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Going for pre op today and then hip surgery Thursday. Last memo for a while.
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Political success rate. (See 1 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This is a must read op ed.
No sooner than I reviewed three chilling articles in a previous memo, Helprin confirms my greatest fears. We, possibly, lost the next war without ever having engaged because of what we have been doing over the last few decades.
China has the numbers, the commitment and our so called allies will melt away once they know we cannot defend our interests and their's.
So on with the investigation of Trump you Democrats with your heads in the sand.
It is also ironic that I am reading about The Bataan March in Grisham's new book. (See 2 below.)
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Can you relate?(10) Jeff Allen - Silly Arguments Between Couples - YouTube
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Capitalism vs. Socialism
Decades after capitalism seemed to have triumphed over socialism, politicians are once again arguing about the merits and drawbacks of these opposing economic systems. Why are we still having this debate? Andy Puzder, former CEO of the parent company of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., explains the misconceptions that keep the debate alive.
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Dick
Dick
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1)
1)
Democratic Leaders
· In all her years in congress Elizabeth Warren introduced 110 bills. 2
passed.
· Cory Booker introduced 120 bills. 0 passed.
· Kamala Harris introduced 54 bills. 0 passed.
Bernie Sanders is truly special. He never held a job until he was finally
elected mayor at age 53.
· He lived off of welfare and four different women, had a child out-of-
wedlock with one and the three marriages did not work out.
In all his years in the Senate, he introduced 364 bills. 3 passed. Two of
those were to name post offices.
If you want to know what kind of leader Bernie is, Go to Wikipedia, it’s a long report.
The following is condensed:
Bernie Sanders’ father was a high school drop-out, who tormented his family with
rants about their financial problems.
He blamed society and economic inequality for his plight, though as a white male in
a middle class neighborhood, he was hardly among the downtrodden.
This was Bernie’s inspiration to take up the cause of economic justice, though he
would spend half of his life as an able-bodied college graduate living off of
unemployment checks, and the women in his life, between odd jobs.
By his own admission, Bernie was not a great student, starting at Brooklyn College
and transferring to Univ. of Chicago, but his enrollment kept him protected from the
draft.
He joined socialist organizations and dabbled in far-left communist politics, gaining
national notoriety by petitioning the school to let students have sex in the dormitories.
This was before birth control and abortion were legal, when there were still very
serious repercussions for women if the condom broke, but that didn’t stop him from
crusading against those silly rules that were an obstacle to his own satisfaction.
He participated in the 1963 March on Washington, a few demonstrations, and was
arrested once, but his activism for civil rights ended when he became obsessed with
socialism. NOT “democratic socialism”, but oppressive far-left Marxism.
Bernie married his college sweetheart, Deborah Shilling, and spent his small
inheritance on a summer home in Vermont on 85 acres. The shack had a dirt floor
and no electricity, maintaining his proletariat credibility, but his new bride.He refused
to get a steady job, so his wife didn’t stick around long, divorced after 18 months.
The Viet Nam war was escalating, and when the next draft was announced, Bernie
applied for a conscientious objector deferment. His deferment was denied, so he
dodged the draft by having a kid out of wedlock in 1969 with his new girlfriend,
Susan Mott, even though he STILL wasn’t working, and had no way to support the
child. By the time his draft number came up, he was too old to be drafted anyway.
He continued to subsist on odd carpentry jobs and unemployment checks, and
occasionally selling $15 articles, including the one about how women fantasize about
gang rape. He still refused to get a steady job to support his child. His girlfriend
left him.
In 1988 he married Jane Driscoll,and took a cold-war era honeymoon in communist
USSR. His new wife supported Bernie financially through his many attempts to win
a public office, and shared his radical leftist political views. They visited the pro-
Soviet Sandinista Government in Nicaragua known for their human rights violations,
support for anti-American terrorists, and the imprisonment and exile of opponents.
Bernie blindly overlooked the carnage to stand with fellow socialists.They traveled to
Cuba in hopes of meeting Bernie’s hero Fidel Castro, but access to
him was denied.
Bernie Sanders managed not to hold a full-time job his entire life or vote in a single
election, until he finally ran for Mayor of Burlington at the age of 40. After several
failed elections, he finally won the office of Mayor of Burlington, VT, and eventually a
Senate seat, which he has managed to keep off and on. For all of his years
representing Vermont, Bernie Sanders passed a total of three bills, and two of them
were for naming post offices.
He’s a draft-dodging deadbeat dad, a globe-trotting communist dilettante, and a
petulant detractor of hard-working honorable Democrats. His one skill is yelling
about how unfair the world is, and how everything SHOULD be. But he has no plans
for how to make it happen, and no idea what goes on in the rest of the world or how
to deal with problems overseas.
His excuse for not having a foreign policy or national security plank on his platform:
“I’ve only been campaigning for three months.”
His socialist friends are bitter about what they see as a betrayal of their values by
Bernie’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination.
His former wife and girlfriend run when they see reporters and will not speak to the
press.
Bernie’s past, including a brief stint living in a kibbutz in Israel is cloaked in secrecy.
(It worked for B Hussein Obama.)
Former employees and coworkers describe him as hostile and belligerent. All of the
Democrats in Vermont’s government endorsed Hillary Clinton.
The people who know Bernie best cannot stand him. His supporters cannot explain
how he is qualified to be president. As for his detractors, we can only watch in horror
as this Nader 2.0 works an appalling act of sabotage on the Democratic Party.
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2)
The way to deal with China, and thus North Korea, its naughty but wholly dependent
vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to
America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long
game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and
the most important measure is military capacity.
2)
The U.S. Is Ceding the
Pacific to China
While Washington’s focus is elsewhere, Beijing plays the long game—that
means preparing for war.
By
vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to
America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long
game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and
the most important measure is military capacity.
As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic
downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party
control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a
trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink
first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.
China looks past this and all short-term maneuvering to see the U.S. ill-attending to its
fundamental strengths, and marks us down as a declining country that cannot come to
terms with necessities. It knows that in the 1970s and ’80s, when America led the world
in computers, electronics, research, and capital, we failed to automate. Taking the easy
way out by offshoring for the sake of cheaper wages, we allowed our manufacturing
base to atrophy. And now China sees a weakling that, rather than venture competition,
seeks safe spaces behind tariff walls.
Perhaps had the U.S. refrained from needlessly antagonizing every one of its important
allies and instead assembled them in a coalition of common interests and grievances,
China, thus isolated, would have made real accommodations. But given broken,
uncoordinated, squabbling opposition, and the high level of Chinese-American
economic interdependence, it need not do so. It will almost certainly delay, prevaricate,
and work around its commitments in all too familiar fashion. And a country the leader
of which in living memory sacrificed 40 million of his people to crackpot economic
theory presents an entirely different kettle of fish than bullying Canada or outfoxing a
real estate minimogul over lunch at the Four Seasons.
The only effective leverage on China, and by extension North Korea—which otherwise
will retain nuclear weapons whether overtly or covertly but certainly—is to alter the
correlation of military forces in the Western Pacific, and indeed in the world, so that it
no longer moves rapidly and inevitably in China’s favor, which is what China cares
about, the essence of its policy, its central proposition. Though with some effort the
U.S. is perfectly capable of embarking upon this strategy, it has not. It seems we lack
the awareness, political will, intelligence, probity, discipline, leadership, and habit of
mind to do so.
First, it is astounding that China, the world’s third-ranking nuclear power, with 228
known nuclear missiles and a completely opaque nuclear-warfare establishment, unlike
the U.S. and Russia is subject to no agreements, no inspection, no verification and no
limits, while in this regard the U.S. remains deaf, dumb and blind. The U.S. should
pressure China to enter a nuclear arms-control regime or explain to the world why it
will not.
Second, keeping in mind that America’s inadequate military sea and air lift make
wartime supply of forces in Europe a well known problem, the distance from San
Francisco to Manila is twice that between New York and London, China has 55 attack
submarines, and the U.S. Navy has long neglected antisubmarine warfare. This renders
the diminished string of American bases on China’s periphery crucial for initial
response and as portals for resupply. But they are vulnerable, and little has been done to
make them less so.
Nothing can change the fact that whereas Chinese attacks on American bases in South
Korea, Japan, and Guam would not strike the American homeland, response against
bases in China would raise the specter of nuclear escalation. China understands that a
knockout blow against our bases would banish the U.S. from its environs, condemning
us to a long-distance campaign to which the U.S. Navy in its present state—
overstretched, undertrained and half the size of the Reagan Navy—is inadequate. And
if China spiked the Panama Canal, which we abandoned and it took on, and used its six
nuclear attack submarines to block the southern capes and choke points east of Suez, it
would have to contend only with roughly half of our already diminished fleets.
China has medium-range ballistic missiles, air-launched land-attack cruise missiles, air-
refueled bombers and fighter bombers, sea-based missiles, and seaborne commandos.
To protect our bases from all this we need long-range anti-ship missiles, adequately
defended, on outpost islands; deep, reinforced aircraft shelters rather than surface
revetments and flimsy hangars; multilayered missile and aircraft defenses in numbers
sufficient to meet saturation attacks; deeply sheltered command and control, runway
repair, munitions, and stores; and radically strengthened base defense against infantry,
special forces, and sabotage. It would be expensive, but essential.
Above all, building up the Navy, Marines, and long-range air power to make the
vastness of the Pacific correspondingly less an impediment is necessary in concert with
base-hardening to remedy the diminution of those powers and balances that deter war
and make for stable relations in the international system, in that they allow confident
restraint and encourage productive negotiation. Failure will lead to the moment when
our regional allies, finding less reason to adhere to us than to appease China, remove
their increasingly important military components of the de facto Pacific alliance, thus
catastrophically breaking it.
At present the U.S. is inexplicably blind to the fundamental power relations upon which
China is intently focused. As long as we remain vulnerable while China increases its
military powers and ours decline, Beijing need not do anything but pretend to
compromise. This can change if we send the Chinese a message they cannot ignore.
That is, if we take our eyes off the zero-sum game long enough to assure our strengths
in depth. Frankly, if we do not, the Pacific Coast of the United States will eventually
look out upon a Chinese lake.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is author of “Paris in the
Present Tense.”
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