B.O. Phone homeTHE real climax of President Obama's Spring Apologies Tour wasn't his photo op with our troops in Baghdad or even his "American Guilt" concerts in Western Europe.
While fans in the press cheered wildly at every venue, the real performance came in Turkey. And it was a turkey.
Obama means well. Just as Jimmy Carter, his policy godfather, meant well. But the road to embassy takeovers and strategic humiliation is paved with good intentions -- coupled with distressing naivete.
On every stage, Obama draped Lady Liberty in sackcloth and ashes, drawing plentiful applause but no serious economic or security cooperation in return. Then, in Turkey, he surrendered our national pride, undercut our interests and interfered in matters that aren't his business.
On the latter point: Suppose the European Union president went to Cuba and insisted that the world's sunniest concentration camp should be welcomed into NAFTA? That's the equivalent of what our president did in Ankara on Monday when he declared that he supports Turkey's bid for EU membership.
The Europeans don't want Turkey in their club. Because Turkey isn't a European state, nor is its culture European. And it isn't our business to press Europe to embrace a huge, truculent Muslim country suffering a creeping Islamist coup.
The Europeans were appalled by Turkey's neo-Taliban tantrum on-stage at last week's NATO summit. The Turks fought to derail the appointment of a great Dane, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as the new NATO secretary general. Why? Because he didn't stone to death the Danish cartoonist who caricatured Mohammed.
Which brings us to the even bigger problem: Obama has no idea what's going on in Turkey. By going to Ankara on his knees, he gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti-American Islamist government bent on overturning Mustapha Kemal's legacy of the separation of mosque and state.
Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, means headscarves, Korans, censorship and stacked elections. The country's alarmed middle class opposes the effort to turn the country into an Islamic state. Obama's gushing praise for the AKP's bosses left them aghast.
Obama's embrace of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now orchestrating show trials of his opponents) was one step short of going to Tehran and smooching President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
What was Obama thinking? He wasn't. He relied on advice from State Department appeasement artists who understand neither Turkey, Islam nor the crises raging between the Bosporus and the Indus. State's answer is always "More love, more humility, more aid."
Well, I, for one, don't think our country has anything to apologize for, either to Turkey or to Europe.
Insisting that America's always guilty, Obama omitted any mention of Turkey's wartime betrayals of our troops, its continuing oppression of its Kurd minority or the AKP's determination to turn a state with a secular constitution into a Wahhabi playground.
When it came to the Armenian genocide, Obama bravely ducked: He never dared use the g-word.
And Obama's disdainful remarks about President Bush were just shabby.
After those overpriced tour T-shirts have shrunk in the wash (trust me -- they will), what will we have gained from Obama's superstar act?
He told the Europeans that the global economic crisis is all our fault. No mention of European greed, overleveraged governments, destructive Euro-loans or Chinese currency manipulation. We did it. Whip us, please.
In return, the Europeans gave him . . . nothing.
Even though Obama was right when he said that Europe faces a greater terror threat than we do, the entire continent only ponied up 2,500 short-term non-combat troops for Afghanistan. The Europeans know we'll do the heavy lifting.
He gave the Russians yet another blank check, too. (Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's thugs beat an aging pro-democracy dissident to a pulp.) In return, the Russians promised to . . . well, actually, they didn't promise anything.
Then Obama went to Turkey, undercut secular political parties, infuriated the Europeans -- and disclaimed our country's Judeo-Christian heritage. (Did Turkey's leaders respond by denying Islam's importance to them? Naw.)
In Turkey, Obama got . . . nothing we didn't already have.
Then he went to Iraq and told its prime minister that Iraq would get nothing.
I believe that our president wants to do the right thing. But he doesn't have a clue how. For now, he's enraptured by the applause. But he hasn't tried to charge his fans for their tickets. And they've already made up their minds they won't have to pay.
#1
Love the last line. Reminds me of a local newscast where people got free concert tickets (Jay-Z IIRC) and interviewed 4 people in line for the tickets. 1 didn't know anything about the election and was just getting tickets; 1 knew obama was running and that the election was in November sometime; 1 knew obama and when to vote and when asked about obama's opponant, "Some old white guy, I don't know" (hard to tell if he was joking or really didn't know. The 4th knew both candidates and when the election was and who to vote for, "I'm voting McCain, I'm just here for a free Jay-Z concert." (whoops, shows that Diamond Dallas Page deal Jay-Z copied, people in line laugh).
Hat tip to One Free Korea. Kimmie looks as if he stole a set of Playboy pajamas, and he's thinner than a Milan model. But see for yourself. As Joshua Stanton at OFK says, "Where's Jack Kevorkian when you need him? And does he still issue those gift certificates?
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/08/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Yes, but he drools out of the right side of his body, and when told to point, has to be told repeatedly. His and Fidels curse, fufilled.
#2
My God! Kimmie's been replaced by a Team America puppet! Note to Parker and Stone: Try making the head smaller. That basketball on top of the Mao suit is just not believable.
Posted by: ed ||
04/08/2009 1:09 Comments ||
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#9
Slightly ironic in view of the Chinese puff piece from yesterday- drank us under the table, he did. Arm wrestled our champion and whipped him, yadda yadda...
Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.
#1
Dare not be the first servant to tarnish the crown of the beloved Lightworker! This lack of accomplishment can only be attributed to limitations associated with mere mortals. Bring us the head of the One's éminence grise.
The secretary's new budget will leave us weaker to pay for the president's domestic programs.
By THOMAS DONNELLY and GARY SCHMITT
On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.
In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were "almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books," the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented "one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity" -- the "necessity" of course being the administration's decision to reorder the government's spending priorities.
However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate "balancing" of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield "the fustest with the mostest," as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard. Consider a few of the details of the Gates proposals:
- The termination of the F-22 Raptor program at just 187 aircraft inevitably will call U.S. air supremacy -- the salient feature, since World War II, of the American way of war -- into question.
The need for these sophisticated, stealthy, radar-evading planes is already apparent. During Russia's invasion of Georgia, U.S. commanders wanted to fly unmanned surveillance aircraft over the region, and requested that F-22s sanitize the skies so that the slow-moving drones would be protected from Russian fighters or air defenses. When the F-22s were not made available, likely for fear of provoking Moscow, the reconnaissance flights were cancelled.
The authors began to come off the rails here. They claim that we need the F-22 as an air superiority fighter to 'sanitize the skies'. But the decision not to deploy the F-22 in Georgia was a political one, not one based on the scarcity of the airplane. If we had a full complement of F-22s the political decision would have been the same. One can have a superior military force but not the will to use it (e.g., France, 1940). At the other end of political judgment, 'sanitizing' the Georgian skies would indeed have been a dangerous provocation. Do we do that for the sake of surveillance? Again, a political decision, and one can argue that the Bush administration made the correct, prudent decision.
As the air-defense and air-combat capabilities of other nations, most notably China, increase, the demand for F-22s would likewise rise. And the Air Force will have to manage this small fleet of Raptors over 30 years. Compare that number with the 660 F-15s flying today, but which are literally falling apart at the seams from age and use. The F-22 is not merely a replacement for the F-15; it also performs the functions of electronic warfare and other support aircraft.
We will have about 180 F-22s. The issue is, do we have enough of those given the likelihood that we'll need to use them in a conflict against a country that can deploy and fight with its own fifth generation air superiority fighter? Only two such countries challenge us over the next two decades: China and Russia. Russia is going to implode for demographic reasons (not that they couldn't be dangerous in doing so), and China prefers to use its military force as a threat to bully others. The actual chance that we'll go to war with either is small.
Note that the F-22 hasn't flown a single mission in Iraq and won't fly one in Afghanistan. It's also known as a bit of a hanger queen. Is it worth $150 million a copy to have a bunch of planes that we might not use? Seems to me that's what Mr. Gates is paid to decide.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gates is further postponing the already decades-long search for a replacement for the existing handful of B-2 bombers.
Smart decision. We don't need a new manned bomber.
We have two situations in which we need to drop a lot of bombs: situations where we have air supremacy, in which case we could just as easily heave bombs out the back of a C-17, and situations requiring high-risk, deep penetration against a prepared enemy, in which case a cruise missile or super-UAV may be the better answer.
- The U.S. Navy will continue to shrink below the fleet size of 313 ships it set only a few years ago. Although Mr. Gates has rightly decided to end the massive and expensive DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer program, there will be additional reductions to the surface fleet. The number of aircraft carriers will drop eventually to 10. The next generation of cruisers will be delayed, and support-ship projects stretched out. Older Arleigh Burke destroyers will be upgraded and modernized, but at less-than-needed rates.
How many carriers do we need? Again, that's Mr. Gates' job to decide. Canceling the CG-X and the DDX seem like good decisions.
The good news is that Mr. Gates will not to reduce the purchases of the Littoral Combat Ship, which can be configured for missions from antipiracy to antisubmarine warfare. But neither will he buy more than the 55 planned for by the previous Bush administration. And the size and structure of the submarine fleet was studiously not mentioned. The Navy's plan to begin at last to procure two attack submarines per year -- absolutely vital considering the pace at which China is deploying new, quieter subs -- is uncertain, at best.
We have Los Angeles class boats sitting in reserve that we don't sail because we don't need them. Cheaper to fire them up for another ten years than to build more subs. And the LCS program has been way over budget. Again, how do you get the best bang for your buck? Maybe expensive littoral combat ships aren't the answer, perhaps cheaper patrol ships are best.
- Mr. Gates has promised to "restructure" the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, arguing that the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have called into question the need for new ground combat vehicles. The secretary noted that the Army's modernization plan does not take into account the $25 billion investment in the giant Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles. But it's hard to think of a more specialized and less versatile vehicle.
Whereas the FCS vehicles depend on magic to survive in a battlefield environment.
The MRAP was ideal for dealing with the proliferation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq. But the FCS vehicle -- with a lightweight yet better-protected chassis, greater fuel efficiency and superior off-road capacity -- is far more flexible and useful for irregular warfare. Further, the ability to form battlefield "networks" will make FCS units more effective than the sum of their individual parts. Delaying modernization means that future generations of soldiers will conduct mounted operations in the M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles designed in the 1970s. Finally, Mr. Gates capped the size of the U.S. ground force, ignoring all evidence that it is too small to handle current and future major contingencies.
No, Mr. Gates said that he'd rather have 45 combat brigades fully manned and ready to fight than 48 brigades that have been hollowed out.
- The proposed cuts in space and missile defense programs reflect a retreat in emerging environments that are increasingly critical in modern warfare. The termination of the Airborne Laser and Transformational Satellite programs is especially discouraging.
The Airborne Laser is the most promising form of defense against ballistic missiles in the "boost phase," the moments immediately after launch when the missiles are most vulnerable. This project was also the military's first operational foray into directed energy, which will be as revolutionary in the future as "stealth" technology has been in recent decades. The Transformational Satellite program employs laser technology for communications purposes, providing not only enhanced bandwidth -- essential to fulfill the value of all kinds of information networks -- but increased security.
Most folks on Rantburg would agree that missile defense is something we need more of, not less. But these decisions, I suspect, come from the White House and not Gates.
Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of "hard choices" and "budget discipline," saying that "[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in." But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.
Defense is not being cut: it is being restructured. Program costs are going up over last year, not down. The issue is always: you can't have everything you want so you have to set priorities.
The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop. But what is true for the wars we're in -- that numbers matter -- is also true for the wars that we aren't yet in, or that we simply wish to deter.
We may have a smaller military. That might be a mistake. We'll retain more 'wallop' than anyone else. The real issue is political: whatever military we have, will we use it, and use it intelligently, when required?
Mr. Donnelly is a resident fellow and Mr. Schmitt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are co-editors of "Of Men and Materiel: the Crisis in Military Resources" (AEI, 2007).
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/08/2009 10:46 ||
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You really can't have "gay marriage," you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say.
You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to shake out its pockets.
Such is the supposed effect of the Iowa Supreme Court's declaration last week that gays and heterosexuals enjoy equal rights to marital bliss. Nope. They don't and won't, even if liberal Vermont follows Iowa's lead.
The human race -- sorry ladies, sorry gents -- understands marriage as a compact reinforcing social survival and projection. It has always been so. It will always be so, even if every state Supreme Court pretended to declare that what isn't suddenly is. Life does not work in this manner.
The supposed redefinition of the Great Institution is an outgrowth of modern hubris and disjointed individualism. "What I say goes!" has become our national philosophy since the 1960s. One appreciates the First Amendment right to make such a claim. Nonetheless, no such boast actually binds unless it corresponds with the way things are at the deepest level, human as well as divine. Surface things can change. Not the deep things, among them human existence.
A marriage -- a real one -- brings together man and woman for mutual society and comfort, but also, more deeply, for the long generational journey to the future. Marriage, as historically defined, across all religious and non-religious demarcations, is about children -- which is why a marriage in which the couple deliberately repudiates childbearing is so odd a thing, to put the matter as generously as possible.
A gay "marriage" (never mind whether or not the couple tries to adopt) is definitionally sterile -- barren for the purpose of extending the generations for purposes vaster than any two people, (including people of opposite sexes), can envision.
Current legal prohibitions pertaining to something called "gay marriage" don't address the condition called homosexuality or lesbianism. A lesbian or homosexual couple is free to do pretty much as they like, so long as it doesn't "like" too much the notion of remaking other, older ideas about institutions made, conspicuously, for others. Marriage, for instance.
True, marriage isn't the only way to get at childbirth and propagation. There's also the ancient practice called illegitimacy -- in which trap, by recent count, 40 percent of American babies are caught. It's a lousy, defective means of propagation, with its widely recognized potential for enhancing child abuse and psychological disorientation.
Far, far better is marriage, with all those imperfections that flow from the participation of imperfect humans. Hence the necessity of shooing away traditional marriage's derogators and outright enemies -- who include, accidentally or otherwise, the seven justices of Iowa's Supreme Court. These learned folk tell us earnestly that the right to "equal protection of the law" necessitates a makeover of marriage. And so, by golly, get with it, you cretins! Be it ordered that.
One can say without too much fear of contradiction that people who set themselves up as the sovereign arbiters of reality are -- would "nutty" be the word?
The Iowa court's decision in the gay marriage case is pure nonsense. Which isn't to say that nonsense fails to command plaudits and excite warnings to others to "keep your distance." We're reminded again -- as with Roe v. Wade, the worst decision in the history of human jurisprudence -- of the reasons judges should generally step back from making social policy. For one thing, a judicial opinion can mislead viewers into supposing that, well, sophisticated judges wouldn't say things that weren't so. Would they?
Of course they would. They just got through doing it in Iowa, and now the basketball they tossed in the air has to be wrestled for, fought over, contested: not merely in Iowa, but everywhere Americans esteem reality over ideological fantasy and bloviation. A great age, ours. Say this for it anyway: We never nod off.
#4
Gays don't want marriage for themselves. They want to take it away from everyone else. It's just another step toward destroying the family, a basic building block of our culture.
On another note, if homosexuality were purely genetic then it would have bred itself out long ago. There are other factors, including recruitment. Recruitment works (like direct mail campaigns, you don't need a lot of positive results to make it a success) and gays are doing everything they can along this front.
#5
Iblis, you have got to be kidding about that "recruitment" thing.
How are they "recruiting" new members? Reruns of "Will and Grace"? Playing Queen, Elton John and Melissa Etheridge records on the radio?
I don't know if gayness has a genetic cause, or if there is some other mechanism involved (in-utero environment or some hormonal difference), but it sure as hell wasn't because some straight guy or girl saw a pride parade and started thinking....hmmm, looks like fun! I'll give it a whirl...
#7
I don't know if gayness has a genetic cause, or if there is some other mechanism involved (in-utero environment or some hormonal difference), but it sure as hell wasn't because some straight guy or girl saw a pride parade and started thinking....hmmm, looks like fun! I'll give it a whirl...
Actually, if you look around the net [in places you really don't want to] it appears the latter is happening. A product of two decades of state and teacher indoctrination since and starting in elementary school.
#8
Sorry, not buying it. You either have a tendency to a certain kind of sexual behavior, or you don't. Unless it somehow appeals to you, no amount of pro-gay (or anti-gay) propaganda is gonna make you swing for the other team. Nobody ever became a drag queen because of some book a teacher read to them in kindergarten, ok?
Think of it this way, by using the most deviant kind of person out there, the child molester. Few of them were former victims, regardless of what the media endlessly repeats. Much like rapists who specialize in attacking adults, they get off on the power they have over their victims. And by far, the vast majority of their victims do not grow up to be child molesters themselves.
There have been many, many programs that have tried to cure them of these desires, but they have all been nearly total failures. There is something hardwired in their brains that make them look at kids in a sick, malevolent way. They are going to be that way until they die. They might get physically or pharmacologically castrated, they might on occasion be incarcerated or hospitalized so they cannot act out on their wishes, but they are still going to fantasize about kids in a way that would make 99.9% of the population retch.
We've pretty much moved beyond the "your mama made you gay" thing that Freud posited. The recruitment thing is about as logical as blaming your parents. Let it go already.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
THE real climax of President Obama's Spring Apologies Tour wasn't his photo op with our troops in Baghdad or even his "American Guilt" concerts in Western Europe. 
