I will be out of town when my dear friend and fellow memo reader is remembered. Sam was a unique character and a wonderful friend and tennis payer. RIP, Sam.
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Telling it like it needs to be told and from Maureen Dowd, of all people. Listen/suck it up you feckless liberals and politically correct progressive apologists. America rejected Obama and Hillary because they were "deplorable." (See 1 and 1a below.)
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The problem and only a will to do what needs to be done will eradicate the threat. Yes, it may create a bigger one but that is the chance we will have to take . Otherwise we will continue to live on our knees like Obama wanted us.
Trump should give China a few weeks to react to the threat we face from N Korea and then do what Mattis knows we must.
Trump, like Obama, took the same oath to defend us from all enemies. Obama failed to carry out his pledge. Does Trump have the guts? Time will tell and we do not have that much.
This bald eagle has always been a hawk. (See 2 and 2a below)
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If your own party is incapable of doing what they were elected to do you can always desert them as they have you. Whether walking across the aisle will be the solution only time will tell. Exchanging McConnell and Ryan for Schumer and Pelosi demonstrates what a pathetic choice Trump has. Don't forget,Waters and Pocahontas come along for the ride.
Both parties have been kicking the ball down the field for decades and now Congress has run out of turf regarding N Korea, soon the same for Iran, our looming deficit problem and our failed immigration policies to name a few. Politicians have demonstrated they do not have the political will to engage in heavy lifting but they always cash their pay checks.
The 'deplorables' rejected the feckless and failed policies of Obama and decided to elect Trump, warts and all, because they were fed up with business as usual.
All presidents must deal with the failures of their predecessors and, as Trump has said, he inherited a mess. Now, many of those ignored pigeons are coming home to roost.
Meanwhile, the mass media continues their attacks on Trump finding fault with virtually everything he does and says. Democrats stonewall (not the Confederate one) , Republicans prove they cannot govern and anti-Trumpers go on a statue destruction binge. One could conclude America is coming apart at the seams.
An encouraging event demonstrated the can do American spirit is not totally dead and is the way Texans responded to the devastating and tragic hurricane in contrast with those in Louisiana.
That said, we remain a nation divided and the reasons are many and varied. I suspect the mass media is due for their share of blame as they highlight wedge issues which politicians find effective but which divide. A poorly educated population, driven by a politically correct curricula, comes in for a share of the blame as well. I still believe the'60's set the stage for the social morass that now envelopes our nation.
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Dick
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1)
By Maureen Dowd
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they
Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the
The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike
Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred
If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a
Maybe they should rethink that.
Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by
reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had
The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse
Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over.
As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”:
1a)
On Wednesday, United Nations war-crimes investigators indicted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his government for complicity in the commission of gross crimes against humanity, including the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians.
“Government forces continued the pattern of using chemical weapons against civilians in opposition-held areas,” the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria findings concluded. “In the gravest incident, the Syrian air force used sarin in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib, killing dozens, the majority of whom were women and children.” In fact, that April attack on civilians using the nerve agent sarin is believed to have killed more than 80 people and might have injured 500 more. That attack and the global outrage it inspired compelled President Donald Trump to mount a series of retaliatory cruise-missile strikes on the nearby Syrian government-controlled airbase from which the attack was believed to have originated.
This was among the worst of Syria’s chemical atrocities, but it wasn’t an isolated event. UN investigators have confirmed 33 chemical-weapons attacks to date, six of which occurred early in the country’s civil war and have no identified perpetrator. The other 27 were conducted by forces loyal to Damascus. One of the earliest and most grotesque of these assaults on human dignity took place in 2013 in Ghouta. There, approximately 1,000 people died as a result of exposure to sarin.
It was this attack that compelled Barack Obama to finally take seriously his year-old, self-set “red line” for action in Syria. In early September of that year, the president addressed the American public in prime time and made a compelling case as to why America must intervene to prevent more crimes against humanity and the erosion of the norm prohibiting the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Yet in that same bizarre address, the president informed America that this urgent global crisis could wait for a vote of support from a skeptical Congress. Moreover, he added, Moscow had intervened diplomatically, and no intervention was likely necessary.
The speech was a Frankenstein’s monster of last minute attempts to absolve Barack Obama from his responsibilities as president, and he’s been struggling to clarify his motives ever since. “I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, unconvincingly, almost exactly one year before the massacre at Khan Sheikhoun. “[T]he fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
If history was inclined to provide Obama absolution for his inaction in the face of war crimes, you might think his team would be content to allow history to run its course. They’re not.
Tablet’s Armin Rosen provided an alarming window into the Obama administration’s efforts to hijack ostensibly responsible institutions and compel them to whitewash the effects of Obama’s equivocations. As a result of Tablet’s reporting, a study of the Obama administration’s Syria policy sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been scuttled at the last minute due to the number of eyebrows it raised. “Using computational modeling and game theory methods,” Rosen reported, the study dubiously concluded that executing strikes on the Assad regime would not have led to fewer attacks on civilians. Indeed, there might have been more as a result.
This report’s conclusion was a mystery, but the motive behind it wasn’t. The Holocaust Museum’s Memorial Council members at the time of this report’s composition included Obama administration officials who are deeply invested in ensuring history comes to that same conclusion. Among them were former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and several Obama-era National Security Council members.
Donald Trump did not address the nation when he executed 59 retaliatory cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airfield. Barack Obama already gave that speech. It wasn’t Obama’s lofty rhetoric but his apprehension that emboldened Assad to exacerbate the worst humanitarian and refugee crisis of the century. That’s a legacy that needs polishing. Apparently, Team Obama isn’t above hijacking the moral authority of Holocaust memorials in the pursuit of that objective.
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NORTH KOREAN CRISIS A DECADES-LONG FAILURE OF POLITICAL WILL
Author(s): JOHN HAYWARD AND CLARE LOPEZ Source: BREITBART.COM
Center for Security Policy President for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez blamed political mismanagement stretching back for decades, rather than a failure of intelligence-gathering, for the shock of North Korea’s latest nuclear test on Monday’s special Labor Day edition of Breitbart News Daily.
“I suspect – and I don’t know, I’m on the outside, not the inside – that intelligence collection has been quite good,” Lopez told SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam. “What has been lacking in my opinion, over the last decades, in the United States has been a policy response to actually deal with what they were being told the North Koreans were developing, in terms of their nuclear weapons and their intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Lopez said the disconnect between the urgency of the North Korean threat and the clarity of U.S. policy began in the Clinton administration.
“I think the intelligence was there. They knew what they were doing, but the will to confront it, to actually do something about it, was not there,” she said.
“Confronting North Korea of course means confronting, or at least working with, China, the Beijing government, because they hold such influence and power over really the survival of North Korea, which could not survive without Beijing’s support,” she continued.
“There’s been a reluctance to confront Beijing, but I think that’s now changing. We’re seeing the Trump administration alarmed, certainly, by this latest nuclear test, which appears to have been a hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear bomb test, now going to the extent of saying look – and they don’t specify China particularly – but those trading partners of North Korea, if you don’t cut off trade with them, we will cut off trade with you,” she said.
Lopez described President Trump calling for a trade embargo against any country doing business with North Korea as a “big deal.”
When Kassam asked if the United States could afford an embargo that could lock out both the vast Chinese market and a number of other nations that do considerable business with American companies, Lopez replied, “The question is not so much can we afford, can they afford?”
“Yes, of course we can,” she explained. “It wouldn’t be an easy thing to do. It wouldn’t be an easy step to take. But I think we do have to exhaust all of the other possibilities – diplomatic, commercial – before we go to any kind of a military option, which of course as General Mattis and the Pentagon yesterday made very clear, a military option is on the table. There are military options. They’re not good ones. They’re not the first ones. So we have to exhaust all of these others first.”
Lopez said the United States should try to work with its allies, especially fellow members of the U.N. Security Council, but “the bottom line is, North Korea now threatens the continental United States.”
“The United States of America does not need to have the permission of our allies to defend this country,” she declared. “I think that’s what General Mattis was making very clear. We would love to have the support of our allies and friends, certainly the U.N., the U.N. Security Council. There was a unanimous decision taken the last time, the last test, when the missile test was done, to impose harsher, stronger sanctions against North Korea. That’s all well and good. But when it comes right down to it, if that regime in Pyongyang is threatening the continental United States with deliverable nuclear weapons on the tip of an ICBM, then the United States defends itself.”
Kassam asked if it was embarrassing for the Trump administration to see North Korea proceeding with nuclear and missile tests after President Trump’s “fire and fury” warning.
“No, not at all, because we’re not there yet,” Lopez replied. “As I said, there is a whole series of possible measures beginning with the commercial, beginning with diplomatic, that can be ratcheted up as required.”
“We talked about that military option. That’s very clearly there. But it’s also very clearly not the first option, not the preferred option at all. But it’s there, it’s real, and according to General Mattis and the other senior officials in the Trump administration, that will be the final option if all of the others fail,” she said.
As for China, Lopez said Beijing “needs to understand that the continued development by the North Koreans of deliverable nuclear weapons, and now possibly a thermonuclear weapon, an H-bomb,” is an unacceptable threat to American and regional security.
“They’ve already demonstrated the ICBM capability to reach the United States,” she pointed out. “By the way, I don’t know if most Americans know this or others either, North Korea already right now has two satellites orbiting over the United States on a south polar trajectory,” she added. “One went up in 2012, one last year, 2016. We don’t know what’s on board those satellites. They are of a size that could potentially hold an EMP electromagnetic pulse weapon that could potentially, possibly, be detonated remotely with a radio signal at a time of Pyongyang’s choosing,” she warned.
“So if these threats continue, Beijing needs to understand that the United States will defend ourselves, and this will be far worse in consequence for China, for the people of China, than were they to take steps right now to help us rein in the Pyongyang regime,” said Lopez.
“Obviously China fears destabilization, a refugee flow across their borders from North Korea,” she acknowledged. “Those threats are far less of concern than what would happen if we get to the point that the United States has to actually make good on its pledge to defend the American people from a North Korean military threat, from a nuclear threat.”
2a) North Korea's Threat Might Be Worse Than We Think
If the U.S. pre-emptively attacks North Korea, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and other places in Asia might get blasted in retaliation, but America will have knocked out North Korea's nuclear capability. Right?
Wrong – at least in the opinion of a U.S. senior intelligence consultant who worked on a secret study of North Korea's nuclear program for the government and disagrees with widespread intelligence opinion, echoed by the press, that there are no viable options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear threat except negotiations.
Dwight R. Rider, 30 years a targeting specialist for the U.S. with a master's degree from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), says the reason the U.S. intelligence community (I.C.) says negotiation is the only option is that the I.C. rejected the study his group made that identified hidden nuclear facilities and weapons in North Korea and now realizes they don't know where to target. Thus, in their minds, any pre-emptive attack might have only minimal effect on North Korea's capability and leave the rogue state with plenty of retaliation options.
Rider is so worried about the U.S. making wrong decisions regarding what to do about the North Korean threat that he's decided to go public, including writing a letter to President Trump and other officials he thinks might be able to influence Trump's actions.
"It is unlikely that long-standing issues between North Korea and the U.S. can be resolved through negotiation," Rider writes in the letter to the president. "Any effort to force North Korea" to bow to outside pressure "means regime change." That's not acceptable to North Korea, he says. Therefore, "some level of force may be necessary."
The problem is, he charges, that U.S. targeters don't have good information, and any strike deemed necessary might thus be impotent, inviting retaliation.
The only reason I'm privy to this is that Rider is a source for me in updating an early book of mine, Japan's Secret War, about Japan trying to make an atomic bomb in North Korea during World War II. As an expert in North Korean topography and nuclear signatures, he believes, as I do, that North Korea's nuclear program grew out of what the Japanese, who occupied the peninsula during the war, left there after the surrender. In my updating, we've become friends, and he's voiced the targeting problem more than once. With the current threat escalation and his fear that U.S. planners have bad information, Rider decided to try to correct the situation.
"I believe North Korea's uranium enrichment program long predates it's rather recent interest in plutonium and other nuclear weapons. I believe North Korea has far more capabilities than our intelligence community believes."
Beginning in 2002, Rider says, he participated in a Special Access Program ("Black") in response to 9/11 that, in time, transitioned "to an investigation of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, also classified. "I was specifically charged to be the biggest pain in the ass possible to the intelligence community to force it to confront the most imminent issue facing the U.S: nuclear proliferation." Over the next five years, he says, "we identified much of Pyongyang's overt and clandestine" nuclear program, including its uranium enrichment facilities, plutonium production facilities, transit points where it shipped nuclear materials overseas, and reactors, among other aspects.
He says the study resulted in "overturning" parts about North Korea in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, an overall look at the world guiding U.S. decision-makers. The outside government advisory group, JASON, made up of elite scientists, commended the study, he says, as did the Department of Energy, which went on record concurring with JASON. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the country's top military intelligence agency, let the study languish. "It was noted and then we never heard about it again. There might have been a letter or something, but I didn't see it."
Basically, charges Rider in the letter, "[o]ur effort threatened the status quo." For years, he says, hoping to get North Korea to agree to treaties, such as that negotiated by former President Carter under the Clinton administration, and then appeasement under President Obama, the intelligence community, wanting to undergird the administrations, had been minimizing the threat and neglecting information. "Our effort revealed decades of poor performance and intellectual dishonesty within the I.C. They didn't want to hear it."
The North Korean "functions, facilities and installations identified" by the classified study were "cold-shouldered" by the I.C. community, writes Rider. Because of this "inaction" and "lack of [I.C.] competence," news reports suggest there are no options available for the U.S. in dealing with North Korea." Rider argues that there are many options, none of which has ever been explored by the I.C.
One obvious option, he says, is "preemption: a retaliatory attack as a crisis develops, or on ground that the U.S. chooses[.] ... I warn however that no successful outcome can be expected if the functions, facilities and installations" his group previously identified "are not confronted" as "Yongbyon and other do-nothing targets as currently proposed by the IC[.] ... To strike the targets ... as presently developed by the I.C. leaves the majority of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities intact, [thus] inviting North Korean retaliation against China, Japan and Russia – and [with] America bearing all responsibility."
He believes that much of North Korea's production and capability are underground, first started by the Japanese who had built the peninsula into a Muscle Shoals of the East to supply its war-making in Asia. "There are people in North Korea who seldom ever see the sun. They live perpetually underground." This is one of the problems. Satellites and other information gatherers can't see there. "There is a lot that needs more expertise to identify, and they rejected it."
Rider continued to work with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) regarding the group's findings as well as other projects through 2015. They encouraged him about it, he says. But the study continued to gather dust. His recent attempts to sound an alarm through normal channels have been met with what to him has been alarming silence.
"Late last year [2016], I filed a complaint at the Department of Defense [DoD] Office of the Inspectors General [DoDIG]." The complaint, he said, was delegated to someone "then confronting accusations of Russian involvement in U.S. Elections[.] ... That agent laughed off the issue."
Recently, he said, congressmen he's contacted – "Barr, Gowdy, and Nunez" – advised him to talk with the House Committee on Intelligence. He left messages with the committee, but calls were not returned. "Since then I have attempted to work through informal channels," calling former "high-ranking intelligence officials" he knew. Same thing. "I was told 'the problem was too big' for them to correct without the assistance of Congress."
He believes that a confrontation with North Korea is "likely within the next few years." U.S. success depends on "definitively destroying North Korea's WMD." American "potential to counterstrike rests entirely upon the information received" from its intelligence-gatherers being "accurately assessed and converted into actionable targets. Anything less than 90 percent surety invites counterattack. The U.S. intelligence community has, to date, failed to accurately interpret and convert the information received into actionable intelligence. Initiating action with less than accurate intelligence of North Korea's nuclear weapons ... will result in the deaths of millions, primarily Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Another Pearl Harbor or another 9-11 lies just around the corner."
Rider hopes his group's "J-39 special studies" – that's all he will label it, since it's classified – under the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be retrieved and incorporated into planning before any action against North Korea is taken. "J-39" is a generic name. "The study exists. We made at least five reports involving it. They can find it if they want, or they can talk to me. I'm available."
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3)
The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump Congress
The Republican gang that can’t even shoot at each other straight.
The Editorial Board
The American people may think they elected a Republican government last November, but it’s increasingly hard to tell. The latest evidence came Wednesday when President Trump accepted a Democratic offer to raise the federal debt ceiling for a mere three months in return for $8 billion for Hurricane Harvey relief.
“We had a very good meeting with [Democratic leaders] Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. We agreed to a three-month extension on debt ceiling, ” Mr. Trump said Wednesday aboard Air Force One on his way to a rally in North Dakota.
“So we have an extension, which will go out to December 15. That will include the debt ceiling, that will include the CRs [to fund the government] and it will include Harvey—the amount of money to be determined, but it will include—because everyone is in favor obviously of taking care of that situation,” he added. “So we all very much agree.”
Ah, dogs and cats living together.
What really happened is that Mr. Trump overruled his Treasury Secretary and GOP leaders who wanted a debt-ceiling increase to run past the 2018 election. Mr. Trump instead gave Democrats exactly what they want, which is to set up an even steeper fiscal cliff on debt and spending in December when Republicans hope to be focusing on tax reform.
Republicans will now have to take at least two difficult votes to raise the debt ceiling, while Democratic leverage will increase when the day of reckoning comes. The chances of a government shutdown in December have now risen sharply, or at least they have if Mr. Trump wants to pass something with more than a few Republican votes.
Mr. Trump may not like GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, but is he trying to elect Speaker Pelosi? As Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse put it in a press release: “The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad.”
Part of the problem is that Congressional Republicans once again helped put themselves in this box. Congress can’t let the U.S. default on its debt, so the majority party has to raise the debt ceiling whether it likes it or not. The smart GOP play was to attach a long-term debt increase to some other must-pass legislation and get it over with. One and done.
In familiar self-defeating fashion, the usual House suspects refused, insisting that the debt ceiling get a stand-alone vote. House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and Republican Study Committee leader Mark Walker also claim to be miffed that the debt-limit increase won’t include spending cuts.
Yet most of these same Members won’t vote to raise the borrowing limit no matter what they’re offered. They find the actual work of governance beneath their dignity. Their mutiny means that Mr. Ryan lacked a GOP majority to raise the debt ceiling, which meant he had to go hat in hand to Mrs. Pelosi for Democratic votes. She and Mr. Schumer came up with their three-month gambit, which Mr. Ryan immediately labeled “ridiculous” and “unworkable,” only to be sandbagged by Mr. Trump.
This may all sound like inside baseball, but it’s politically relevant because it illustrates the Republican inability to govern. The Senate killed health-care reform. The House can’t pass a budget resolution that is essential for tax reform. Mr. Trump is sore that Republican leaders failed on health care, so he now undermines their fiscal strategy and all but hands the gavels to Democrats. Readers might take note and hold off on spending that tax cut.
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