Tag: Alan Caruba

Political

Destroying Our Military from Within

This is an excellent article by Alan Caruba that appeared on the Canada Free Press website this past weekend.

“Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.” — Ronald Reagan

If you want to know how President Obama feels about the U.S. military, consider that in all the years since D-Day 1945 there have been three occasions when a President failed to go to the D-Day Monument that honors the soldiers killed during the Invasion.

The occasions were:
1. Barack Obama 2010
2. Barack Obama 2011
3. Barack Obama 2012

For the past 68 years, all Presidents, except Obama, have paid tribute to the fallen soldiers killed on D-Day. This year, instead of honoring the soldiers, he made a campaign trip on Air Force 1 to California to raise funds for his reelection.

The U.S. military has been systematically weakened from within by a combination of idiotic and duplicitous decisions that suggest how far the nation has come from the fundamental understanding that an enemy must be destroyed with sufficient devastation as to never contemplate attacking us or our allies again.

World War Two was a success because both Germany and Japan were required to sign instruments of unconditional surrender. Both nations are now our allies. Even Vietnam where the U.S. blundered into a civil war and was ultimately forced to withdraw now has normalized diplomatic relations and welcomes U.S. investment.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain inconclusive due to a combination of timid rules of engagement and the transformation of our military’s mission into “nation-building” that have yielded unsatisfactory results.

The military force that distinguished America as a super power at the mid-point of the last century now is facing draconian funding reductions from a Congress unwilling to make hard decisions about our historic debt.

A July Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Coming Defense Crack-Up”, warned the automatic sequestration, “If implemented, the Pentagon budget would be cut by another 9% (or $492 billion) over the next decade, on top of the $487 billion in cuts that are already planned. Defense accounts for the largest share of total sequestration, or 42.6%m according to the Congressional Budget Office.”

“The sequestration cuts would leave the defense budget some 30% smaller in 10 years.” Does anyone believe that the world will be any safer in two years or ten years? Or that weakening our defense will make us safer in a world bristling with nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction?

If the sequestration cuts are pure folly, then the use of our defense forces as a means to avoid “global warming” is sheer insanity. There is no global warming insofar as the Earth entered a natural cooling cycle in 1998 and the claim that carbon dioxide is “causing” global warming is completely baseless. A tiny element of the Earth’s atmosphere—0.038%—carbon dioxide (CO2) has been the excuse environmentalists have used to attack our manufacturing and energy sectors. Now it is being used to render our military weaker through a requirement to use biofuels.

On October 8, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13514, ordering the Defense Department and other agencies to reduce CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gas emissions. He set a goal of having the ships that defend our nuclear carriers powered by biofuels.

How stupid is this? First of all, America sits atop enough oil reserves to make us energy independent if the Obama administration would permit exploration and extraction domestically and offshore. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that the U.S. possesses 26% of the world’s oil supply. The Obama administration assertion that the U.S. has only 2% of the world’s supply is a lie.

There is zero need for biofuels. By 2020, the Navy has been instructed to use alternative fuel for half of its consumption. A recent naval exercise cost the Navy $27 per gallon of biofuel, versus $3.50 to $4.00 for standard petroleum fuel. As this is being written, Americans are required to use ethanol, a biofuel, in every gallon of gas they put in their cars, needlessly increasing the cost with no benefit in mileage and at the risk of damaging their car engines.

The Air Force is also subject to these mandates for biofuels that cost more than $26 per gallon, compared with standard jet fuel at $4 per gallon. Both the Navy and Air Force face the prospect of having to refuel ships and planes in potential battle zones where every gallon of biofuel would have to be transported from the U.S. for lack of biofuel refineries in Asian, Mideast or Mediterranean ports. Can you spell d-e-f-e-a-t?

These biofuel mandates are part of the Obama administration’s crony capitalism that has seen “alternative energy” lose billions in loan guarantees to solar companies and the government mandates that maintain the wind power industry that, like ethanol, would not exist without federal government support.

Phil Dunmire, the national president of the Navy League of the United States, on July 18, warned that “The defense and maritime industries are being jeopardized from within” noting that “programs related to our nation’s defense will absorb half of the sequestration costs despite being just 19% of the national spending budget.” These cuts go into effect in January!

The sequestration and other budget cuts, and the global warming biofuel mandates will leave the U.S. more vulnerable to attack and defeat since the end of World War Two. Our Navy has shrunk. Our combat air fleet is old. The manpower of military forces has been reduced and subjected to restrictions that leave every soldier and marine subject to investigation for every enemy they kill.

The exception to the long engagement in the Middle East was the successful killing of Osama bin Laden, but even that was tarnished by a President who took full credit for it and released information about it that runs contrary to the safety of all comparable future missions. Within days, the White House provided a briefing on it to a Hollywood producer and writer in order to facilitate a film lauding the mission.

The greatest force for the defense of the nation and for freedom in the world is being reduced by a Congress and a White House who refuse to recognize the threats that exist in a dangerous world.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Amusing

Obama’s Make-Believe Life

This piece by Alan Caruba is well worth the read!

Pass it on.

I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he’s led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.

In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? “Dreams of My Father” was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The “Audacity of Hope” followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a “communist with a small ‘c’” was the real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley’s formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed “cool” in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska. It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984’s Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.

Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to “wish away” some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain.

The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign “world tour” were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party’s hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an “obstreperous” Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against “jumping to conclusions” about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber “an isolated extremist” only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America. He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual’s life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist’s dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America?

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Amusing

President Stupid

Here here!

Remember when everyone was calling George W. Bush stupid? I do. Since then, his published memoir of his years in the White House has been on the bestseller lists following two years of Barack Obama unrelenting blunders and lies.

From the beginning of the Obama administration, there were all manner of evidence that a group of hapless, moronic ideologues had been handed the reins of power. Early nominees for key posts were jettisoned or withdrew from consideration for a variety of reasons. This was followed by a huge overlay of “czars” for everything, with undefined power over and above the Cabinet Secretaries in charge of various departments.

Two years later, the candidate who campaigned against the Iraq war decisions and implementation, against Guantanamo, and deemed Afghanistan to be the “real war” is pursuing the same Bush programs. The general credited with victory in Iraq has been put in charge of Afghanistan and not been heard from since.

When the Iranians protested in the streets of Tehran last year, Obama missed a major opportunity to throw U.S. support behind them. Instead he said he did not want to “meddle” in Iran’s internal affairs! Fast forward to Egypt and President Stupid was declaring on worldwide television that President Mubarak had to go “now.” Well, he’s gone and, thank God, the military is still in charge.

Surrounded by imbeciles and ideologues, President Stupid’s national security director declared that the MUSLIM Brotherhood was a “secular” organization
Surrounded by imbeciles and ideologues, President Stupid’s national security director declared that the MUSLIM Brotherhood was a “secular” organization. His science advisor thinks all the ice at the North Pole is melting. His EPA Director thinks that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on earth, is a “pollutant” and is asserting the authority to regulate it.

In both the first and second State of the Union speeches, President Stupid rambled on about green jobs, solar and wind energy, and now the need to spend billions on a “high speed” rail system in a nation where Amtrak has been losing money from the day it opened for business. In a time of severe deficits and national debt, how dumb do you have to be to want to throw billions at an unneeded new rail system?

President Stupid’s decisions have frequently left people gasping in disbelief. He appointed “a wise Latina”, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court even though she had never been a judge.

Obamacare is the pinnacle of President Stupid’s “achievements” thus far
Obamacare is the pinnacle of President Stupid’s “achievements” thus far. It has been declared unconstitutional by two lower courts and is likely to be declared null and void by the Supreme Court before he leaves office. The House Budget Committee just released a report that estimates the loss of 800,000 jobs if it becomes law. You have to be stupid to keep handing out “waivers” to Obamacare in all directions as an admission of its failure to apply only to those who do not have friends in the White House.

  • You have to be stupid to keep defending “global warming” or “climate change” when this huge, global hoax was exposed in 2009 as a fraud. Meanwhile, a natural cooling cycle caused freezing weather that just wiped out 80-100% of Mexico’s crops.
  • You have to be stupid to openly declare that you want to drive the coal industry out of business when it provides half of all the electricity the nation uses every day, but that is precisely what President Stupid’s administration is doing.
  • You have to be stupid to declare a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico after courts have twice told you to remove it.
  • You have to be stupid to lecture the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on how to create jobs when your economic policies have been killing them for two years. And then tell them they have to redistribute their profits to their workers. They already do that. It’s called wages!
  • You have to be stupid to have spent the first two years of Sundays playing golf and then expect people to believe you are deeply religious.
  • You have to be stupid to keep bowing to foreign leaders of nations from Saudi Arabia to Japan to China when the President of the United States must never bow to anyone. We don’t even lower our flag in the presence of foreign leaders.
  • You have to be stupid to believe you can get away with telling lies when even an adoring press is finding it increasingly difficult to cover up or defend this behavior.

Watch now as the press begins the run-up to the 2012 elections by emphasizing how brilliant President Stupid really is.

Already the talk is about a surefire reelection if the unemployment rate gets down to eight percent when its average over the pre-Obama years has usually been around five percent and actual unemployment is twice the official figure of 9.6 percent.

You have to be stupid to think Americans will be fooled again.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Amusing

They Destroyed My Towers!

Whenever I drove into New York via the Lincoln Tunnel, I would join the other cars on the long, graceful curve leading to its entrance and, looking to my left, I could see across the Hudson River. At the tip of Manhattan, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood as symbols of our economic power.

On occasion, I had dined in Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower and marveled at the panorama of New Jersey on one side, the outer boroughs on the other, and the dazzling view of Manhattan.

Whenever I think about September 11, 2001, I have only one emotion and that is a deep, unrelenting anger that a group of murderous, suicidal Islamists destroyed “my towers.”

They killed some 3,000 people when you factor in the attack on the Pentagon along with the passengers of the four commercial airliners used to perpetrate the destruction.

It is a wonder to me that Americans then and since exercised such restraint, such tolerance that the nation’s small population of Muslims not only did not suffer attacks, but today continue to build mosques for worship.

The effort to build one so close to Ground Zero demonstrates how obtuse and out of touch the political leadership is with mainstream Americans. The odious behavior of New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is beyond comprehension. The President tipped his hand at a White House dinner held to celebrate Ramadan, backing away slightly the following day enough to deflect criticism.

Those proposing the Ground Zero mosque demonstrate the arrogance and contempt for Americans and for all “unbelievers” that lies at the core of Islam, but American leaders of varying religions have fallen over one another to excuse this exercise in triumphalism.

The Crusades from 1095 to 1291 were an effort to recapture the Judeo-Christian holy land from Muslim conquest. Having invaded Spain in 711, Muslims would rule for seven centuries until driven out of their last stronghold, Grenada, in 1492. In 1683, Muslims were decisively defeated near Vienna. How different Europe would have otherwise been.

Islam is a religion of the sword despite its widespread acceptance. Its barbarity is on display on a daily basis whether killing Christian missionaries in Afghanistan or Israeli civilians, a pregnant mother, her husband and their two children a week ago.

A sane society would have cleared away the rubble of 9/11 and rebuilt the Twin Towers, but Ground Zero, in terms of new structures nine years after the attack, remains barely begun

Al Qaeda and all those who subscribe to its intent to destroy the West, the civilization developed in the West, and the freedoms championed by the West, remain to be defeated, while they continue to threaten India and even Europe once again.

The further we get from 9/11, the dimmer the embers of anger become for those with short memories or no grasp of history.

The irony is that 9/11 reflects the long memories of many Islamists whose religion demands that all lands formerly conquered in the name of Islam be regained and that all people who follow a faith other than Islam be reduced to dhimmi, second-class citizens ruled by Muslims.

The World Trade Center belonged to the world. They were my towers and your towers. They represented a world bound together in trade, a world that set a value on all manner of goods and commodities, a world in which jobs and wealth were being created.

The World Trade Center represented a rational world.

Today, nine years later, the dispatches from the Middle East, from Afghanistan, the Palestinian enclaves, from Pakistan, from Yemen, and from an Iran bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, are filled with news of an irrational, dysfunctional society; an Islamist rat’s nest, still seeking to destroy Israel, and still testing our borders and defenses in order to destroy America.

It is a good day to get angry once more, to resolve that we and the West shall not be defeated.

By Alan Caruba

Amusing

A Political Who’s Who of Global Warming Liars

Alan Caruba hits at the heart of the underhanded practices in the Cap and Trade debate. In this article he lists them all; Democrats Obama, Boxer, Ried, Waxman, Kerry etc…

Now that we know Global Warming is nothing but another Liberal scam the big question is… Will Al Gore give back his Nobel Peace Prize and Academy Award before they send him off to jail?

As the global warming fraud unravels, it’s a good time to look at the politicians who have been some of the most outspoken advocates, using global warming/climate change to advance “Cap-and-Trade” legislation and other related laws and regulations.

Top of the list is President Barack Obama who has made many references to “climate change” and “global warming” to further this national and international fraud. He’ll pick up his Nobel Peace Prize in December; the same one given to Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a few years back. Further proof of his mendacity will be his attendance at the UN Climate Change Conference in Denmark.

Speaking on World Environment Day last June, Obama said of global warming, “We’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take concrete actions if we are going to deal with a potentially cataclysmic disaster.” This mirrors years of similar doomsday statements by former Vice President Al Gore.

This is the kind of drivel Americans and others around the world have heard from their supposed “leaders” for far too long.

As we move through the congressional hierarchy, one of the biggest prevaricators about global warming/climate change has been Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-C) and her counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), manages to wheeze about it from time to time.

Former presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, (D-MA) has been leading the fight for “Cap-and-Trade” but after much reflection former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) concluded his support of global warming was a mistake.

Sen. Kerry said that failure to pass the Senate version of “Cap-and-Trade” (of greenhouse gas emission credits) would be comparable to another 9/11. He also has blamed tornadoes on global warming. The man is a complete idiot.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has uttered every global warming falsehood and has been joined by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). All three have played a critical role in advancing the “Cap-and-Trade” bill despite the fact that it is a massive tax on energy use and based on a lie.

Writing for the Huffington Post in October, Sen. Boxer said, “Global Warming is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Addressing this challenge also represents enormous opportunities for economic recovery and long term prosperity.” Her commentary was titled, “Telling the Whole Story on Global Warming”!

Never mind that global warming has been the excuse environmental groups have used to stop the building of coal-fired plants, nuclear plants, drilling for oil offshore in our continental shelf, et cetera. There’s no economic recovery to be found in so-called “green jobs” and prosperity is a small light at the end of a very long tunnel as the result of the Obama administration’s investments in “renewable energy” and massive increase of our national debt.

Among the other politicians hovering around Cap-and-Trade have been Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.VA), Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont), and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Sen. Bingaman is a big fan of “renewable energy” (solar and wind) and proposed a nationwide renewable electricity standard even though it provides barely one percent of all the electricity Americans need and use every day.

Among the nation’s prominent governors, California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger has been vocal about environmental issues, many of which have left Californians trapped by idiotic measures ranging from restrictions on fireplaces in new homes or the purchase of large screen television sets. California’s failure to anticipate its growing need for electricity has left it dependent on importing it from other states.

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency, they are using global warming to justify securing the right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that they “cause” a global warming. The expose of the phony “scientific” data behind this massive fraud should, if truth mattered, end this power grab. The ability to regulate CO2 is the ability to control the use of all energy in the nation. That should be stopped!

Alone among his colleagues, Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma (R) has been the one outstanding voice for reason and for truth about global warming. The odds are that history will not give his courageous effort to expose the massive fraud the recognition he deserves. The nation owes him a debt of gratitude.

The lesson we can draw from this is that the next time any U.S. Senator or Representative, let alone the President and any member of his Cabinet, says anything positive about “global warming” or refers to “climate change” to justify some action, they are lying to you.

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