaplain that he also had taken that same oath of office.  Therefore, would the chaplain counsel a fellow officer to break that oath?  The chaplain’s second answer: He would counsel Moslems to refuse to kill Moslems, no matter what uniform anyone was wearing. 

I said nothing more.  All the air was sucked out of the room in amazement.  The civilian imam motioned that the session was over, and he and the chaplain left the stage.  We immediately broke for lunch.  When we returned, the commander of the base, an upset two-star general, took the stage and announced that the Air Force had no problems with any Moslems serving and that we should go on with our presentations.  We dutifully obeyed and finished the day with no further confrontations with uniformed traitors.       

I write about this event twelve years later to emphasize a compelling fact: Almost every international “crisis” confronting the United States in the last two decades has been woven throughout by major strains of Islamic Jihadist violence.  The violent attacks of the last decades, funded by petro dollars, are the latest jihadist campaign in a 1300-year war between an increasingly secular Western civilization and Islam.   What we in the West call toleration, jihadists call weakness and willful rebellion against authority.  What we honor as individual liberties, jihadists call infidels’ insubordination to Islam.  Jihadists look at our nation’s grand experiment of freedom, buttressed by obligations to our nation and to others’ liberties, as a weakness to exploit.  Jihadists hate our way of life, and they hate us.    

To blunt our enemy’s latest aggression, we must remind ourselves who killed three thousand Americans twelve years ago, who has killed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, who killed bystanders in the Boston marathon, who killed unarmed soldiers in a processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, who killed our ambassador and three others in Benghazi, who is killing thousands of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and who is killing Syrian Christians today, right now.   

We know our enemy.  We know where he comes from.  We know he wants to punish then eradicate the West.  This is war.  

6 September 2013 - 

What Could Possibly Be More Important Than Syria?

The importance of the crisis in Syria is overblown.  But, the President is deflecting our focus on to strategically irrelevant events in an effort to avoid facing real threats to the United States which are within our power to solve.  Consider the following strategic threats to America. 

The federal debt is almost $17,000,000,000,000, more money than the entire country produces in a year.  And, the federal government spends nearly a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes.  Unless the President follows the Constitutional mandate to submit a legitimate annual budget and drastically reduce spending on programs that are not the federal government’s constitutional obligation, foreign countries eventually will no longer accept U.S. dollars or bonds in payment.  Our money—our sovereignty—will then be worthless.  Foreign banks and foreign interests will dictate how we pursue our own strategic interests.  If this isn’t a looming sovereignty crisis, nothing is.

Over six percent of our population resides in the U.S. illegally.  Our sovereignty—our ability to control our borders and to enforce our laws—is eroding.  Foreign interests, whose concepts of government are fundamentally different from those outlined in our Constitution, increasingly influence local, state, and federal governance.  What is a bigger threat to the United States, a civil war in Syria where victory by either side does little to change our strategic position in the region, or an administration that selectively enforces immigration laws, refuses to let states enforce immigration laws, and encourages local politicians to ignore the law with “sanctuary city” policies?  If our illegal immigration situation isn’t an invasion that sparks domestic conflict, nothing is.  

The U.S.’s self-serving administrative and regulatory government rivals any in Europe.  Currently, it uses tax enforcement powers to squelch conservative dissent.  To support an ill-conceived anti-terrorism strategy, it willfully intrudes on Americans’ legal, private communications.  By regulatory fiat, it picks winners and losers in the marketplace.  We can hardly claim moral authority as the world’s guardian of democracy and freedom when we govern ourselves more like Napoleon’s descendants than like Washington’s. 

In foreign policy decision-making, particularly in the Middle East, the President has been naïve and feckless, and has behaved dangerously.  His successes are short-lived and leave us open-ended exposure to more violence.  In March through November of 2011, for example, using UN Resolution 1973 as cover, the President acted without congressional approval and pushed NATO to conduct a bombing campaign over Libya.  Fortunately, this resulted in virtually no friendly casualties, little collateral damage on the ground, and the eventual execution of a really bad guy, Mohammar Qadafi.  But, there have been longer-term consequences of our actions, such as the rise of radical Islamist violence in the government and on the streets of Libya.  When these radical Islamists killed our ambassador and three others in Benghazi in 2012, our response went from embarrassing to criminal.  One bad foreign policy decision by our President led to another, and America and Libya now are no better off than they were in February 2011.  The next embarrassments will come if the President uses the same decision-making process in Syria that he used in Libya.

Finally, the government of the United States must seize strategic initiative in the Middle East and reject pressure to react to events like the Syrian civil war.  We can become literally energy independent instead of allowing economic and diplomatic power to flow to countries like Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.  The administration should encourage the development of ALL of America’s oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power sources.  We should become an energy exporter.  It is within our domestic power to do so.  That would dry up funds to the terrorist networks that hate America and to the organizations that threaten our friend, Israel, the only working democracy in the Middle East.  Our energy independence can reprioritize all crises in the Middle East and within the international economic arena. 

 

All strategic threats to the United States are within our domestic power to resolve.  But, the strength to use that power will never emanate from the President or Congress unless we, the people, demand they use it.  We must demand that those who govern  make these strategic changes; then and only then will we retain the status of super-power, command the world’s respect, recover our sovereignty, and reclaim the ability to define our own destiny.