Tag Archives: Trump

Recent Posts

Send in the Clowns

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Remember the song “Send in the Clowns” written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music? Numerous artists sang the song e.g., Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, and Judy Collins to name only a few. I personally liked old Blues Eyes’ version.

Anyway, a retired Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant who taught me how to spell recruiting forwarded the following to me from one of his friends. I loved it it so much I thought I’d share it with you. 

Outdated due to being “post-election”, but still on-point with accomplishments that are grossly under-appreciated.  Never did plan to invite him over for brunch, but always did plan to live in a better USA, which we had the last 4 years.  Didn’t vote for the personality, just the sound policies of a successful president.

Hey, anyone starting a pool as to the date Biden steps down, for the pre-planned entrance of Kamala into the white house?  A charade I fully expect will take place in the next 4 years as sleepy-Joe isn’t remotely qualified or physically able for the job.  I’ll bet he does not last a year before the Ho replaces Joe

Subject: Fwd: The Resume of a Clown

The clown in the White House just brokered four Middle East Peace Accords, something that 71 years of political intervention and endless war failed to produce.

The buffoon in the White House is the first president that has not engaged us in a foreign war since Eisenhower.

The clown in the White House has had the greatest impact on the economy, bringing jobs, and lowering unemployment to the Black and Latino population of ANY other president. Ever.

The buffoon in the White House has exposed the deep, widespread, and long-standing corruption in the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Republican and Democratic parties.

The buffoon in the White House turned NATO around and had them start paying their dues.

The clown in the White House neutralized the North Koreans, stopped them from developing a further nuclear capability, sending missiles toward Japan, and threatening the West Coast of the US.

The clown in the White House turned our relationship with the Chinese around, brought hundreds of businesses back to the US, and revived the economy. Hello!

The clown in the White House has accomplished the appointing of three Supreme Court Justices and close to 300 Federal Judges.

This same clown in the White House lowered your taxes, increased the standard deduction on your IRS return from $12,500 for Married Filing Joint to $24,400, and caused your stock market to move to record levels over 100 times, positively impacting the retirements of tens of millions of citizens.

The clown in the White House fast-tracked the development of a COVID Vaccine – it will be available within weeks – we still don’t have a vaccine for SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, or a host of diseases that arose during previous administrations.

The clown in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration had crippled, and had fired 214 key generals and admirals in his first year of office.

This clown in the White House uncovered widespread pedophilia in the government and in Hollywood, and is exposing world wide sex trafficking of minors and bringing children home to their families.

The clown in the White House works for free, and has lost well over 2 billion dollars of his own money in serving – and done all of this and much more in the face of relentless undermining and opposition from people who are threatened, because they know they are going to be exposed as the criminals that they are if he is re-elected.

I got it, you don’t like him. Many of you utterly hate and despise him. How special of you. He is serving you, and ALL the American people. What are you doing, besides calling him names and laughing about him catching the China virus?

And please educate me again as to what Biden has accomplished for America in his 47 years in office?

I’ll take a “clown” any day, versus a fork tongued, smooth talking hypocritical, corrupt liar. Please let it be known, I am not sure I would want to have a beer with him (if he drank, which he doesn’t), or even be his friend. I don’t care if I even like him. I want a strong leader who isn’t afraid to kick some ass when needed. I don’t need a fatherly figure – I already have one. I don’t need a liar – that’s what Hollywood and CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS and the New York Times are there for.

I don’t need someone to help me, but I also don’t want an obstacle or a demented, senile washed-up Swamp Monster.

God bless Donald Trump – the most unappreciated President in history. And, in the immortal words of Yosemite Sam, “Forget Hell.”

Pass this on if you agree.

Besides President Donald J Trump, who do you think was the last Clown? I’ll vote for Ronald Reagan.

Yes, PLEASE “Send in the Clowns”! The more the merrier.

 

Originally posted 2021-01-18 09:56:40.

Recent Posts

Lovin it!

5 Comments

Hey gang, thanks for all the comments to that scum sucking ne’er-do-well who sent me the email claiming to be one of us. LOL. Got so many comments I can’t answer them all.  They are all great, but some are REALLY great! Not surprised he didn’t rise up again, the POS! Several of you thought perhaps if he was a marine (no caps) he was a lover of Mr. Mattis and is defending that non-marine turncoat. BTW can you believe I am STILL getting daily hits on that post from 9 June 2020!.  That post has been around the world several times.

New subject. Have you heard about Twitter and the President and all conservatives. Check out this link. Glad I do not own that scum sucking liberal company. Let’s bring em’ down, pass the word.

https://thepatriotjournal.com/twitter-trump-conservatives-price/?utm_source=2020newsletter&utm_medium=email

I had to go ask Google how to deactivate my Twitter account since I didn’t know because I never use it except to report a new blog entry, but I don’t need their BS. If you want to deactivate yours and don’t know how, here are two descriptions, I used the first one; it was easy. Worked great. Color me gone Twitter.

How to deactivate your account
  1. In the top menu, you will either see a navigation menu icon or your profile icon. …
  2. Tap Account, then tap Deactivate your account at the bottom.
  3. Read the account deactivation information, then tap Deactivate.
  4. Enter your password when prompted and tap Deactivate.
  1. Click on the More icon  and then click on Settings and privacy from the drop-down menu.
  2. From the Your account tab, click on Deactivate your account at the bottom of the page.
  3. Read the account deactivation information, then click Deactivate.  
  4. Enter your password when prompted and confirm that you want to proceed by clicking the Deactivate account button.

Originally posted 2021-01-12 17:23:17.

Current Events

Soviet Politics, American Style

8 Comments

The above photo is of Young Communists saluting as they pass Lenin’s Tomb in the U.S.S.R., May 1, 1924. Many of you are probably going to consider I have gone off the deep end and finally crashed into insanity. Hell, I don’t know, maybe I have? However, I cannot help but believe my country that I love more than anything. The country that gave a dumb shit Baltimore HS drop out kid of 17 the chance to make something of himself and have a wonderfully, fulfilling, fantastically enjoyable career serving it is doomed due to the likes of the mentally sick, brainwashed, nitwitted young fools  who are convinced our country is sick. Below is a well written, easily interpreted essay of doom. Enjoy if you can. Be sure to read the Postscript.

On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, gave his farewell speech and more than seven decades of Russian revolutionary socialism came to an end. A generation later, the spirit of the Soviet Union has re-emerged with mass support in the U.S.

When I arrived in Moscow in 1976 to begin a six-year stint as a correspondent, I was struck by the red flags flying from government buildings and the somber streets devoid of advertising except for garish posters showing workers with clenched fists demanding an end to the arms race.

When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed the Soviet attempt to impose a deluded version of reality had died with it. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay “The End of History,” said that Marxism-Leninism was doomed as an alternative to liberal democracy. I argued at the time that the drive to make a religion out of politics had not disappeared.

For the past four years, potted histories have warned about the rise of fascism in the U.S. But the real danger is the transformation of “tolerance” into an ideology with its own courts, informers and punishments, all of them reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

A friend of mine in Moscow, Vladimir Fyodorov, went to work for the TASS news service, which offered readers not news but a “correct” depiction of events, especially regarding the U.S. and the “ulcers of capitalism”—racism, crime and unemployment.

On his first day at TASS, Vladimir was handed a United Press International story about a U.S. company that was promoting a high-quality tire and offered to replace older tires free of charge. Vladimir wanted to kill the story but his boss rewrote it. The new version read: “In the crafty capitalist market, firms frequently offer low-quality products. This is why a well-known American firm was forced to replace tires that were of inferior quality.” The headline was “Deception of Buyer.”

A few weeks later, Vladimir was given a report that prisons in Fiji were so comfortable that people preferred to stay there than to be at liberty. He produced a report that life in Fiji was so unbearable that people preferred to live in prison. His colleagues congratulated him. He told himself: “I’m going to go out of my mind here.”

Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.

The Times also advanced an ideological account of U.S. history, according to which the American Revolution was undertaken to defend slavery, and promoted it over the objections of historians and the paper’s own fact-checkers.

The Soviet system also relied on the complete liquidation of academic freedom. Marxism-Leninism was treated as a perfect science. But the ideology raised obvious questions: In a “classless society,” why were there special stores for officials? If socialism ended war, why did the Soviet Union and China go to war in 1969 over Damansky Island?

If a student tried to raise these questions, he was expelled from the Komsomol, the communist youth league. That ended any hope of a career. I knew a young man in Moscow who refused to be intimidated and continued to ask questions. He was committed to a mental hospital.

The Soviet style has become a reality in the U.S. Speakers are routinely canceled on ideological grounds: In July the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, canceled a virtual talk with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society because of “the moment of reckoning our society is going through.” At my alma mater, the University of Chicago, the English department announced that it would “only accept applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.”

The Soviet Union finally counted on the readiness of people to betray even family and friends. The regime held up Pavel Morozov (1918-32) as a martyr. He lived in a village in the Urals when the regime was collectivizing agriculture. When Pavel learned that his father was helping peasants hide grain, he walked 35 miles to the nearest town to report him to the secret police. His father was arrested and Pavel was stabbed to death by relatives.

I thought of Pavel Morozov when I read a June op-ed in the New York Times by Chad Sanders, a black writer. He told his white friends that he didn’t need their “love texts” and suggested that instead they cut off contact with family members until they sent money to Black Lives Matter or joined their protests.

When Mr. Gorbachev began the reforms that destroyed the Soviet Union, he said, referring to the U.S.: “We’re going to do something terrible to you. We’re going to deprive you of an enemy.” Twenty-nine years later, it’s clear he was right. Without the ideological challenge of the Soviet Union, we have become immersed in internal conflicts and have made an ideology out of them.

It is true that Marxism is a more coherent system of thought than “wokeism.” But even an intellectual hodgepodge can engender totalitarian habits if it fulfills an emotional need and becomes a device of interpretation.

The antidote is fidelity to higher values. But that requires a moral seriousness that a world at peace and in thrall to superficialities does not inspire. “The West does not know and does not want to know what shaped it,” writes Cardinal Robert Sarah, a Guinean prelate. “This self-asphyxiation leads to new barbaric civilizations.”

The Soviet Union is dead, but its ghost wanders an unsettled world. Finding a lodestar for society’s moral development is the most important challenge facing the U.S. today.

Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” and a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Postscript from anonymous.

Franklin Graham said it right and so have I, this is the last free election if Donald Trump doesn’t win we will ever SEE in America . We are done here. Unfortunately we are too late to be effective with a vote. There will be only two alternatives left to us if Biden is seated as President. We have heard it once in our history loudly at Concord. The British are coming to take our guns. Then a shot was fired. The rest is history.

We may hear again a shot fired when someone is burning our town, or another family arrested for protecting their home standing on their steps. Or another old man or woman is hit to the ground for no reason other than walking on a public street. I ask you to think about that. If licensed to carry, do it. If not licensed, get licensed now! Be prepared to defend others in need. Lawlessness is coming on scale. We must decide to stand aside or to stand up. Not a pleasant decision. Get your head straight and make some decisions on how you will react. Be ready to defend your family and for some of us, the Constitution we have sworn to protect.

President Clinton started the ball of breakdown to socialism. I am proud that American’s stood up for a disrupter like Trump. I thought I was alone. I was SO proud of America . Today, Trump is all that is left holding the line. Give him what you’ve got. Prepare to defend yourself!!!

 

Originally posted 2020-12-23 10:38:57.

Current Events

Legitimacy of Biden Win Buried by Objective Data –

6 Comments

Emerging information from the states render his victory less and less plausible.

What does all this evidence mean? IMHO — NOTHING. The fix is in, and has been for the past year. We are doomed to become a third world shit hole. Having just celebrated number 80 this past Friday, I’m almost to the point I don’t care anymore. If that POS Biden and his globalist’s cronies do end up where they should never even have come close to being, they can’t hurt me. However, my heart goes out to my children  and grand children. Likewise to all those Republican lower income families who will find themselves struggling even more having to pay for all the extravagant benefits everyone will lavishing enjoy on their behalf. For all you globalist progressives who made it all happen;, suck it up. My Trump Nation Flag will conti8nue to fly proudly under my American Flag on the pole. If that POS does end up in the Oval office, and all goes the way I fully expect it to in months or years, I want everyone who passes my house to know I had nothing to do with it.

From the American Spectator

David Catron

 

by 

During the weeks following November 3, innumerable election experts and statistical analysts have pored over the voting data upon which former Vice President Joe Biden’s purported campaign victory ostensibly stands. A growing body of evidence ranging from straightforward ballot audits to complex quantitative analyses suggests that the tabulation of the votes was characterized by enough chicanery to alter the outcome of the election. Consequently, a consensus has gradually developed among the auditors of publicly available information released by the states, and it contradicts the narrative promulgated by the Democrats and the media. The more data experts see, the less convinced they are that Biden won.

Among the analysts who question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory is Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, a cybersecurity expert whose technical expertise was touted by the New York Times last September and who has been described as a hero in the Washington Monthly. It’s unlikely that either publication will be singing his praises for his work pursuant to the recent election. His damning analysis of the electronic manipulation of votes that occurred in the early hours of November 4 appears in a sworn affidavit included with C.J. Pearson v. Kemp, a lawsuit filed by Attorney Sidney Powell in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. His nine-page affidavit (Exhibit 26) describes how it is possible to manipulate votes, where this occurred, and sums up his findings as follows:

I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden. These alterations were the result of systemic and widespread exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS, Scytl/SOE Software and Smartmatic systems that enabled operators to achieve the desired results. In my view, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.

Dr. Keshavarz-Nia is by no means the only expert to reach the conclusion that widespread vote-tampering occurred. This examination of the election results, for example, uses quantitative analysis to identify some very odd anomalies in the 2020 vote patterns. But it isn’t necessary to be a sophisticated statistician or cybersecurity expert possessed of arcane knowledge of how voting machines operate to see that enough ballot fraud occurred to change the election results in several states. That Keshavarz-Nia provides his findings in a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, renders him highly credible. Still, his conclusions are rather opaque to anyone without an enormous amount of training and experience in his field. This requires many of us to take what he says on faith.

Bearing this in mind, Matt Braynard of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP) approached the 2020 results in a far less arcane fashion. His team analyzed publicly available data on absentee ballots, and he explained his findings in a way that any intelligent voter can understand. VIP looked at suspicious ballot activity in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the most significant VIP findings involved people who changed their state of residence, yet voted absentee using their prior address. In Arizona, which Biden “won” by 10,457 votes, there were 19,997 questionable votes. In Georgia, which Biden “won” by 12,670 votes, VIP found 138,221 such votes. In Wisconsin, which Biden “won” by 20,608 votes, there were 26,673 such votes. As Braynard told the Epoch Times:

This election, it appears to me, has been decided by ballots that are highly questionable.… I can give you the list of the people who voted in this election, who filed National Change of Address cards in Georgia, moving themselves to another state.… I can also show you the subsequent state voter registrations of these individuals in other states, who then cast absentee ballots back in Georgia.… I have no confidence that Joe Biden is the deserved winner of this election.

Braynard has been asked to present the findings of the Voter Integrity Project to Monday’s hearing with members of Arizona’s legislature. Moreover, as Braynard tweeted Friday, “The VIP findings have also been included in court filings in PA, GA, MI, WI, and AZ, including declarations we collected.” Sunday, another tweet by Braynard revealed that the FBI has proactively requested VIP findings that may indicate illegal ballots.  Meanwhile, no discussion of 2020 election skulduggery is complete without a discussion of the Democrat precincts that record more votes than registered voters. Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) tweeted the following on that perennial topic: “According to an affidavit in the MI lawsuit, one Michigan precinct/township had 781.91% turnout. How does this happen?”

Good question. No fewer than six precincts listed by Rep. Posey experienced turnout exceeding 120 percent. Another 10 allegedly enjoyed 100 percent turnout. This is an insult to the electorate’s intelligence, and it happened in Democrat precincts all across the nation. From World War II through 2016 average turnout in a presidential election was about 56 percent. Yet we are expected to believe that, in 2020, the national turnout was 66 percent. It simply does not pass the laugh test. This looks to be the result of widespread Democrat chicanery facilitated by high-handed flouting of federal, state, and county election laws. Joe Biden’s victory is no more legitimate than his plagiarized rhetoric or working-class credentials. His Potemkin presidency would be no more authentic than the man himself.

Have a nice week — if you can.

Originally posted 2020-12-14 10:47:39.

Current Events, Recent Posts

David Petraeus –

5 Comments

– A Prefect Avatar for America’s Corrupt Ruling Class

Remember this guy? He’s a bud of Mattis, they called them Warrior Monks. LOL. That’s a joke. They are nothing more than high ranking retired military officers who climbed the ladder of success by BS-ing folks with their bravado and secretly sucking down gallons of Kool Aid. Neither of these “Warrior Monks have ever pulled a trigger except at the range. Before or after reading this post please go to my post of 19 June entitled “Mattis & Petraeus – Warrior Monks?” and read about what this scum did and was caught.. He should be stripped of his retirement and spending the rest of his life, in prison for what he plead guilty and got a p-lea bargain. If any of us did what this POS did, guess where we’d be? Unbelievable. Our country does not hold these high ranking scumbags accountable for anything — absolutely nothing. As I have said before, Lady Justice no longer wears a blindfold.

Below is a Warrior Monk, do you honestly think either of these hotshots ever looked like this Warrior?

General David Petraeus, for many years (decades?) lauded as the greatest and most successful soldier of his generation, just insulted, in terms paradoxically both implicit and vicious, the men who made both his military renown and his post-military success and wealth possible.

“The most significant terrorist threat in the United States is not actually from Islamist extremists, it’s from right-wing terrorists in our own country,” he recently said to a gathering of elites.

This assertion, in a sense, is unremarkable given that it has become a common ruling-class talking point. It’s a lie, of course. Your own senses tell you so. When was the last time you even heard of a “right-wing” terror attack, much less one that actually inflicted mass casualties?

Sure, the ruling class and its propaganda arm tell you that they happen all the time, but they’re lying. They don’t lie merely by predicting waves of rightist violence that never materialize—though they do predict that, often.

Remember all those “warnings” of right-wing terror that would rock America in the event of a Trump loss? Allegedly violent Trump supporters have an even stronger case than mere loss to be angry, given the fishiness of the election and their belief that it was stolen. And yet none have so much as broken a window, much less committed any acts of terror. The one major demonstration in Washington, D.C. was entirely, not “mostly,” peaceful—that is, until leftist thugs showed up to beat on the marchers. Beatings which the same people who, naturally, never apologized for being wrong about imminent right-wing violence just as naturally never mentioned.

Nor does the ruling class merely lie by saying that every act of violence by the melanin-challenged is somehow connected to Nazism—though of course they do say that, daily. They also insist, risibly, that violence manifestly committed by people who are neither white nor on the Right is nevertheless perpetrated by the white Right. Witness, in only the most recent and egregious example, the repeated attempts to attribute 2020’s Antifa-BLM riots to “white supremacists.”

Don’t trust your own eyes and ears? How about “data”? Terrorism expert Timothy Furnish has found since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Islamic terrorists have murdered just under 28,000 people worldwide. The global death toll over the same period from every act of violence even plausibly—that is to say, not necessarily—connected to “white supremacy” is 346. Or 1.5 percent of the Islamist butcher’s bill. This is the “grave, urgent threat” that David Petraeus insists poses the greatest danger to our country.

Petraeus may be lying from conviction. Certainly, all his peers in the ruling class believe, or profess to believe, that native-born whites are uniquely evil and hell-bent on killing their fellow citizens. And it can be hard to tell genuine ruling class belief from merely useful cant. Yet there’s no doubt that this particular lie is useful—to them. It’s one of the key ways in which the ruling class libel and smear dissent against their rapacity and misrule. So Petraeus has an interest in saying what he said, whether he believes it or not.

Who Does Petraeus Think Made Him a Success? 

Who is David Petraeus? Currently, he’s a partner at KKR, one of the world’s two or three most important private equity firms. What is “private equity”? The charitable way to describe that activity is the buying up of failing or underperforming companies and making them more profitable via a ruthless imposition of focus and efficiency. The less charitable description is “vulture capitalism”: hunting down value, wherever it may be, and stripping it out of even successful companies by closing facilities, laying off workers, outsourcing production and any other move that might reduce costs and (further) enrich the firm’s new owners.

Whatever you may think of private equity—salutary driver of market discipline or greedy despoiler of the American heartland—the fact remains that David Petraeus is not a private equity investor nor an analyst capable of restructuring even the smallest company. He’s a former military officer—a capable one, by all accounts—now getting rich from the profits of private equity by trading on his former service and (especially) his domestic and foreign government contacts.

Which is what makes the lie especially egregious coming from Petraeus’s lips. Why is David Petraeus famous? That is, apart from getting fired from the CIA over an extramarital affair and receiving a slap on the wrist for illegally sharing classified information with his mistress? His prior claim to fame, the one that won him his current job and stature, was to have successfully presided over the Iraq “Surge” of 2007, in which a bloody, three-year insurgency was finally quashed.

How was the Surge accomplished? In part by spreading around an enormous number of American greenbacks to buy off local militias. But also, in part, via “COIN,” or counter-insurgency warfare doctrine, a body of thought and practice revived from its post-Vietnam oblivion by David Petraeus. (This is another pillar of Petraeus’ fame; a so-called “soldier-scholar,” he has a Ph.D. from Princeton.)

One tenet of COIN as reimagined, and implemented, by Petraeus is that soldiers attempting to pacify an insurgency must show their “virtue” to the local population by taking risks, i.e., exposing themselves to danger. This is not, to say the least, what soldiers are ordered to do in nearly all other combat situations. But many thousands followed this particular order.

Again, whatever you may think of the Iraq war—nobly-intended tragedy, pointless adventure, deep state conspiracy—or the Surge, there can be no doubt that Petraeus’s success was achieved on the backs of American soldiers—many of whom lost their lives, and many more others, limbs, to achieve it.

Where did those soldiers come from? The overwhelming majority of American service members who volunteer for dangerous combat roles grow up in red, rural, conservative America: the South, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Mountain West. The majority are also, not to put too fine a point on it, white—exactly the demographic that the ruling class has in its targeting sights when it lies about the alleged threat from “right-wing terrorists.”

Why the Need to Insult?

It’s no exaggeration to say that, without these proto “right-wing terrorists” and the milieus from which they emerge, the United States military would have no combat units at all. To say the least, woke transsexual gender studies majors from the blue coasts are not showing up in droves, or even singly, to Officer Candidate School or basic training. Neither are the children of the upper, upper middle, and increasingly the middle classes.

The military, at least for its combat missions, is more reliant than ever on that part of America that the ruling class openly despises. What would it do without them? Stop fighting constabulary wars? Either that or scour the rest of the country to recruit men far less committed to the mission, and probably less good at their jobs, than those who volunteered to fight the post 9/11 wars and made the Surge a success.

Why insult these people, then? Why denigrate their families, faith, and communities by insinuating that the places from which they come are breeding grounds of terror, violence and hate? For, from where else may we assume this alleged “right-wing terrorist threat” originates? Portland? Santa Monica? The Upper West Side?

Either Petraeus really believes what he said or he said it because he knows it’s what his ruling class paymasters want to hear—and especially want to hear from professional talking heads like David Petraeus. We can assume Petraeus knows the latter; he’s not a stupid man. Is this, therefore, a case where interest and belief coincide? Or was he, perhaps unthinkingly, selling out the brave men he used to command and whose success made his reputation and caused his great good fortune and wealth?

I don’t know the answer. Either way, the incident is revealing—not about what the ruling class thinks of us; we already knew that. It is instead revelatory of how insincere is their unctuous, ubiquitous praise of our men in uniform, of the sentiment behind all those incessant repetitions of “thank you for your service.”

There are many reasons to wonder how long the ruling class can keep recruiting stalwart young men to fight its wars—not least being our best-and-brightest’ s inability to win seemingly anywhere or even to define victory. Expressions of contempt such as the one uttered recently by David Petraeus are, however small by comparison, another such reason.

Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a former national security official in the Trump Administration. He formerly wrote under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus when he was a senior editor of American Greatness. The is the author, most recently, of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.

Originally posted 2020-12-07 09:37:54.