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He Fights!

A friend and shipmate from my tour on the USS Chicago (CG-11) sent the following to me, and I could not help but to share it with my followers. Mr. Sayet speaks to his leftist friends. His points are very valid and worthy of repeating, but wait, who would I repeat them to; I have no leftist friends!

He Fights

By Evan Sayet

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum.  They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”  Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.  We tried statesmanship.  Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?  We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?  And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.  I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.  I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.  Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s.   To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.  It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war.  While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors.  Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.  Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today.   Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man.  He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking person.  In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank.  But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be eight decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting.  And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent (people), I read your book!”  That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.  That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.   It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.

First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN.  He made it personal.  Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”

Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.

Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position.  With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat.  They need to respond.  This leaves them with only two choices.  They can either “go high” (as Hillary and Michelle would disingenuously declare and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.  The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve.  It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN.  This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”

This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do.  The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious.  Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.

And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes.   Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.

Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme.  This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family — a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him.  If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.

Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.

This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.

So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”?  Of course I do.   These aren’t those times.  This is war.  And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting  without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times.  I don’t care.  I can’t spare this man.  He fights.

Evan Sayet is the author of The Kinder Garden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks.  His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history.

 

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the
liberties of a nation be secure when we have
removed a conviction that these liberties are
the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just, that his justice
cannot sleep forever.” Thomas Jefferson
=======================================

 

Originally posted 2017-08-22 13:52:10.

Recent Posts

General Robert E. Lee

7 Comments
As a Marine Infantryman, we studied Lee, we studied his tactics, his leadership, and his mission-type orders he issued to his subordinates. We never studied Grant, there was nothing there worthy of our study. Many have suggested what the outcome would have been if Lee would have had the resources of Grant. All the frantic screaming  and illegal actions by those who would destroy any historical remembrance of him, are merely showing just how ignorant they are about our history. They know nothing of the real General Robert E. Lee.

IN DEFENSE OF GENERAL LEE

By Edward C. Smith
Let me begin on a personal note. I am a 56-year-old, third-generation, African American Washingtonian who is a graduate of the D.C. public schools and who happens also to be a great admirer of Robert E. Lee’s.

Today, Lee, who surrendered his troops to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House 134 years ago, is under attack by people — black and white — who have incorrectly characterized him as a traitorous, slaveholding racist. He was recently besieged in Richmond by those opposed to having his portrait displayed prominently in a new park.

My first visit to Lee’s former home, now Arlington National Cemetery, came when I was 12 years old, and it had a profound and lasting effect on me. Since then I have visited the cemetery hundreds of times searching for grave sites and conducting study tours for the Smithsonian Institution and various other groups interested in learning more about Lee and his family as well as many others buried at Arlington.

Lee’s life story is in some ways the story of early America. He was born in 1807 to a loving mother, whom he adored. His relationship with his father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, (who was George Washington’s chief of staff during the Revolutionary War) was strained at best. Thus, as he matured in years, Lee adopted Washington (who had died in 1799) as a father figure and patterned his life after him. Two of Lee’s ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, Mary Custis, was George Washington’s foster great-granddaughter.

Lee was a top-of-the-class graduate of West Point, a Mexican War hero and superintendent of West Point. I can think of no family for which the Union meant as much as it did for his.

But it is important to remember that the 13 colonies that became 13 states reserved for themselves a tremendous amount of political autonomy. In pre-Civil War America, most citizens’ first loyalty went to their state and the local community in which they lived. Referring to the United States of America in the singular is a purely post-Civil War phenomenon.

All this should help explain why Lee declined command of the Union forces — by Abraham Lincoln — after the firing on Fort Sumter. After much agonizing, he resigned his commission in the Union army and became a Confederate commander, fighting in defense of Virginia, which at the outbreak of the war possessed the largest population of free blacks (more than 60,000) of any Southern state.

Lee never owned a single slave, because he felt that slavery was morally reprehensible. He even opposed secession. (His slaveholding was confined to the period when he managed the estate of his late father-in-law, who had willed eventual freedom for all of his slaves.)

Regarding the institution, it’s useful to remember that slavery was not abolished in the nation’s capital until April 1862, when the country was in the second year of the war. The final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was not written until September 1862, to take effect the following Jan. 1, and it was intended to apply only to those slave states that had left the Union.

Lincoln’s preeminent ally, Frederick Douglass, was deeply disturbed by these limitations but determined that it was necessary to suppress his disappointment and “take what we can get now and go for the rest later.” The “rest” came after the war.

Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few civil rights leaders who clearly understood that the era of the 1960s was a distant echo of the 1860s, and thus he read deeply into Civil War literature. He came to admire and respect Lee, and to this day, no member of his family, former associate or fellow activist that I know of has protested the fact that in Virginia Dr. King’s birthday — a federal holiday — is officially celebrated as “Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson-Martin Luther King Day.”

Lee is memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol and in stained glass in the Washington Cathedral.

It is indeed ironic that he has long been embraced by the city he fought against and yet has now encountered some degree of rejection in the city he fought for.

In any event, his most fitting memorial is in Lexington, Va.: a living institution where he spent his final five years. There the much-esteemed general metamorphosed into a teacher, becoming the president of small, debt-ridden Washington College, which now stands as the well-endowed Washington and Lee University.

It was in Lexington that he made a most poignant remark a few months before his death. “Before and during the War Between the States I was a Virginian,” he said. “After the war I became an American.”

I have been teaching college students for 30 years, and learned early in my career that the twin maladies of ignorance and misinformation are not incurable diseases. The antidote for them is simply to make a lifelong commitment to reading widely and deeply. I recommend it for anyone who would make judgment on figures from the past, including Robert E. Lee.

[Dr. Smith is co-director of the Civil War Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.]

 

Originally posted 2017-08-22 13:36:52.

Recent Posts

Hypocrisy at it’s Finest

2 Comments

Derrick Wilburn is the founder and Chairman of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives and the Conservatives of All Colors Internship Program. His organization’s and personal mission are to bridge the gap that exists between conservative political causes, parties, candidates and officeholders and ethnic-minorities in the USA. He is published nationally everyday on AllenBWest and  is heard across America on Red State Radio.

“I can’t fault them for wanting to live in a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood.  It’s the hypocrisy that gets me. Campaign against the top 1% and then lose and fall in line with the top 1%.

Something STRANGE happens when Democrats leave the White House… After their exodus from the White House, the Obamas joined another rarified club, that of the ruling liberal elite class owning multiple ultra-expensive homes in highly exclusive communities that none in America can afford, save the one percenters.  The very same one percenters whom they rant and rail against as being the greedy, egocentric millionaires who simply have too much – following the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton who (despite Hillary’s claim that they left The White House dead broke) somehow managed to educate their daughter at Stanford, Oxford, NYU and Columbia ($500,000?), acquire a $1.7 million estate in Chappaqua and a $2.85 million mansion in Georgetown and then Bernie Sanders who, shortly after ending his 2016 presidential bid, bought his third home, a $600,000 lakefront vacation house on Lake Champlain.

Barack and Michelle have real estate designs of their own.  Earlier this year it was revealed that upon his leaving the presidency the Obamas will not be returning to Chicago. They will instead be moving into a $6 million, 8,200-square foot, 9-bedroom 12-bathroom mansion in Kalorama, one of the Washington District’s most posh, desirable and exclusive neighborhoods in the heart of one of America’s wealthiest zip codes.  With daughter Malia off to college, that leaves just Barack, Michelle and Sasha until the younger daughter graduates high school in 2018. 

Nothing says they care about climate change, energy consumption and our CO2 footprint more than keeping an 8,200-square foot house heated and air-conditioned year round for just three people. The hypocrisy and ‘do as I say not as I do’ hubris of all these wealthy climate change proponents is sickening.  By the way, the Obamas’ new home is just two doors down from Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta, who recently lost the most significant campaign of his life.

But that’s not the new news.  We have now learned Barack and Michelle are the proud owners of yet another home, this one on the Left Coast.  As reported by Page Six and other sources, the Obamas have a new home in Rancho Mirage, California.  Rancho Mirage is a popular golf getaway which would explain its attraction to the soon-to-be ex-golfer-in-chief.  By some counts this makes the Obamas’ fifth home.  Also from Page Six, The Obamas are also said to have bought a holiday getaway in Obama’s childhood home state of Hawaii.  How many American families own five of anything, let alone houses in Hawaii that they see once a year or so.  Most of us are blessed if able to rent a hotel room or condo in Hawaii once a decade or a life time. 

The relocation habits of Democrats leaving office is very interesting.  For example, having been voted out of office in 2014, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu didn’t return to Louisiana.  Instead she made her 7,300-square foot $2.5 million Washington DC mansion her new home.  Rather than returning to Little Rock, when Bill and Hillary left the White House, they chose the liberal, ultra-wealthy haven of Chappaqua, New York with its average household income of $285,801 and average household net worth of $1,564,366 for their new residence. 

Now it’s the Obamas’ turn.  Are they going back to Chicago to live amongst the little people and take their chances becoming yet another statistic (total number shot as of this writing this year: 3,961)?  No, not so much. They, like the others, are moving into a private, secured community to live in a house big enough for five families where they will host cocktail parties for golf buddies and other millionaire and billionaire friends.

Yet like the Sanders, Landrieus and Clintons of the world, they will accept exorbitant five-, six-, even seven-figure speaking fees to give speeches about how the rich in our country are steadily pulling away from everyone else and increasingly isolating themselves.  About how the concentration of wealth at the top is allowing some Americans to own multiple houses, vacation when and as they please and live lives most of the rest of the country cannot fathom.

They’ll blather on and on about how the rich are a big part of the problems in our country but they gladly join them hoping no one will notice.  Well, we did!”

(Harry Truman once said, “One cannot become wealthy being a president unless you are doing something crooked”.) 

Harry sure didn’t die rich, but the scumsuckers today all leave the WH unbelievably rich, even some of the GOP presidents as well. What’s amazing to me is that none of them went back home to their roots where it all started. I guess they don’t want to hobnob with the old crowd anymore. Interesting to say the least

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally posted 2017-08-20 16:51:46.

Recent Posts

RINO Extraordinaire!

2 Comments

By
Burma Davis Posey

 

This is John McCain’s home in Arizona. Not bad for a man who worked in the military, left the military, and then ran for Congress. He has been in Congress since 1983… for 34 years.

McCain graduated 894th in his class of 899 students from the Naval Academy. He was known for being wild and it usually revolved around women. He was a member of a group of students who called themselves “The Bad Bunch”.

He married Carol Shepp who was a successful swimsuit model. She had been married to one of his classmates and had two children from her first marriage. She and McCain became parents for a daughter one year later. He had been quite a playboy and was already becoming bored with the domesticated life. He requested active duty in Vietnam. While he was there, Carol faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news about her husband. His plane was shot down in 1967 and he became a POW.

On Christmas Eve 1969, Carol and the children were spending the holiday with her parents. After dinner she was going to take gifts to some friends. The road was icy and she slid head-on into a telephone pole. She was thrown from the car through the front window. Her legs, spine, and right arm were crushed and she was in the hospital for 6 months. Ross Perot was an advocate of POW’s and he paid her medical bills. She requested that John not be told because she felt he already had enough to deal with.

McCain was released in 1973 and returned home to much fanfare. Carol had several surgeries, lost 5 inches in height, and gained some weight.. McCain told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again. But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance.

As a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles. “He started carousing and running around with women.”, reported Robert Timberg. Bob Timberg was a retired Marine, an American journalist, writer, and author of four books, including THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG and JOHN MCCAIN: AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY.

McCain admitted he started having many girlfriends and affairs during this time. On one trip to Hawaii he met an Anheuser Busch distributor heiress, Cindy Hensley, at a cocktail party. She was 17 years younger than McCain and worth $100 million dollars. He invited her to have drinks with him at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He said by the end of the evening he was in love.

They had an affair for nine months while he was still married to and living with his wife Carol. McCain wanted to marry Cindy but needed first to get a divorce. He and Carol separated in January 1980. He requested a divorce in February, the divorce was sped along and granted in April. He and Cindy married 5 weeks after the divorce was final on May 17, 1980. Carol and their children were devastated. McCain callously left his first wife and children behind. He and Cindy moved to Arizona. Cindy’s father was well-connected and helped McCain move smoothly into Congress representing Arizona in Washington DC.

McCain’s new wife and her family were extravagantly wealthy. Her father was one of the largest distributors of Anheuser Busch in the country and she was an only child. The divorce settlement afforded Carol McCain full custody of their three children, alimony, child support, including college tuition, houses in Virginia and Florida, and lifelong financial support for her continuing medical treatment from the car accident.

Carol said the reason for the divorce was John turned 40 and he wanted to be 25 again. Carol was extremely hurt. She went to work as the press assistant for soon-to-be First Lady Nancy Reagan. She became loved and respected in Washington. She kept a dignified silence about the horrendous way McCain had treated her.

Some of the McCain friends were less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

Despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who have not forgotten his treatment of his first wife. Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights.

Ted said, “I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is… deceit.

“When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it. Eventually he met Cindy and she was young, beautiful, and very wealthy. McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

“This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. Yet he has no character. He is a fake.”

Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel, even by the standards of modern politics.

Mr. Perot said, “McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory.

After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.

A man who cannot be faithful to a loving, self-sacrificing wife cannot be trusted to be faithful to the American people.

Cindy has also had to learn the lessons about her husband the hard way. Even though she and McCain put on a perfect front for the public, especially when he is running for office, she really is an invisible wife to him.

Tom Gosinski, who served as director of Cindy McCain’s nonprofit American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) wrote in his journal about the McCain marriage:

“During my short tenure at AVMT I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman. Her marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to distance herself from friends, cover feelings of despair with drugs, and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences. She became addicted to Percocet and had a doctor prescribing them for her illegally. When her parents learned she was taking them, they helped her stop.

Washington rumors were saying McCain had an inappropriate relationship with the young and lovely lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. Ms. Iseman began visiting McCain’s offices and campaign events so frequently in 2000 that his aides were “convinced the relationship had become romantic”. One staff member supposedly asked, “Why is she always around?” His staff members began a campaign to “save McCain from himself” by restricting Iseman’s access to McCain during the course of the 2000 presidential primary. According to the Washington Post, McCain’s political advisor John Weaver met with Iseman at Washington’s Union Station to tell Iseman not to see McCain anymore.

It is not a real marriage between John and Cindy McCain. Real marriages usually involve living together. McCain and Cindy have not “lived” together for 20 years. To defend this, McCain brags the family takes two vacations together every year and Ms. McCain is the one who has always made that happen.”

Two vacations per year…What a farse and fake!! Nothing about this man is real. He has no compassion or empathy for anyone except himself. The only real thing emotion he is capable of is anger. He is famous for his anger.

His father and grandfather were both decorated Navy Admirals. He was given special privileges and extreme preferential treatment while he served in the Navy. He was a pilot but according to his colleagues he was a very bad pilot. He actually crashed three planes. There was a horrendous incident that happened on his aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Forrestal, that killed 134 men. There has been a debate since the incident with some being convinced John McCain was responsible for this accident. Others are angry about anyone who would dare speak against a Naval officer and embarrass an entire branch of service.

Many witnesses have reported that McCain was guilty of a “wet start”. When a pilot wants to be a show off, with a “wet start” his engine start creates a large startling flame and lots of surprise noise from the rear of a jet engine on start up. McCain did the “Wet Start”. It was not an accident. The flames from the wet start torched off the launching of a powerful Zuni rocket on the plane behind him. The Zuni rockets were famous for having electrical problems. It shot across the carrier’s deck hitting other parked planes that were packing 1,000 high-explosive pound bombs. This caused the bombs to explode. The subsequent massive explosions, fire and destruction went several decks below and nearly sunk this major 82,000 ton U.S. aircraft carrier.

This stunt and aftermath caused the death of 134 sailors and blew off arms, legs, and caused blindness and burns to another 161 sailors. McCain jumped from his plane, rolled across the flames, and escaped. He watched the men dying and the burning from a closed circuit television on the ship. Sadly all of those lives were lost.

They had to take the ship off the battle line for 2 years when it had to be taken back to port for $76 million dollars of extensive repairs. That does not include the cost of replacing the airplanes or ammunition.

Other Navy pilots causing this type of death and destruction would have been arrested and would probably still be in prison. Why didn’t this happened to John McCain?

McCain’s grandfather was a famous FOUR STAR Navy admiral and his dad, at the time of the incident, was also a powerful illustrious FOUR STAR Navy admiral. McCain had graduated from the Naval Academy. Witnesses say the good ole boy Navy tradition went into high gear immediately. McCain was not even repremanded. When there is a cover-up, the soldier is usually simply assigned to another ship. McCain was quietly assigned to another ship. There is an ongoing debate about the incident to this day.

John McCain’s lack of character was further demonstrated when he voted not to repeal Obamacare. He had run his 2016 Senatorial race under the banner he would LEAD the fight to repeal Obamacare. He hates Donald Trump so very much he gleefully held his thumb down for his vote rather than a thumbs up. He laughed afterwards and said, “Let’s see Donald Trump save America now!”

What a horrible man. He stabbed his constituents and the citizens of America in the back. Liberal socialists now call him their hero.

McCain has recently discovered he has a brain tumor. I am genuinely sorry for anyone who has to face a health issue especially when it involves cancer. Thankfully for him the doctors have said it is curable. The fact that he now has a brain tumor does not change the horrendous things he has done in his life because of his extremely low flawed character.

If Senator McCain’s own health care was dependent on the Obamacare he has continued to saddle the American people with, I guarantee he would not have voted thumbs-down. But because he married a wealthy heiress and has plenty of money to take care of his own health needs, he does not care.

What a guy… what a guy!

My only question to the good people of Arizona. Why is he still in Congress, do you understand that this imbecile is a reflection on each and every one of you desert dwellers? Wake up and send this RINO packing at the first chance.

Originally posted 2017-08-12 09:53:05.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, and Kelly

6 Comments

Interesting article from the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan. I know John Kelley, watched him work as a Bn S-3 during a MCRES of an infantry Bn preparing to deploy and I was the Bn’s umpire back in 87. After the grueling 72 hours of hell, I asked the Bn Commander, “Where in the hell did you find your S-3?” He laughed and said, “That boy’s going to be a general someday.”

I realized as I wrote this that I’ve never met a Kelly I didn’t like, who wasn’t admirable. There was the great journalist Michael Kelly, lost in Iraq in 2003 and mourned still by anyone with a brain: What would he be making of everything now? There’s Gentleman Jim Kelly, formerly of Time and an award-winning journalist. Ray Kelly was one of New York’s finest police commissioners. Megyn Kelly is a brave, nice woman. I wrote once of a small miracle in which a group of friends arrived, late and in tears, to see John Paul II celebrate Mass in New York. The doors of the cathedral were shut tight. A man in a suit saw our tears, walked over, picked up a sawhorse and waved us through. As we ran up the steps to St. Patrick’s, I turned. “What is your name?” I cried. “Detective Kelly!” he called and disappeared into the crowd.

Grace Kelly was occasionally brilliant and always beautiful. Gene Kelly was a genius. There is the unfortunate matter of the 1930s gangster “Machine Gun Kelly,” but he is more than made up for by Thomas Gunning Kelley (an extra e, but same tribe), who in 1969 led a US Navy mission to save a company of Army infantrymen trapped on the banks of a canal in South Vietnam’s Kien Hoa province. He deliberately drew fire to protect others, was badly wounded, waved off treatment, saved the day. He received the Medal of Honor. There are other Kellys on its long, illustrious rolls.

So Gen. John Kelly (retired), US Marine Corps, veteran of Anbar province, Iraq, and new chief of staff to President Trump: onward in your Kellyness.

Everyone wonders what he’ll do, what difference he’ll make. He is expected to impose order and discipline, tamp down the chaos. I suspect his deepest impact may be on policy and how it’s pursued, especially in the area of bipartisan outreach.

American military leaders are almost always patriotic, protective, professional, practical. They’re often highly educated, with advanced degrees. Mary Boies, who for two decades has worked with the military as a leader of Business Executives for National Security, said this week: “In general, military top brass are among the most impressive people in our country.”

It’s true. And in a nation that loves to categorize people by profession, they can be surprising.

Generals and admirals are rarely conservative in standard or predictable ways, ways in which the term is normally understood. They’ve been painted as right-wing in books and movies for so long that some of that reputation still clings to them, but it’s wrong.

They are not, or not necessarily, economic conservatives. Top brass are men and women who were largely educated in, and came up in, a system that is wholly taxpayer-funded. Their primary focus is that the military have what it needs to do the job. Whatever tax rates do that, do that. They are not economists, they don’t focus on Keynesian theory and supply-side thought. They’re like Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who saw the historically high tax rates of the Roosevelt-Truman era and thought fine, that’s how we won World War II. He didn’t seem concerned about tax rates until he’d been president for a while and started hearing about the problems of business while playing golf with CEOs.

Generals are not romantic about war, because it’s not abstract to them. As Boies says: “Army officers know better than anybody the limits of military hard power. Military people hate war because they’ve seen it and know both its limitations and its devastating effects.”

In my observation generals are both the last to want to go in (“Do you understand the implications of invasion? Do you even know the facts on the ground?”) and the last to want to leave (“After all this blood and sacrifice, this hard-won progress, you’re pulling out because you made a promise in a speech?”). They hate hotheaded, full-of-themselves civilians who run around insisting on action. Those civilians are not the ones who’ll do the fighting, and as public allies they’re not reliable.

On social issues they generally tend to be moderate to liberal. I have never to my knowledge met a high officer who was pro-life. They largely thought Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell a reasonable policy, but they’re realists: Time moves on, salute and execute. They don’t want to damage or retard their careers being on the wrong side of issues whose outcomes seem culturally inevitable. You don’t die on a hill that is not central to the immediate mission.

They are as a rule not deeply partisan. Those who work in the Pentagon have to know how to work with both parties and negotiate their way around partisan differences. (Enlisted men in my experience are more instinctively conservative, though often in interesting ways.)

When things are working right, chiefs of staff have an impact on presidential thinking. They guide discussions toward certain, sometimes directed conclusions. They’re expected to give advice, and it’s expected to be grounded in knowledge and experience.

It may be easier for Kelly to impose order than people think. Sacking Anthony Scaramucci sent a message. The warring staffers around Kelly know it won’t be good for them if they don’t support him, at least for now. If they fight him with leaks, they’re revealed as part of the problem of the past six months.

If they are compliant and congenial, it will look like they weren’t the problem; someone else was. Also they’re tired of being part of a White House that has been famously dysfunctional. It will help their standing in the world to be part of something that works. Similarly with Trump: If it works with Kelly, the first six months were Reince Priebus’ fault, if it doesn’t work, it was the president’s.

Beyond that, a good guess is that Kelly will not be especially interested in partisan differences; he will not be ideological. He will guide Trump in the direction of: Solve the problem.

On tax reform, for instance, his instinct will be to figure the lay of the land and try to get to the number it takes to pass a bill with both parties. A friend who once worked with Kelly said: “He won’t go ‘This has to be comprehensive, historic.’ He’ll figure the few things both sides agree on and build out from there. You’ll get a compromise. It won’t solve everything, but it will be good for the country and it will get Trump on a path to somewhere, because right now he’s on a path to nowhere.”

Generals are not known for a lack of self-confidence. If he goes up against Mitch McConnell, it won’t be big dawg versus eager puppy, it will be big dawg versus big dawg. And McConnell has already disappointed the president. Kelly hasn’t.

Trump, whatever his public statements, doesn’t need to be told things haven’t gone well; he knows. He has nowhere else to go, and the clock’s ticking.

Kelly has the power of the last available grown-up.

Another advantage: He doesn’t need the job. He’s trying to help, as a patriot would. But this is not the pinnacle for him. His whole career has been pinnacles.

 

Originally posted 2017-08-11 09:40:48.

Conservatism

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