BRUTE!

1) Robert Coram is someone I know and friends of mine, who are much closer to him, were kind enough to have him inscribe his new book to us and I have begun reading it. Very interesting. (See 1 below.)
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Bret Stephens discusses how Obama seems to be in a state of paralysis considering the matters confronting him. (See 2 below.)
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A retired Marine officer does not discount that the Pentagon may be denying the firing of a Chinese missile from a sub off our coast.

I have made my own inquiries but so far no responses.

Liberal friends of mine believe the episode is attributable to pot smokers in California. (See 3 below.)
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Can you be sure you have clear title to your home? The mortgage and foreclosure mess seems to be growing and the possible additional cost to major banks could be substantive. (See 4 below.)
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Rangel is found guilty on 11 charges and Beinart believes should he leave, DC will be a duller and meaner place.

I doubt Rangel will leave but he will be reprimanded. Democrats hang on and know how to dig in their heels. (See 5 below.)

Another view. (See 5a below.)
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Iran and Hezballah plan and Israel's response remains passive. (See 6 below.)
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Praeger finds the liberal mind has a problem coping with and acknowledging facts.

The reason is, facts challenge unworkable theory.(See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1) An All-Time Great Marine
By MAX BOOT

After it emerged in the 1990s that Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark and Christopher Hitchens—notable goyim all—had discovered the existence of Jewish ancestors, I formulated Boot's Law of Genealogy: Everyone is Jewish; some people just don't know it yet. Further confirmation, if any were needed, comes courtesy of this new biography of Lt. Gen. Victor "Brute" Krulak, who died last year at 95.

Before reading "Brute," I had no idea that the famous Marine was a hebe like me. Krulak was born in Denver in 1913. His father, Morris (originally Moschku), had emigrated from Russia in 1890. His mother, Bessie Zalinsky, had arrived two years earlier. Yet by the time Krulak entered the Naval Academy in 1930, he was telling everyone, Robert Coram reports, "that his great-grandfather had served in the Confederate army, that his grandfather had moved from Louisiana to Colorado to homestead 640 acres, and that his father had been born in the Colorado capital." He claimed to be an Episcopalian, associating himself with the most socially prestigious religious denomination. His children were raised as Episcopalians; two even became ministers. (Another son, Charles, became Marine Commandant in the 1990s.)

Krulak was so determined to put his past behind him that when he married the daughter of a Navy officer from "an old, genteel East Coast family," he did not invite a single one of his relatives to the wedding, for fear that his Jewishness would be discovered. Nor did he tell anyone that he had been married once before. At 16, he had eloped with his girlfriend. The marriage was annulled after just nine days but, if discovered, it would have kept Krulak from entering the Academy, which barred students who had ever been married.

Krulak figured, no doubt rightly, that in the starchy, snobbish officer corps of his day, a Jew with a failed marriage would not have gotten far. There was nothing he could do to hide his other handicap—his tiny size. When he entered the Academy he was 5'4'' and 116 pounds. On his first day, Mr. Coram writes, "a towering midshipman looked down at him, smirked and said: 'Well, Brute.' " Thus was born the nickname that Krulak loved.

He was so small that he did not meet the Marine Corps' minimum size requirements. To get his commission, he made use of high-level connections. At Annapolis he had cultivated Holland Smith, who would go on to become a famous World War II general nicknamed "Howlin' Mad." Smith and future commandant Lemuel Shepherd would turbo-charge Krulak's ascent.

Brute rewarded their trust by becoming one "squared-away" Marine. You do not have to be convinced by Mr. Coram's overblown claim that Krulak was "the most important officer in the history of the United States Marine Corps" to recognize his signal contributions.

In 1937, while stationed in Shanghai, Krulak observed Japan's use of landing craft with "large, flat bows" that opened on a beach, "allowing the boats to disgorge vehicles and personnel on dry land." At the time the U.S. had nothing comparable. Krulak was a prime mover in getting the Marine Corps to adopt similar boats made by an obscure shipyard (Higgins Industries of New Orleans). The Higgins boat would make possible all of the American amphibious assaults of World War II, from Normandy to Iwo Jima.

Having a major role in the development of the landing craft would, by itself, have been enough to secure Krulak's place as a military innovator. But he further burnished his reputation when, immediately after World War II, he pushed the Marine Corps to adopt helicopters ahead of the other services. He realized their potential not only to evacuate wounded and move supplies but also to outflank the enemy in battle. Krulak, still only a colonel, also played a key behind-the-scenes role in rallying Congress to defeat President Truman's efforts to severely trim the Marine Corps' size and mission. This led to Truman's famous complaint that the Marine Corps has a "propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's."

Krulak's combat exploits, while distinguished, were far too brief to put him in the company of such Marine legends as Lewis "Chesty" Puller or Dan Daly. He commanded a battalion sent in 1943 to raid the Pacific island of Choiseul to distract the Japanese from the invasion of Bougainville. He won the Navy Cross, his service's second-highest decoration, but the raid was a minor affair that lasted just seven days. It is remembered primarily because one of the PT boats that evacuated Krulak's men was commanded by a young officer named John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy became a senator, Krulak claimed to have gotten chummy with him during the war. This was just another of Krulak's tall tales; the two never met in the Pacific. (The Marine contingent that Kennedy evacuated was led by Krulak's second-in-command.)

Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak
By Robert Coram
Little, Brown, 374 pages, $27.99

It would be easy to condemn Krulak for his dissembling were it not for the fact that he wound up sacrificing his career by telling a painful truth. In the 1960s he was commander of Fleet Marine Force-Pacific, which oversaw the Marines fighting in Vietnam. The most successful Marine program, known as the Combined Action Platoons (CAP), sent squads to protect villages alongside South Vietnamese militia. This was a more effective counterinsurgency approach than the big-unit sweeps favored by Gen. William Westmoreland. After initially claiming that conventional tactics were a big success (a part of his history that Mr. Coram glosses over), Krulak became an ardent convert to counterinsurgency and a big booster of CAP.

In 1967 he told President Johnson that if the U.S. approach did not change, "he would lose the war and . . . the next election." It wasn't what LBJ wanted to hear, and it probably cost Krulak a chance to get four stars and become commandant. He was forced to retire the next year. He could take solace, however, in having displayed more moral courage than his seniors who went along with the administration's failed strategy.

Mr. Coram, a reporter turned biographer, does a good job of telling Krulak's story in clear, simple prose. His account is marred only by relentless Marine boosterism. The Battle of Belleau Wood was a notable Marine victory in World War I, but contra Coram, it does not belong alongside Cannae, Gaugamela and Agincourt—three of the most significant battles in history. Mr. Coram also claims that the roots of the new counterinsurgency doctrine produced by Gen. David Petraeus "could be found in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War." The Marine experience was significant, but other wars where the Marines didn't fight (e.g., Algeria and Malaya) were more influential—as was Gen. Petraeus's own experience in Iraq.

These are the sort of exaggerations you expect of a retired gunny. Mr. Coram, however, isn't a "devil dog" himself. He writes that he was often asked by Marines: "How can you write about the Marine Corps when you were not a Marine?" His answer, apparently, is to adopt a Mariner-than-thou tone. That annoying tic aside, he has produced a valuable work that significantly revises our understanding of—but does not diminish our respect for—one of the all-time great Marines.

—Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, won the Marine Corp Heritage Foundation's General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power" (2002).
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2)Obama's Air Guitar The danger of America's will to weakness.
By BRET STEPHENS

Beijing provokes clashes with the navies of both Indonesia and Japan as part of a bid to claim the South China Sea. Tokyo is in a serious diplomatic row with Russia over the South Kuril islands, a leftover dispute from 1945. There are credible fears that Tehran and Damascus will use the anticipated indictment of Hezbollah figures by a U.N. tribunal to overthrow the elected Lebanese government. Managua is attempting to annex a sliver of Costa Rica, a nation much too virtuous to have an army of its own. And speaking of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega is setting himself up as another Hugo Chávez by running, unconstitutionally, for another term. Both men are friends and allies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

About all of this, the Obama administration has basically done nothing. As Sarah Palin might say: How's that multi-poley stuff workin' out for ya?

Throughout the Bush years, "multipolarity" was held up as the intelligent and necessary alternative to the supposedly go-it-alone approach to the world of the incumbent administration. French President Jacques Chirac was for it: "I have no doubt," he said in 2003, "that the multipolar vision of the world that I have defended for some time is certainly supported by a large majority of countries throughout the world." So were such doyens of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as Fareed Zakaria and Francis Fukuyama.

In this view, multipolarity wasn't merely a description of the world as it is, or of the world soon to come. It was also a prescription, a belief that a globe containing multiple centers of influence and power was preferable to one in which American dominance led, inevitably, to American excess. The war in Iraq was supposed to be Exhibit A.

Barack Obama was also a subscriber to this view. In the fall of 2008, a high-ranking foreign diplomat paid a visit to the offices of The Wall Street Journal and told a story of a meeting he and his colleagues had had with the Illinois senator. Mr. Obama, the diplomat recounted, had gone out of his way to arrange the chairs in a circle, not just as a courtesy but also as an effort to suggest that there was no pecking order to the meeting, that they all sat as equals. Wasn't that nice? Didn't it set a better tone?

Maybe it did. And maybe, given the thrust of some of President Obama's ideas on trade, currency and monetary policy, it's just as well. But whether an American president ought to get his way on a matter of policy is one thing. That a president can't get his way is another. That's a recipe for the global disorder we are beginning to see encroaching from Central America to the Middle and Far East.

Last week, Mr. Obama was so resoundingly rebuffed by other leaders at the G-20 summit in Seoul that even the New York Times noticed: Mr. Obama, the paper wrote, faced "stiff challenges . . . from the leaders of China, Britain, Germany and Brazil." His administration has now been chastised or belittled by everyone from the Supreme Leader of Iran to the finance minister of Germany to the president of France to the dictator of Syria. What does it mean for global order when the world figures out that the U.S. president is someone who's willing to take no for an answer?

The answer is that the United States becomes Europe. Except on a handful of topics, like trade and foreign aid, the foreign policy of the European Union, and that of most of its constituent states, amounts to a kind of diplomatic air guitar: furious motion, considerable imagination, but neither sound nor effect. When a European leader issues a stern demarche toward, say, Burma or Russia, nobody notices. And nobody cares.

If the U.S. were to become another Europe—not out of diminished power, but out of a diminished will to assert its power—there would surely never be another Iraq war. That prospect would probably delight some readers of this column. It would also probably mean more fondness for the U.S. in some quarters where it is now often suspected. Vancouver, say, or the Parisian left bank. And that would gladden hearts from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side.

But it would mean other things, too. The small and distant abuses of power, would grow bolder and more frequent. America's exhortations for restraint or decency would seem cheaper. Multipolarity is a theory that, inevitably, leads to old-fashioned spheres of influence. It has little regard for small states: Taiwan, Mongolia, Israel, Georgia, Latvia, Costa Rica. The romance of the balance of power might have made sense when one empire was, more or less, as despotic as the next. It is less morally compelling when the choice is between democracy and Putinism, as it is today for Ukraine.

We are now at risk of entering a period—perhaps a decade, perhaps a half-century—of global disorder, brought about by a combination of weaker U.S. might and even weaker U.S. will. The last time we saw something like it was exactly a century ago. Winston Churchill wrote a book about it: "The World Crisis, 1911-1918." Available in paperback. Worth reading.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)From: Col Wayne Morris USMC (Ret)

Subject: Pentagon and its embedded media covering up Chinese show of force off LA
To:
Date: Thursday, November 11, 2010, 10:07 PM

Thanks Norman.


Have seen a couple similar articles today and have been waiting to see IF anything else came up.


I don't discount anything, and this scenario is quite similar to some back-channel comm we've had with some folks on the issue over the past couple days. Only things I'm really discounting are the utterly ridiculous blurbs being put out by DoD, etc. They're causing their own credibility problems, but hey, what's new?!?!?!?


Others open and many are continuing to follow this.


Semper Fi,
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4) Congressional Watchdog: Foreclosure Mess Could Threaten Big Banks


The disarray stemming from flawed foreclosure documents could threaten major banks with billions of dollars in losses, deepen the disruption in the housing market and hurt the government's effort to keep people in their homes, according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.

Revelations that several big mortgage issuers sped through thousands of home foreclosures without properly checking paperwork already has raised alarm in Washington. If the irregularities are widespread, the consequences could be severe, the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report issued Tuesday. The full impact is still is unclear, the report cautions.

Employees or contractors of several major banks have testified in court cases that they signed, and in some cases backdated, thousands of certifying documents for home seizures. Financial firms that service a total $6.4 trillion in mortgages are involved, according to the new report. Big banks including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc.'s GMAC Mortgage have suspended foreclosures at some point because of flawed documents.

Federal and state regulators, including the Federal Reserve and attorneys general in all 50 states, are investigating whether mortgage companies cut corners on their own procedures when they moved to foreclose on people's homes.

"Clear and uncontested property rights are the foundation of the housing market," the report says. "If these rights fall into question, that foundation could collapse."

It lays out the possible scenarios: Borrowers may not be able to ascertain if they're sending their mortgage payments to the right party. Judges may block all foreclosures. Prospective buyers and sellers could be in left in limbo.

For major banks, if they discovered that they still owned millions of bad mortgage loans they assumed had been sold, the losses could reach billions.

"Serious threats remain that have the potential to damage financial stability," Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., the watchdog panel's chairman, said in a conference call with reporters on Monday. "This is an incredibly complex problem. ... It could turn out to be nothing. It could turn out to be a big deal."

The Treasury Department's foreclosure prevention program could be crimped if mortgage companies taking part in it find their legal right to begin foreclosure proceedings is challenged, affecting their ability to modify home loans. Treasury should actively monitor the effect of the so-called "robo-signing" controversy on the program, the report urges.

Despite the problems, the Obama administration has maintained there is no need to halt foreclosures in all 50 states.

Treasury officials say a review has been undertaken of the procedures for certifying documents for foreclosures of the 10 biggest mortgage companies participating in the program.

"We strongly believe that the reported behavior within the mortgage servicer industry is simply unacceptable, and (companies that) have failed to follow the law must be held accountable," Treasury spokesman Mark Paustenbach said in a statement. Treasury, various regulators, the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are investigating, "and we will continue to monitor the situation closely," Paustenbach said.

Phyllis Caldwell, who heads the department's homeownership preservation office, last month told a hearing by the oversight panel that so far no evidence has emerged of risk to the financial system from the documents scandal — or from efforts by mortgage investors to force banks to buy back problem loans because of alleged misrepresentations of their risk.

That brought protests from some members of the panel, such as Damon Silvers, policy director for the AFL-CIO labor federation, who told Caldwell: "It is not a plausible position that there is no systemic risk here." The report says the position appears "premature."

"Treasury should explain why it sees no danger" and regulators should subject Wall Street banks to new stress tests to gauge their ability to deal with a potential crisis, the report states.

In legal moves by mortgage investors against banks, one action alone could seek to force Bank of America to buy back and take partial losses on as much as $47 billion in soured loans, the report notes.

The oversight panel was created by Congress to oversee the Treasury's $700 billion rescue program that came in at the peak of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. Of the total, $75 billion was earmarked for mortgage assistance programs.
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5)Charlie Rangel Found Guilty
By Peter Beinart Info

New York Democrat Charlie Rangel was found guilty on 11 counts of ethics violations today. Peter Beinart says the House will be a duller, meaner place when he leaves.

I’m sure Charlie Rangel did whatever the House ethics committee says he did. I’m sure it’s in the Democratic Party’s interest for him to resign, fast. And I’m sure Washington will be a duller and meaner place once he leaves.

In a city in which even Democrats long ago stopped talking about the poor, Rangel—a maid’s son who began working when he was eight—never did. He screamed about the injustice of Reaganism and screamed about the injustice of Gingrichism and had the temerity to suggest that being a Christian should have something to do with aiding the poor. In the 1990s, when the Catholic hierarchy didn’t aggressively fight the cuts in social spending pushed by the Republican Congress, Rangel—a Catholic—told New York’s Cardinal O’Connor to “put his vestments on and get on the Capitol steps and read Matthew,” the gospel where Jesus says that those who feel the hungry will enter heaven.

In an age of identity politics, Rangel had little time for cheap displays of racial solidarity. He endorsed Walter Mondale over Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama and while he got arrested protesting apartheid South Africa, he met the same fate protesting Islamist Sudan. Many of his closest friends in the House were blue-collar white members who, in the words of Chris Matthews, then an aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, were “tied emotionally and culturally to the people they represent,” like Rangel himself.

In an age of bullshit pieties, Rangel said what he actually believed. “Who the hell wants to live in Mississippi,” he asked in 2006, which was pretty understandable for a black man who came of age in segregated America. “If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq,” he declared the same year. Most Democrats in Congress would never have said such a thing for fear of being declared anti-military. But most Democrats in Congress had never served themselves, whereas Rangel had won a purple heart and bronze star in Korea for leading his troops from out behind Chinese lines in weather so cold that several of them froze to death. While other Democrats quibbled around the edges of the Iraq War, Rangel introduced legislation instituting the draft—thus instantly exposing the weakness of the pro-war case since everyone knew that few senators would risk their own sons to rid Saddam Hussein of chemical weapons.

Charlie Rangel is a holdover from the days when Democrats were more comfortable in pool halls than coffee houses, when the party had a deep, organic link to America’s working class. His relationship to the poor voters of his Harlem district is not one of compassion, but of solidarity, the solidarity of a man who might himself have ended up on the streets had not the G.I. bill given him an education.

In an age of bullshit pieties, Rangel said what he actually believed.

The House of Representatives will soon be run by people who believe that America would an almost perfect society if only government got out of the way. Rangel knows that’s not true; less because he is enthralled to any counter-ideology than because he has seen it disproven in his own life. The Democratic Party of Charlie Rangel—and of Tip 0’Neill and Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther—is almost gone, replaced by a party with less of a gut-level attachment to those on society’s margins. It’s fitting that Rangel would be preparing to leave just as Barack Obama considers backing behind a plan to extend the Bush tax cuts even for millionaires. Given the way things in Congress are going, I can’t imagine why Rangel would want to stay.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, is now available from HarperCollins.


5a)Charlie Rangel and the farce known as congressional ethics
By Dana Milbank

Charlie Rangel's trial began with an admonition from House ethics committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) that the matter should be conducted "with the dignity and decorum befitting any proceeding before the House of Representatives."


Within minutes of its opening Monday morning, the trial degenerated into exactly the level of dignity and decorum we have come to expect from our lawmakers.

Rangel immediately requested a postponement of the trial - never mind that the New York Democrat had spent the last three months demanding that the trial be expedited. The man who until recently had sway over hundreds of billions of dollars as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee was now claiming that he was too indigent to hire a lawyer. Half an hour into the public hearing he had demanded for so long, Rangel announced that he was leaving.

"I object to the proceedings, and I, with all due respect, since I don't have counsel to advise me, I'm going to have to excuse myself from these proceedings," he told his eight colleagues, who wore expressions of surprise and amusement.

Rangel, in his agitation, stepped away from his microphone as he berated the panel members. This forced the C-SPAN sound man to rush forward with a boom microphone, and caused problems for the stenography services, one of which transcribed the beginning of Rangel's diatribe this way: "RANGEL: (OFF-MIKE) On several occasions I've spoken with (inaudible). I've spoken with the chair. And I have (inaudible). . ."

After Rangel departed, he treated reporters who chased him down the hall to more of his treatise on fairness and justice. The committee members huddled in private, then decided to proceed with the trial of Rangel in absentia, as if they were a Hague tribunal judging an at-large war criminal.

This was but the latest act in the ongoing farce known as congressional ethics. Rules are so flexible, and enforcement so lax, that even instances that look like outright influence-buying don't get prosecuted. And there's no sign that the situation will improve, as key figures make noises about abolishing the new Office of Congressional Ethics, a semi-independent body designed to make ethics investigations more transparent.


Now comes Rangel, who seems determined to take down with him any remaining credibility of the ethics committee. "I am being denied a right to have a lawyer," he informed the committee with righteous indignation.

"You may hire whoever you wish as a lawyer," the chairwoman told him. "That is up to you."

There is some truth to Rangel's complaint. His law firm, Zuckerman Spaeder, withdrew from the case after his trial date was set, and after Rangel had paid them at least $1.4 million. (The firm says it "did not seek to terminate the relationship.")

Rangel, after a tough reelection campaign (and the loss of fundraising clout associated with his committee chairmanship), has little campaign money left to pay another lawyer, and House rules prevent him from accepting pro bono help. (Celebrated criminal lawyer Abbe Lowell, seated with Rangel's family in the hearing room Monday morning, was willing to take the case for a pittance.)

Still, it's difficult to feel sorry for Rangel. He could pay for lawyers by selling off his villa in the Dominican Republic (the one for which he's accused of avoiding taxes - one of the 13 charges against him). Or he could have maintained better relations with his legal team, rather than publicly rejecting their advice in a speech on the House floor.

Rangel sauntered into the hearing room - a chamber much less grand than his former Ways & Means lair - wearing a striped tie as loud as the TV test pattern. Rangel smiled as if arriving at a cocktail reception, then stood at attention at the defense table until the committee members walked in, five minutes later.

After opening statements, Lofgren asked Rangel, alone at the defense table, if he was represented by counsel. The 80-year-old lawmaker interpreted this as an invitation to make a speech. He delivered a lengthy complaint about the process and a reaffirmation of his innocence. After several minutes of this, the chairwoman interrupted. "Mr. Rangel?"

"If the chair is suggesting that I conclude my remarks," Rangel said - Lofgren nodded her agreement - "then I would do that." But not before he made another statement, this one invoking his wartime service and his work for the New York state legislature in the 1960s.

The prosecutor attempted to enter his 549 exhibits into the record. "Is there objection?" Lofgren asked.

Rangel took this as a cue to make another lengthy speech. Lofgren eventually interrupted. "Mr. Rangel, if you could be seated," she requested.

Rangel, ignoring the chairwoman, remained on his feet - the preferred position of a man about to stage a walkout.
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6)As Iran, Hizballah weigh war in months, Israel plans for next decade

On October 28, a Hizballah war game demonstrated the ability of its special forces to overrun Lebanon in two hours. It took Israel 19 days to respond: Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi finally confirmed on Nov. 15 that the Shiite terrorists may seize power after the UN Tribunal indicts their leaders for the Hariri assassination. The general's was dry - not a word about how Israel proposed to handle a violent hostile terrorist takeover of Beirut on Iran's behalf and the grave strategic peril it presented Israel.

One of the first targets Iran's surrogate plans to grab is Beirut International airport and harbor. Massive quantities of war materiel could then be delivered directly into Hizballah's hand in Beirut instead going the roundabout route through Syria's sea port at Tartous and Damascus airport as they do now.

So how will the IDF handle this brazen hostile act? Impose a belated blockade on Beirut and intercept Iranian freighters? Tehran has already made it clear that any party intercepting its shipping for searches would find itself at war with the Islamic Republic.

Will the Israeli Air force intercept Iranian air transports ferrying weapons and Revolutionary Guards fighters to sustain Hizballah's war machine against Israel?

Again, If Israel never once, in the four years since UN Security Council 1701 banned the import of weapons for Hizballah, fired a single shot to impede the vast quantities of arms smuggled in from Sytia to Hizballah since then, why suddenly now?

Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak appear to be sunk in a state of suspended animation as attested to by three events in the last two days:

1. Both of them, backed by certain high-ranking military officers have made a big deal of the security incentives they say the Obama administration is willing to pledge in return for its second, 90-day moratorium. One of those incentives is another 20 F-35 stealth warplanes on top of the first twenty Israel has already purchased.

(The Palestinians have meanwhile dug their heels in against resuming talks claiming the US has given Israel too many benefits.)

The value of the warplanes is not in question, only their relevance to Israel's military muscle in view of the fact that those planes are not scheduled for delivery before 2020 – that is in ten years' time!

Does anyone know how many nuclear bombs Iran will have amassed since then or whether any will be deployed in Lebanon?

All that can be said for sure about the year 2010 is that Barack Obama will no longer be president of the USA, Netanyahu prime minister of Israel nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president of Iran – even though as things stand today, the last of the three might yet make himself supreme ruler a lifelong position.

Therefore, what good are the US F-35 warplanes when today Israel which lives under active threats from Iran, Hizballah, Syria and Hamas?

2. An Israeli intelligence officer, who opted to stay anonymous, confirmed Sunday, Nov. 14, that Hamas had obtained surface missiles (Improved Fajr-5,made in Iran) with a range of 80 kilometers and therefore capable of exploding in the heart of Tel Aviv. He blamed Egypt for not doing enough to thwart the smuggling of illicit weapons through Sinai into the Gaza strip, but neglected to mention what Israel had done to thwart their passage into the Strip and deployment.

This approach is typical of the mindset afflicting Israel's government, military and intelligence decision-makers these days. They seem to think that they need only to sound the alarm about threats and Washington or Cairo will do the rest. Israel's enemies are left in peace to build up their strength and magnify the menace they pose without interference.

3. Monday, Nov. 15, Colonel Zvika Haimovitch of the Israeli air defense corps told a government-sponsored aerospace conference in Jerusalem that within two years, or 2015at the latest, Israel's skies will be hermetically protected against enemy missiles. In the next two to five years "we will turn this vision into reality," he said. Israel's multi-layered air defense network will be fully deployed by 2015, "combining short-range rocket interceptors with kamikaze satellites that blow up ballistic missiles in space."

He mentioned the Iron Dome developed by Israel for shooting down rockets with ranges of 5-70 kilometers as one of those tiers, David's Sling for intercepting more powerful rockets and the Arrow III for boosting a satellite beyond the Earth's atmosphere to collide with an incoming missile.

The same day, American military sources disclosed that the IDF had only lately halted the introduction of the first Iron Dome battery to operational use because the battalion that was to have operated it had not finished training. Those sources mentioned a delay of at least one year.

Col. Haimovitch would have done better to use his public platform to address real events such as Iran's five-day countrywide air defense exercise which started Tuesday, Nov. 16, on driving off US and Israel warplanes and missiles venturing into its airspace. However, Israel's top brass are taking the lead from its political leaders, preferring to talk in the abstract about future threats when real perils lurk just behind Israel's door.
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7)Must the Liberal Mind Reject Sad Facts?
By Dennis Prager


Recently I devoted my local column to analyzing why most Jews believe that people are basically good despite the fact that this belief is neither rational nor Jewish. In a lifetime of teaching and writing on Judaism, I have never encountered a single normative statement in 3,000 years of Jewish writing that asserted that man is basically good.

As I expected, the reaction — apparently all from Jewish liberals — was entirely negative. Almost an entire page of the journal was devoted to letters attacking me. One of the seven letters — from a prominent Hollywood screenwriter — bordered on hysteria.

The question is, why?

Why would liberals in general, and Jewish liberals in particular — given the Jews' singularly horrific history at the hands of other human beings — react so strongly against someone who wrote that people are not basically good?

In my original article, I offered one explanation: Since the Enlightenment, the secular world has had to believe in man (or "humanity") because if you don't believe in God and you don't believe in humanity, you will despair.

But one critic opened my eyes to an even deeper reason most liberals do not acknowledge that people are not basically good.

This is what he wrote:

"What a sad world it would be if we all believed as Dennis Prager that mankind is inherently evil."

And this is what I responded:

"I did not write that man is inherently evil. I wrote that he is not basically good. And, yes, that does make the world sad. So do disease, earthquakes, death and all the unjust suffering in the world. But sad facts remain facts."

"A distinguishing characteristic of liberals and leftists," I concluded, "is their aversion to acknowledging sad facts."

Years ago, a woman writer, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, first made me aware of this. She wrote about liberals rejecting many facts about male and female natures. She used the French expression "les faits de la vie" — the facts of life.

The left, she wrote, rejects les faits de la vie.

I believe this is so for two reasons.

First, as with my correspondent above, people on the left tend to be unwilling to accept the sadness and pain that recognition of such facts creates. leftism is often predicated on avoiding pain. That is a major reason why the left dislikes capitalism and free markets. Free markets create winners and losers, and the left does not like the fact that some people lose and some win.

This antipathy to having losers expresses itself on the micro level as well. Many liberals oppose children playing in competitive sports because they can lose — sometimes by a big score. That is why many schools now emphasize "cooperation instead of competition." They do not want children experiencing the pain of losing, let alone losing by many points. That is also why liberals introduced the absurd idea of giving sports trophies to all kids who play, win or lose. God forbid that only the winners receive trophies; the kids who didn't win may experience pain.

Second, the left lives by theories and dogmas into which the facts of life must fit. That is why left-wing ideas are usually wishful thinking.

Though either explanation suffices, the two explanations reinforce each other.

Here are four descriptive statements rejected by the left for these two mutually reinforcing reasons.

1. People are not basically good.

Leftists tend to reject this because a) It is too painful to accept, and b) it undermines the leftist dogma that people do bad because of outside forces — poverty, capitalism, racism, etc.

2. Men and women are inherently different.

Leftists have rejected this idea because some of the differences are too emotionally upsetting to accept. Men are variety-driven by nature? Too upsetting. Women may have less yearning for, and ability in, math and engineering? Only a sexist like former Harvard president Lawrence Summers would say such a thing. Moreover, the belief that men and women are inherently different violates the left's foundational principle of equality. Many liberals admit that they reject talk of male-female differences because it can easily lead to gender inequality.

3. Black males disproportionately commit violent crime in America.

Leftist reactions to this truly painful fact are to label one who notes it a racist and to decry American society as racist because there are more black males in prison than in college.

4. The United Nations is a moral wasteland.

Since before the U.N.'s founding in 1945, liberals placed much of their hope for a peaceful world in the United Nations. That the U.N. has turned out to be an abettor more than a preventer of violence is a fact that the left finds too painful to acknowledge. And it violates the left-wing belief that nationalism is evil and internationalism is the solution.

It is generally believed that as people grow older, they reject much of the liberalism they believed in when they were young. This is true, and one reason is relevant here: As we get older, we tend to make peace with painful faits de la vie.
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