Noonan Takes Romney To The Woodshed! IDF Ready!

Dagny has begun reading my memos!
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I am half way through Bob Woodward's " The Price of Politics." Interesting read.  (See 1 below.)
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Golan heating up? IDF sending message it is prepared.  (See 2 below.)
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Two kinds of redistribution.  (See 3 below.)
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Noonan to Romney - get cracking as she takes him to the wood shed. (See 4 below.)
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In the previous memo I posted an article by Stratfor's George Friedman and his thinking about Libya and Americas's involvement in the Middle East from  President Jefferson's Barbary Coast days.

Friedman is a thoughtful analyst and steps back and presents a basis for objective perspective and does so again.

He lays out the pros and cons of the way Obama has handled matters and, in Friedman's view, it all comes down to Iran. I am in total agreement with respect to this observation.  Obama is allowing himself to be backed into a corner of his own making by his unwillingness to get tough and take on Iran because he (subsequent presidents) will have to do so in any event. The longer Obama waits and/or dithers the more difficult it will be when it happens.

If you did not read the article I urge you do so.
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Mid East madness - Victor Davis Hanson.  (See 5 below.)
Dick
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1)Will Ordinary Dems Ever Say 'Enough'?
By Karin McQuillan

I have a lot of liberal friends.  I know they disagree with Republican principles and proposals -- profoundly disagree.  That's fine.  They are decent, big-hearted, smart people.  They love our country.  I'm proud to have them as friends.  There are many problems that face our nation that should not be partisan.

So when will they say "Enough" to President Obama? 

Will I ever hear them say things like what's below?  For example:

I want honest talk when our embassies are overrun and our ambassador and others murdered -- not nonsense that it had "nothing to do with the United States," 9/11, the killing of bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda.  I don't want to hear about how "it is in response not to U.S. policy, not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video -- a film."  Do not tell me that it was a spontaneous riot caused by an obscure YouTube posting from last June.  Please.  We are really not that stupid.

I don't want one more lecture on Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance.  Your job is to protect our country from the jihadis, not interfaith outreach.

Why is our national security being limited to drone strikes?  What about the need for intelligence?  If we still had a functioning intelligence capability, wouldn't we have known about the planning of the attacks in Cairo and Libya?

I want free speech -- it is not okay that a man who posts something obnoxious on YouTube was carted  off by federal agents in the middle of the night.

I don't want my president to meet with Letterman and Beyoncé and refuse to meet with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.  It is a dereliction of your responsibilities.  It is unbefitting and disrespectful to the office of president.  Israel is facing the looming threat of a nuclear Holocaust from Iran.  What on Earth are you doing choosing Letterman over your job as president?

I don't want my president to hold a fundraiser in Las Vegas instead of staying in Washington when there are anti-American riots in 21 Muslim countries across the globe.

I don't want my president to tell me that the Muslim Brotherhood are moderates, when their motto is "Jihad is our way.  Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

I don't want my president to not protect our embassies on 9/11.

I don't want a president who fought against sanctions on Iran in Congress, then gutted them with hundreds of exemptions, including oil for China, and claims that that's all he has to do to deal with the threat of a nuclear Iran.

I want a president to attend his national security meetings each day in person so he can ask questions and discuss options, instead of half the time skipping the meeting and reading a brief summary.

Will my Democrat friends ever hold Obama accountable on the economy?  Republicans were revolted by Bush's overspending, and they created the Tea Party to insist on fiscal responsibility.  Where are the rebels in the Democrat party?  Will they ever say any of what follows?

I want a president who works with his own party and submits a budget to Congress, as required by law.

I want the president to take the debt seriously.

I want to hear how you're going to save Medicaid and Social Security from going bankrupt.  People rely on those programs.  We can't afford for them to fail while you are milking them for votes.

Don't lie to me that "taxing the rich" is going to pay for your yearly trillion-dollar overruns.

Stop printing money to finance our crushing debt burden.  You are jacking up oil prices and the price of everything that is transported.  You are killing the middle class every time they fill up their cars or buy groceries.  You have doubled the price of gas.  Enough.  Stop spending money we don't have.

Twenty-three million Americans don't have work.  Fewer people are working now than when you took office.  The recession and banking crisis ended in 2009.  Mr. President, what policies did you put into place to stimulate the private sector, and where are the results?  Any new ideas other than attacking the rich?

My friends are silent, which leaves me with nothing but questions.  Where is their sense of holding Obama responsible -- for anything?  Where is there sense of what is creepy behavior by a president?  Obama has time for The Pimp with a Limp, but not for  national security briefings?  Where is their sense of our constitutional rights and protections?  A citizen is carted off by federal agents for posting something on YouTube, and they are silent?  Why aren't they crying like Clint Eastwood when 23 million fellow Americans are out of work?  How can they want four more years of the same? 

This is not what they voted for.  They voted for something much better.  Is there any broken promise, any failure, any lie, any flouting the law, any dereliction of duty, any divisive political tactic that would make them say "Enough"? 

The author was a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Senegal, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and a mystery author whose novels highlighted the wildlife and peoples of Kenya. 

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2)--Iran pours more troops into Syria, ready to target Israel from Syria and Lebanon

I

Iran continues to fly military personnel and quantities of weapons into Syria by civilian aircraft which cut through Iraqi airspace, American intelligence sources disclosed early Thursday, Sept. 20. UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon also said that, "Unfortunately, both [Syrian] sides, government and opposition forces, seem to be determined to see the end by military means."

Clearly, Iran is augmenting its military involvement in the constantly escalating Syrian civil war, broadening it into a multinational conflict which threatens to drag Lebanon in, by means of the Iranian-Syrian ally, Hizballah.

The UN Secretary General's statement implying that the two Syrian sides are determined to fight to the bitter end is echoed in Iran’s resolve to fight to the bitter end for Assad, on Syrian soil.

Tehran is not hiding its actions. Sunday, Sept. 16, Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Commander Gen. Ali Jafari said openly that Al Qods Brigades units were present and operational in both Syria and Lebanon.

No comment on this revelation has come from the US, Israel or Israel’s military (IDF) chiefs - notwithstanding its menacing import, namely, that Tehran is no longer hanging about and waiting for its nuclear program to be attacked in order to punish Israel, but is getting ready for a pre-emptive operation.

Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have chosen silence in the face of what any other nation would regard as a casus belli: the open deployment of enemy forces on its northern and eastern borders.

This must have been the catalyst for the IDF’s surprise two-division strength drill Wednesday on Israel’s Golan border with Syria. But the IDF spokesman sounded almost apologetic when he explained that the exercise had nothing to do with the events in Syria or with Hizballah, and that it was no more than a routine drill for testing preparedness.

Military sources say that, in the current climate, no military operation by any army on the Syrian border – especially one of this magnitude – may be regarded as “routine.” Only a week ago, the Golani Brigade concluded a large military exercise in northern Israel including the Golan. That sort of frequency must have operational connotations: The IDF is evidently keeping the army on the move and in a constant state of readiness to fight a real war without delay on terrain made familiar by repeated war games.

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz has a penchant for expressing himself through symbols, his method of overcoming the restrictions placed on his tongue by military and other constraints.

On New Year’s Eve last week, the general handed military correspondents a small gift: The Hebrew edition of the American writer Richard David Bach's "There's No Such Place as Far Away."

For the Golan drill Wednesday, he decided to attach Maj. Gen. (res.) Nati Sharoni, chief artillery officer in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to his party of advisers and observers.

The book was a clear message to Tehran and doubting Thomases at home that the IDF is fully capable of an operation against Iran’s nuclear program and of successfully accomplishing any mission far from its shores.

Gen. Sharoni’s presence at the Golan exercise, and the exercise itself, was a warning to Iran, Hizballah and Syria that they will be disappointed if they hope to catch Israel unready, as it was by the surprise attack which almost overcame the IDF 39 years ago before the tide of war was turned back against Egypt.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)The Fallacy of Redistribution

By Thomas Sowell 

The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.

Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are even less tied down, especially today, when vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.

If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the wall, and act accordingly.

Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call "human capital." When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.

Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.

We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future.

If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others.

That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.

Barack Obama can endlessly proclaim his slogan of "Forward," but what he is proposing is going backwards to policies that have failed repeatedly in countries around the world.

Yet, to many people who cannot be bothered to stop and think, redistribution sounds good. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Time for an Intervention
By Peggy Noonan



What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

* * *

And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

* * *

The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.

Republicans are going to have to right this thing. They have to stabilize it.

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?

Also, Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!

* * *

When big, serious, thoughtful things must be said then big, serious, thoughtful speeches must be given. Mr. Romney is not good at press conferences. Maybe because he doesn’t give enough, and so hasn’t grown used to them, and confident.

He should stick to speeches, and they have to be big—where America is now, what we must do, how we can do it. He needs to address the Mideast too, because it isn’t going to go away as an issue and is adding a new layer of unease to the entire election. Luckily, Romney has access to some of the best writers and thinkers in the business. I say it that way because to write is to think, and Romney needs fresh writing andfresh thinking.

Romney needs to get serious here.Or, he can keep typing out his stray thoughts with Stuart Stevens, who’s sold himself as a kind of mad genius. I get the mad part.

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys—make it look like there’s an election going on. Because there is.

Be serious and fight.

If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning.

* * *

Romney always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”

Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?

Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:

Right this ship.

* * *

So, these are some ideas. Others will have more, and they’ll be better.

But an intervention is needed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)SigMiddle East madness

• 

Victor Davis Hanson 

n-Up

Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen.

Embarrassed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice insisted that these assaults were just reactions to an insensitive video circulating on the Internet that disparaged Islam. As embassies burned, we were assured that there was no animosity directed at America in general, or at this administration and its foreign policy in particular.

That is hogwash. The weeks-old video was a mere pretext, in the manner of the Danish cartoons that Islamists use to stir up mobs in their war against the West. The street rioting was long ago synchronized across the Middle East to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Apparently, the administration was left stunned and without a clue about the latest Middle East madness.

President Obama chose not to support nearly a million Iranian dissidents in 2009. Two years later, he belatedly offered encouragement to the revolutionaries who overthrew Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Yet those snubbed in Iran were far more likely to oppose radical Islam than the protestors who later put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Cairo.

Who, exactly, were we "leading from behind" in Libya? Muammar Gadhafi was a monster, but also one in a sort of rehab who was seeking better relations with the West.

As for Syria, the Obama administration has called dictator Bashar al-Assad a reformer. Then he became a mass murderer who had to step down. Then we called in Kofi Annan and the U.N. to practice soft-power diplomacy. Then we threatened to intervene. Now we have backed off.

As a candidate and as president, Obama assumed that his own multicultural politics, his familiarity with Islam, his novel transracial personal story and his repudiation of George W. Bush would all combine to win over the Middle East. Supposedly, Middle Eastern dislike of America had little to do with longstanding existential differences that did not start with Bush and won't end with Obama.

Obama's al Arabiya interview, Cairo speech and loud reset diplomacy sent mixed messages. He gave the impression that Middle East anger was largely either America's fault or due to misunderstandings that the sensitive Obama alone could mitigate -- as he distanced himself from the supposed pathologies of prior American policy in the region.

That myth-making is now discredited. But it still makes it hard for the administration to admit that hatred in Egypt is deep-seated and irrational -- and has very little to do with a silly video. Those in the Arab street hate the West and America because they are told daily that our supposed godlessness and decadence should not make us so rich and powerful -- especially when such pious believers as themselves are so poor and impotent.

But rather than addressing the real causes of their present misery -- tribalism, misogyny, statism, corruption, authoritarianism, fundamentalism and religious intolerance -- amid rich natural resources, Islamists scapegoat. Sometimes they fume at American support for Israel, at other times at an obscure video, cartoon, or rumor of a torched Koran.

We only feed these adolescent tantrums when America wrongly apologizes for the occasional insensitivity of a few of our citizens, who enjoy free speech under the U.S. Constitution.

America looks even weaker when this administration sends confusing signals about U.S. power. It too often spikes the ball -- whether Joe Biden bragging about killing Osama bin Laden, the president joking about Predator assassination missions, Hillary Clinton high-fiving over the death of Gadhafi, or unnamed top officials disclosing classified secrets about the cyber-war against Iran.

Yet at other times, amid promised defense cuts, the Obama administration loudly announces a strategic pivot away from the Middle East toward Asia, or derides the very antiterrorism protocols -- Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals and preventative detention -- that it later embraced.

Nothing is more dangerous in regard to the contemporary Middle East than misunderstanding the source of Islamist rage. Speaking loudly while carrying a small stick only makes that confusion worse.

What can we do?

Start developing vast new oil and gas finds on public lands here at home. Get our financial house in order. Quietly cut back aid to hostile Middle East governments. Put travel off-limits. Restrict visas and call home ambassadors -- at least until Arab governments control their own street mobs.

Develop a consistent policy on the so-called Arab Spring that applies the same criticism of illiberal dictators to the theocrats who depose them. Keep quiet and keep our military strong. Don't apologize for a few Americans who have a right to be crude. Instead, condemn those premodern zealots who would murder anyone of whom they don't approve.

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