I have been reading books about Army personnel policies for years. One of the serious problems the Army has had is the fact that they were not prepared for the Iraq insurgency. They did not know how to fight “asymmetric war” also called “4th generation war.” I have previously posted on this topic and am quite aware of the stepchild status of Special Forces in the Army since Vietnam. Now that may all be changing at last. General Petraeus was appointed head of the Army general selection board, and now the results are in. The Cold War, and its emphasis on Big Army tactics and promotion of Big Army supporters, seems to over at last. Better late than never.
Archive for August, 2008
Good news for the Army. The Cold War is over.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008The left begins to see the empty suit
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008This piece on Huffington Post may be the beginning of the end for Obama as the left recognizes that they bought a pig in a poke. He has no core values. At last, they seem to recognize this.
Stanley Kurtz, however, sees core values but they aren’t the ones Obama is talking about.
When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is anything but the post-racial politician he’s sometimes made out to be. Take set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Schmidt, stressing to the Defender Schmidt’s past support for affirmative action and set-asides.
Obama wrote a column for the Hyde-Park Herald for years while serving in the Illinois legislature. Those columns are the source for Kurtz’s analysis of his convictions.
The overwhelming majority of Obama’s “Springfield Report” columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state or local issues. It’s interesting, therefore, that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al Gore rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that he’s heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden to the same “big money interests.”
He was flirting with Ralph Nader’s candidacy in 2000 but urged a vote for Gore to avoid splititng the vote between the two leftist candidates.
Obama’s strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
Still, they together fought attempts to toughen juvenile justice handling of violent crime.
Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper “structural problems of the system.” Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the “normal” and the “deviant.”
Foucault has even proposed that mental illness is a “social construct” and his views are at the heart of much of the opposition to treatment of schizophrenia.
The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan. Well aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of “blended sentencing,” in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a juvenile sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his nose clean, doesn’t violate parole, and participates in community-based rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence.
The bill ended up passing overwhelmingly and Obama, typically, jumped aboard the train just as it was leaving the station and voted for a slightly amended version. His votes and his expressed opinions in the local paper provide a picture of his real views and they are hard left. These views are firmly held but the only thing more important to Obama than his principles is his ambition. That’s why they have been concealed.
Wendell Willkie
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008I have finished my third book about Wendel Willkie. I got interested in him for two reasons. I read Amity Schlaes’ book The Forgotten Man, an economic history of the Great Depression. I wrote a review of the book on Amazon. Ms. Schlaes describes the battle between private utilities, led by Willkie, a lawyer and later president of Commonwealth and Southern, a large utility, and David Lilienthal who was appointed by Roosevelt to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority as a monopoly in the South. Willkie eventually lost his battle and was forced to sell the private utility to TVA but he did get a decent price for his shareholders. The contest between Willkie and Roosevelt made him famous. He was a long time Democrat but, by 1939, Republicans who despaired of the isolationist Republican Party had convinced him to switch his registration and to consider a run for the presidency in 1940.
The second book, Five Days in Philadelphia, describes the Republican convention of 1940 where the dark horse Willkie, who had never run for office and who had not entered any primaries, won the Republican nomination, defeating Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey, among others. I have written a review of that book, as well.
I just finished the third book, Dark Horse, which is a full biography. He was an amazing man and one that the Republican party could use today. He had an incredible touch with people. Present day students of politics might be surprised to see the support he had from union leaders like David Dubinsky, founder of the garment workers union.
Dubinsky had hopes of launching a national liberal party, headed by Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for President in 1940 who had soured on the Republican Party after his defeat in the primaries in 1944. He proposed that Willkie begin by running for Mayor of New York City in 1945; Willkie, however, died before the plan could get off the ground.
Willkie received more votes in 1940 than any Republican would get until Eisenhower in 1952. He lost by a large majority in the electoral college but a switch of as few as 600,000 votes could have swung enough states for him to win.
After the election, he agreed to undertake a fact-finding mission to Britain at the height of the Blitz. He refused to be coddled and walked the streets of London during the bombing, visiting air raid shelters that held as many as 10,000 people. He became a familiar and beloved figure to the Londoners, especially after Churchill convinced him to wear a white helmet during air raids.
He cut short his trip to return to testify before Congress, and hostile members of his own party, in favor of Lend Lease. Roosevelt credited him with the easy passage of the bill. He conducted a series of debates with Charles Lindberg before huge audiences and urged preparedness. The final debate was canceled by Pearl Harbor.
Once the war had begun, he agreed to undertake another mission for Roosevelt and traveled around the world, visiting Egypt just before the battle of El Alamein. General Montgomery allowed him to tour the battlefield and visit the “Tommies” in their camps. He met King Farouk and concluded that he was a weak sybarite but others impressed him and he came to the conclusion that the colonies of Britain would have to be allowed independence after the war. This led to a clash with Churchill but Willkie’s popularity in Britain was undiminished and he reinforced Roosevelt’s belief that the colonial era would end once the war was over.
Willkie met with the Shah of Iran and leaders of Iraq and Syria. He refused to stay in the palace the French had arranged for him and nearly precipitated an international incident over his desire to keep in touch with the local people and not the colonial overseers. He went on to the Soviet Union and had several very interesting meetings with Stalin. One incident, similar to a fictional incident in Herman Wouk’s novel, The Winds of War, involved a mild confrontation with Stalin in which Stalin good naturedly gave way. Many of the travels of Captain Victor Henry, Wouk’s hero of the two novels, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, seem to based on Willkie’s trips. Willkie even visited with Red Army troops facing the Germans and was once admonished by a Soviet general when he mentioned that the Red Army was defending. The general insisted that was wrong; they were attacking.
From Moscow, Willkie, like the fictional Captain Henry, flew east to China, were he spent time with Chiang Kai Shek and was entranced by Madame Chiang to the point where there was concern about a romance. He continued on around the world and, after his return, wrote a hugely influential book titled One World, which unexpectedly sold 2 1/2 million copies in a few months.
By 1943, Willkie had returned to law practice; the major New York law firm who recruited him changed its name to list him first as a partner. He continued to speak out on the war and his concerns about the world after the war ended. He was interested in another try at the presidency in 1944 but the Republican Party, with stupidity that boggles the mind, rejected him and chose Thomas Dewey, who was easily dispatched by the ailing Roosevelt.
Roosevelt actually considered asking Willkie to take the Vice-Presidential nomination on a unity ticket since he was dumping Henry Wallace at the insistence of the party. The consequences of that possibility are enormous. Willkie was (rightly) suspicious of Roosevelt and did not encourage such speculation so Roosevelt chose Senator Harry Truman. Willkie was interested in founding a third party for 1948, which would exclude the southern segregationists of the Democrats and the isolationist-protectionist wing of the Republicans. Willkie was powerfully involved in Civil Rights, was a close friend of Walter White, president of the NAACP and a major figure in early civil rights action. By the way, the use of the term “Liberal” in 1944 had little to do with the term as currently understood. Willkie, for example was a free trader in an era of high tariffs, a position that aggravated his problems with the Republican Party. Republicans, having passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which helped so much to bring on the Great Depression, had learned nothing since and were as protectionist as in 1929.
Unfortunately, Willkie, who was a chain smoker and had gained 40 pounds since his 1940 nomination, died of a heart attack in the summer of 1944. With him died the potential for a modern political party and an end to racial segregation 20 years before those things came to be. He was a towering figure who should be better known. He also makes a contrast with the present presumed Democratic nominee who, superficially, has a similar dark horse persona.
My next book about him will be his “One World,” which is described as very readable and not dated in style. I will report after finishing it.
Obama and the dollar bill speech
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008UPDATE #2: The polls are showing bad news for Obama.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.
However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.
McCain’s viral marketing is working.
UPDATE: Those shadows on Obama’s front porch are vultures that flew over from the primary. They are home to roost for a while.
Matt Lauer interviews both campaign managers and Axelrod essentially concedes the racial meaning of the “dollar bill” comment.
[W]hat it means, what he was saying – and he does this in a self mocking way – look, I know I’m not from central casting when it comes to presidents of the United States. I’m new, I’m relatively young, I haven’t spent my life in Washington. And yes, I’m African-American – and that’s going to be some fodder.
The president on the dollar bill, Washington, never spent a day in Washington, DC and he had never held elective office. Andrew Jackson, on the $20 bill was also a general and never spent a day in Washington until he was elected. Abraham Lincoln had been a Congressman for one term and Thomas Jefferson, while he had been governor of Virginia, had not served in Washington. Benjamin Franklin, who had never been president, is on the $100 bill but, again, the capital was in Philadelphia and New York while Franklin spent most of his time in Europe as ambassador. There is just no other interpretation of Obama’s remark except that McCain was referring to his race. Axelrod concedes this. Even the Los Angeles Times admits the fact that the remark was about his race and that Obama accuses McCain of attacking him because of his race.
Obama has since called the race charge “a typical pattern” of the GOP campaign.
But now Obama’s chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits his candidate was referring in part to his race when he suggested the McCain campaign wants voters to fear Obama because he doesn’t look like other presidents.
Shelby Steele, who is biracial like Obama, has written books about the dilemma of young men who are black but have white mothers. Obama has chosen, by his choice of the church he attended and other choices, to seek his black identity. He has called his grandmother, who raised him in his teens, “a typical white person.” On the other hand, he is trying to attain the highest office in American politics, which requires a majority of votes from whites. Steele has described two tactics used by black strivers to deal with the majority white society. He calls one of them “bargainers,” those who present a nonthreatening face and seek approval from whites. Oprah Winfrey is Steele’s example. David Ehrenstein called Obama, “The Magic Negro” as a way of describing the same persona of a black man who seeks white approval and does not mention the anger and alienation that is felt by other blacks and which he, himself, may feel but conceals.
The other tactic described by Steele is the “challenger” who does show anger and demands concessions from whites to assuage his anger and their guilt for past oppression of blacks. Two examples he gives are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson once tried to run for president but challengers are not going to get any votes from the vast majority of whites who, while aware of past injustices, feel no responsibility for them and who themselves are free of racial bias.
If Obama, under the pressure of the campaign and frustrated at his failure to achieve the high poll numbers he is convinced that he deserves, slips into the challenger role, he will fall quickly from grace. The votes from blacks and guilty whites are not enough to carry more than a couple of big cities. This may have been the first slip. The tactic worked against the Clintons in the primary but Democratic primary voters are far from the American mainstream.
H/T to Powerline and Politico.
Blessed be The One
Friday, August 1st, 2008This new McCain ad is the best yet. He has somebody doing these that is the best I’ve seen. The producer and writer must be geniuses because this is viral marketing at its best. Over a million people have viewed this ad on You Tube and it’s only just out. Of course, to the Obama people it will be racist but they are only reacting to effective tactics, and not very well at that.