Free To Think For Ourselves- Heaven Forbid!

From a friend, a fellow memo reader and former moderate-centrist. I have watched him change and become discouraged in the past year.

His idea did not tale 2000 pages either. To his idea I say AMEN!(See 1 below.)

I am not sure the author of this article is correct but he comes very close to conveying the sentiments of many. (See 2 below.)

Mark Steyn acknowledges we have the best trained military but lack the necessary strategy to defeat Islamist radicals. (See 3 below.)

This editorial follows along the line of my friend whose comment I posted yesterday. Our first reaction is to protect PC'ism in order to temper what the facts may reveal when we finally uncover them. Then the next question is can we believe what we are being told or are facts going to be forever hidden from us?

The other article is also politically incorrect. We are supposed to love those who threaten our Republic and be considerate of their views. We are also supposed to lie to ourselves, sublimate our concerns and hide the truth because it might set us free to think for ourselves.(See 4 and 4a below.)

Pelosi Care, according to official estimates, will cost 1.2 billion but the cost of virtually every Federal Regulation has a tendency to escalate. I would rather trust The Heritage Foundation than any politician and we are probably staring at a 2 trillion plus cost or is it staring at us? (See 5 below.)

Edward Bast writes Krauthammer is all wrong. You decide. (See 6 below.)

Dick

1)Proposed Amendment 28 to the US Constitution!

"Congress shall make no law that applies to any citizen of the UnitedStates that does not apply equally to all US Senators and Representatives."

Congress shall make no law that applies to any US Senator or Representative that does not apply equally to all citizens of theUnited States. All existing laws and regulations that do not meet this criteria shall be declared null and void!"

2)Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush.
Barack Obama's reaction to bad news is to play it so cool that Americans yearn for a bit more drama - and some even for his predecessor.
By Toby Harnden


During the election campaign, Barack Obama's cool detachment was a winning quality, the "No Drama Obama" a welcome contrast with the "Mr Angry" John McCain, never mind the hot-headed "I'm the decider" President George W Bush.

A year into his presidency, however, Mr Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone's guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.

In a sign that the Obama honeymoon truly is over, I began to hear this week the first stirrings of a wistfulness about Mr Bush. "I never thought I'd hear myself say it," one Democrat told me. "But Obama makes you feel that at least with Bush you knew where he was on something."

When Mr Bush's Republicans were defeated in the 2006 mid-term elections, it was the President himself who stepped up and declared that his party had received "a thumpin'". The Democratic defeats on Tuesday were not on anything like the same scale but Mr Obama acted as if nothing at all had happened.

Mr Obama had campaigned for Jon Corzine, New Jersey's Democratic governor, five times, twice just last Sunday. But when Mr Corzine lost by four points in a state Mr Obama won by 15 last year - a 19-point swing to Republicans - White House aides just shrugged.

In Virginia, which Mr Obama won by six points last year, prompting Democrats to declare an historic political realignment in the state, the Democratic candidate went down by 17 points in the biggest landslide since 1961 - a 23-point swing to the Grand Old Party.

It took Senator Mark Warner of Virginia to admit that his party "got walloped". For three days, Mr Obama maintained a studied silence about the results while his aides blamed them on local factors that had nothing to do with the President. And to think that it was Mr Bush who was always accused of being "in denial".

More serious perhaps was Mr Obama's strange disconnectedness over the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by an Army major and devout Muslim who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had praised suicide bombing and shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire.

Maybe Mr Obama had been reading the American press, much of which somehow contrived to present the atrocity as a result of combat stress due to soldiers going on repeated war deployments (though Major Nadal Hasan had not been on any) and therefore, no doubt, Mr Bush's fault.

When the television networks cut to the President, viewers listened to him spend more than two surreal minutes talking to a gathering of Native Americans about their "extraordinary" and "extremely productive" conference, pausing to give a cheery "shout out" to a man named Dr Joe Medicine Crow. Only then did he briefly and mechanically address what had happened in Texas.

On Friday, when most of the basic facts were available, Mr Obama tried again. It was scarcely any better. He began by offering "an update on the tragedy that took place" - as if it was an earthquake and not a terrorist attack from an enemy within -and ended with a promise for more "updates in the coming days and weeks".

Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathised with the families and comrades of those murdered.

It was a reminder that for the past 16 years Americans have had two Presidents who would often extemporise and express emotion. President Bill Clinton could certainly "feel your pain" while Mr Bush sometimes struggled to hold back tears. Mr Obama is more like President George Bush Sr., who famously communicated his concern for people by blurting out: "Message - I care."

The White House argues that Mr Obama was not on the ballot last week and there is therefore no need to fret. The problem with this complacency is that voters were angry about the state of the economy, which Mr Obama can't keep blaming on his predecessor. With unemployment now above 10 per cent, Mr Obama needs to show Americans that he can relate to what they're going through, and take responsibility.

It could do him good to show he has a bit of fire in his belly. Perhaps he might make a decision or two based on gut instinct and deep conviction. In other words, maybe he should try being a bit more like Mr Bush.


3)Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy: Same ideological pathologies that drive al-Qaida overpowered Hasan's American identity.
Mark Steyn

Thirteen dead and 28 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a "tragedy" (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the "war on terror." Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America's enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy – a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.

And he's a U.S. Army major.

And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that "the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor" (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the "noble" "heroism" of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.

When it emerged early Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: "Please judge Maj. Malik Nadal [sic]by his actions and not by his name."

Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense that the New York Times' first report on Maj. Hasan never mentioned the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or that ABC's Martha Raddatz's only observation on his name was that "as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'"

What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.

Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers, recommend, judged people by their actions – flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we're effective at responding with action of our own.

But we're scrupulously nonjudgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like "radical Islam" or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old "radical extremism." But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates "radical Islam" from nonradical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An Army psychiatrist, Maj. Hasan is an American, born and raised, who graduated from Virginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. But he opposed America's actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan and made approving remarks about jihadists on U.S. soil. "You need to lock it up, Major," said his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.

But he didn't really need to "lock it up" at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any "red flags" were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are "anti-war." Some of them are objectively on the other side – that's to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope.

Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as "If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier's uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation" is an adviser to Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: "We are not to question Shariah."

That's the guy manning the airport security desk.

In the New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan's faith only obliquely: "He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference." Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had "Allah" and "another word" pinned up in Arabic on his door. "Akbar" maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Quran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired.

But don't worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there's no terrorism angle.

That's true, in a very narrow sense: Maj. Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaida reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the same pathologies that drive al-Qaida beat within Maj. Hasan, too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline – his entire American identity.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy – in Afghanistan and in Texas.


4)EDITORIAL: Too scared to recognize terrorism

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was declared "not a terrorist" before the facts were out - even before officials were sure whether the attacker was alive or dead. Failing to honestly name a terrorist attack despite the evidence is as destructive and dishonest as leaping to call an attack terrorism without the facts to support that.

Apparently, the claim was based largely on the fact that Maj. Hasan appears to have been a lone gunman. However, terrorism is defined not by the number of people involved, but by the motivations and intentions of the attacker. If reports about him are true, Maj. Hasan clearly was a terrorist.

He reportedly was upset about the activities of the United States in the Middle East and purportedly had made postings about suicide attacks on jihadist forums. He told an associate that "maybe the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor"; he was videotaped on the morning of the attack wearing traditional white clothing in the manner of someone about to martyr himself. The same day, he divested himself of belongings and handed out Korans, and he shouted the battle cry of the jihadists, "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire. If these reports are true, this was not just terrorism; it was Islamic jihadist terrorism.

It is unclear whether Maj. Hasan acted alone or others were involved in this attack. It would not come as a surprise to learn more people were involved. If so, it will constitute a major counterterrorism failure.

Troubling questions are emerging. What diverted authorities from doing a more thorough job of investigating Maj. Hasan six months ago, when he was suspected of jihadist tendencies? Why was he allowed to remain on active duty in the Army, live amongst the troops and prepare for deployment to a combat zone? Those who claim that such an investigation would be some form of discriminatory profiling are simply wrong. It is not profiling to investigate someone based on probable cause. The fact that Maj. Hasan is a Muslim would not be reason enough to open an investigation. However, a Muslim in uniform openly discussing violence against the United States and posting his views on suicide attacks to jihadist forums should at least get a second look.

Those who want to explain this away as the result of stress, workplace violence or the "stretched force" are willfully blind. Condemned Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, scheduled for execution this week for his role in killing 10 people and wounding three in October 2002, petitioned for clemency on the basis that he suffers from severe mental illness and Gulf war syndrome. Surely someone who hunts down and murders strangers is not in his right mind, but the primary motive in both Muhammad's case and Maj. Hasan's was jihadism.

The refreshing candor of someone like Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the shooter in the June attack on the Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., is rare. Reportedly, he said he was a practicing Muslim angry with the U.S. military for its crimes against Muslims and would have shot more than the two soldiers he killed if more had been available. This incident also was called "not terrorism."

The United States is engaged in a global struggle with violent adherents to an extremist Islamic creed. It does not besmirch the Muslim faith - or the vast majority of American Muslims - to admit that fact. The politically correct tendency to define attacks as something other than terrorism simply to avoid addressing the motives of the attacker is dangerous. Anyone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" and opens fire on a crowd of unarmed people is a terrorist. If Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is not a terrorist, no one is.

4a)FT. HOOD ATTACK WAS TERRORISM
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN


In his nationally televised remarks following the horrendous killings at Ft. Hood, President Obama never mentioned the T word. The attack was an act "of violence." No mention of terrorism.

In fact, the Ft. Hood shooting is the first terror attack on American soil since
9-11. But Obama, reluctant to take the rap for inadequate protections against such attacks, is doing everything he can to make it look like an adult version of the Columbine school shootings. We are treated to stories about the killer's dread of being sent back to Afghanistan and his deformed personality.

But, the fact is that Major Nidal Malik Hasan jumped on a table, yelled "Alah Hu Akhbar" and began the shooting rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 30 more.

Ilana Freedman, CEO and Senior Analyst for the Gerard Group International, which provides intelligence analysis for business and homeland security, describes Hasan as a "lone wolf terrorist" who acts without apparent coordination with any other person or organization. But that does not make him any less of a terrorist.

The dividing line, of course, between a terrorist and a psychopathic killer is political motivation. His statements right before opening fire would indicate that Hasan was motivated by fanaticism and a commitment to Islamic fascism, even though President Obama bends over backwards to avoid saying so.

Obama's refusal to call the attack terrorism, and to heed the warning signs about the porous nature of our security system that allowed it to happen on a military base, recalls President Clinton's deliberate decision to downplay the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He did not visit the site of the attack and treated it as a crime, promising to find those guilty and punish them, rather than to attack the international groups that funded and enabled them.

There may be no groups behind Major Hasan's attack, but the fact that he was an officer in the Army, with full access to a military base and its arsenal of weapons, while holding the views he did, is the first indication of a laxity in security under President Obama. This attack did not take place in a shopping mall or a school, where security procedures are, understandably, relaxed. It happened on the highest security place of all - a military base! That the military failed to spot the possibility of an attack and had no measures in place to prevent it must be laid at the feet of the commander-in-chief of that military: President Barack Obama.

Many commentators have warned that the diminution of security and the weakening of our anti-terrorist protections would leave us vulnerable to be hit again. Now it has happened. And the president is doing everything he can to blur the distinction between murder and terrorism.

It was his failure to understand the difference between an act of war and a crime that undermined President Clinton's administration's anti-terror efforts and led directly to 9-11. It would appear that President Obama is going down the same road of denial and minimization of political harm. There may be casualties at Ft. Hood, but Obama is determined that his popularity will not be among them.


5)Yes, $2.6 Trillion! A Closer Look at the Full 10 Years of Spending in the House Health Bill

Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true cost is not the net spending on only the coverage related provisions ($897 billion) but rather the total gross spending for the coverage provisions ($1.05 trillion) as well as any additional spending in the bill (approximately $217 billion). That would raise the plan’s price tag to about $1.5 trillion when including the roughly $210 billion cost of the “doc fix” is included. The “doc fix” refers to the undoing of the flawed Medicare payment update formula, which Congress created but has routinely stopped from being enforced. Under current law, that formula would result in a 20 percent reduction in doctors’ pay under the Medicare program.

The real story about the true cost is even more dramatic. The bill is front loaded with taxes, and back-loaded with spending in the first ten years. Since most of the spending in the House bill does not fully go into effect until 2014, the 10-year cost estimates based on the preliminary CBO score (for years 2010 through 2019) only account for six years of new spending under the plan. Once it is implemented (over a full 10-year window from years 2014 to 2023), the giant House health bill carries a price tag of $2.4 trillion, or as much as $2.6 trillion with the “doc fix.”


6)Under the Influence:The Measure of American Power
Andrew Bast

Editor's note: As noted below, this will be the final "Under the Influence" column at World Politics Review. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Andrew Bast for his contributions to WPR over the past 10 months. It's been a pleasure working with him, and we wish him the best of success in all his endeavors.

As this will be the final "Under the Influence" column here at World Politics Review, it seems only fitting to tackle what Charles Krauthammer, the iconic commentator, recently had to say about the question this column has been exploring for the last 10 months: Is American power waxing or waning? Writing in the Weekly Standard -- on whose cover figures a Nobel-wearing President Barack Obama, his right hand proudly resting on a bust of former President Jimmy Carter -- Krauthammer surveyed the vigorous debate over American power. It's a debate that has reached a fever pitch in the last few years, with the disastrous war in Iraq, the muddling through in Afghanistan, and the publication of popular studies like Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World."

Krauthammer wrote that, "For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice."

In this column, I have consistently laid out a yardstick alongside American power, and, in so doing, I've focused largely on two themes: the war in Afghanistan and the rise of China. And for good reason. The former, even more than Iraq, is a test of how the U.S. will shoulder what will be the chief security challenge to the international order for at least the next two decades: weak, fragile, and failed states. The rise of China, likewise, will test an entire field of political science scholarship, and specifically raises the question of whether this emergence of a new empire will lead, as it so often has in the past, to war.

Alongside these two dominant themes, I've also delved into several other facets of American foreign policy -- the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, Cuba, Haiti, underdevelopment, Darfur, and North Korea.

What has become clear through it all is that Krauthammer is simply dead wrong.

He writes, "We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon." But the reality is that there are few accidents in international politics, and even fewer with centuries-long trajectories. There are mistakes, gaffes, and idiotic strategies. But accidental hegemons are simply an impossibility.

No, the expansion of American power has been methodical, first by way of Manifest Destiny to the Pacific, then by way of the Monroe Doctrine throughout the Western Hemisphere, then on to the triumph in World War II and the capitalist proselytizing that won the Cold War. Far from accidental, our country's rise has been deliberate, and downright effective.

Krauthammer would have us believe that after a two-century rise, the U.S. has suddenly decided to shed its wild ambition, turn off the switch, and willingly (with apologies to Dylan Thomas) go gently into that good night. The suggestion, while it may provide political flimflam for a disaffected and alienated political class, is ludicrous.

Twenty-eight-point-three-seven-five. That is, by my calculation, the measure of American power at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Critics will say it's unscientific, and they'd be mostly right. But if the yardstick is the measure -- with 36 meaning unmatched global domination, and 1 signifying inescapable insignificance on the world stage -- at 28.375, American foreign policy seems to reach more than three-quarters of the targets it wants to hit.

Is that down from 1945? Most certainly. Down from February 2002? Perhaps a bit. But, contrary to the realists who believe that international politics is a zero-sum game, the world is more complicated than, "If I win, you lose." If U.S. power is waning, it remains damn strong. And that it is waning is far less a function of choice, a la Krauthammer, than the result of a global order outside the comprehensive grasp of any single state -- or empire, for that matter.

Three-quarters power still goes a long way. Sen. John Kerry's arm-twisting last month, for instance, forced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff election. But unlike total power, it only went so far. The runoff, which would have at least somewhat legitimized the democratic process in Afghanistan, later fell through. Also, lest it be forgotten, even if the occupation of Iraq has been a hellish nightmare, the initial U.S. invasion swiftly toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. The U.S. can still dominate any other traditional military on the planet. Though that might prove less and less valuable as the years pass, it still represents serious -- if three-quarters -- power.

However, tasking the military for civilian matters, as is happening today, could lead to disaster. A common refrain in military thinking today is, "To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail." Accordingly, several major initiatives -- from Stability Operations becoming a core mission of the nation's armed forces to the evolving counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan -- have turned soldiers into state-builders. If weak, fragile, and failed states really will be the foremost international challenge for the foreseeable future, then sending troops to do development is like taking a hammer to a cracked vase. Here Krauthammer's thesis rings true, if not as he intended, for this is indeed a significant choice that is pushing the country toward decline.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," wrote Matthew Hoh in a September letter to his chain of command. Hoh served two tours as a marine in Iraq and had been in Afghanistan for 5 months with the Department of State when he penned this letter of resignation. "I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque, and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan."

Years from now, his letter may well prove to be a momentary blip in the headlines. But today it stands as one of the most telling documents about the confusion of the mission and the paradox of sending the best-trained soldiers in the world to accomplish everything for which they have not been trained. It is no small fact that the Soviet Union's catastrophic fight in Afghanistan played a significant role in that empire's dissolution. And as for the host of other failed states, can the military really become a diplomatic arm of American foreign policy?

Then there's this: Years and years after the war in Afghanistan has come to an end, there will still be China. Of course, just two decades ago, elites in the U.S. desperately feared the ascendance of Japan. Unlike Japan, however, almost all signs suggest that China's rise will continue unabated. Interestingly, few, even in America's foreign policy apparatus, fear that rise. In many ways, this historical moment is defying convention. As Zakaria describes in his book, "[it is not] about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."

This is where true influence may lay: in understanding that a real disjuncture in the history of global politics may be at hand. Rather than strengthening, say, a combative alliance with India to offset Chinese power, the U.S. could leave its most resonant imperial stamp on history by challenging China -- and Brazil, Russia, and India -- with cooperation. And the world order that would ensue could, indeed, leverage American influence on everything -- from nuclear proliferation to economic development and prosperity -- in unprecedented measure.

Andrew Bast has reported from four continents for several publications, including Newsweek and the New York Times. His weekly WPR column, Under the Influence, has appeared every Friday for the last 10 months