Monday, October 16, 2017

Get With Trump's Program, Be Constructive Or Get Out Of The Way And Get Sent Home. Israel Does Not Mess Around. Come and Help Military Heroes! The Academies and More Lies.



I am, in no way, excusing the dysfunction within the ranks of the Republican Senate. However,  in all fairness, even to Sen McConnell, who is a genius parliamentarian or Gorsich would not be on The Supreme Court, he has to deal with a bunch of peacocks.  That ain't easy.

Trump is a builder businessman and has yet to grasp the subtleties of  Senate politics because he likes to get things done and, in the construction business, delay costs money.  At some point it will either dawn on the goo-fusses in the Senate they were sent to correct the nation's problems, if that is possible, or many will be sent home and they will lose power and position.That can prove the case even for California's Feinstein.

Trump is doing what the people elected him to do and Republican Senators can either climb aboard, and hold their noses if they wish, or they will be able to lick their wounds from home.

The hold-out peacocks need to learn some loaf is better than none and stop acting like 2 year old  primadonnas.

Ball is in their court.

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Israel- no nonsense. (See 1 below.)

Trump's personality causes those who like his policies and actions but not him, heart burn. The problem is that their distrust of him clouds their vision from being able to even see when he is right. They only can find fault and that simply makes him more combative. (See 1a below.)

And

Then we have Obama and a traitor he said was a hero.  More lies!!! (See 1b below.)
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In a day and age when women have achieved equality with men in countless ways, one inequality still stands out – physical strength. There’s no way to correct for that…or is there? What’s the great equalizer? The answer: guns. In this week’s video, Katie Pavlich, Townhall Editor and Fox News contributor, details why, if you believe in equality between men and women, you should be all for women owning and knowing how to use a gun.
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More attacks on The Academies. I repeat - when all else fails, lower your standards. (See 2 below.)
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The slanted media? (See 3 below.
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For those who want to help military heroes who defended us and paid a price you have an opportunity of returning the favor:
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Dick
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1) Israeli air force destroys Syrian anti-aircraft battery in retaliatory strike

By ANNA AHRONHEIM

The SA-5 missile battery, which was stationed some 50 kilometers east of the Syrian capital, fired at Israeli jets that were on a routine aerial reconnaissance flight in Lebanese airspace. The Israeli Air Force attacked and destroyed a Syrian SA-5 anti-aircraft battery east of Damascus Monday morning after it fired a surface-to-air missile at Israeli jets.

The SA-5 missile battery, which was stationed some 50 kilometers east of the Syrian capital, fired at Israeli jets that were on a routine aerial reconnaissance flight in Lebanese airspace, IDF Spokesman Brig.Gen. Ronen Manelis stated.

“We see the Syrian regime as responsible and see these missiles as a clear Syrian provocation, and it will not be accepted,” Manelis stated, adding that while Israel has no intention to enter into the civil war in Syria, Israel will react to all provocations.

Manelis told journalists that Russia was updated about the incident, in which no Israeli jets were harmed, in real time, and that it will be brought up during the visit of the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu who is set to land in Israel in the coming hours.

Moscow intervened in the Syrian conflict in September 2015, and officials from Israel and Russia meet regularly to discuss the deconfliction mechanism system implemented over Syria to prevent accidental clashes between the two militaries.

Shoigu will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and other senior officials to discuss the Jewish State’s ongoing concerns regarding Iran’s entrenchment in Syria and the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah by Tehran through Damascus.

Israel rarely comments on foreign reports of military activity in Syria but has publicly admitted to having struck over 500 Hezbollah targets in Syria, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that strikes will continue when “we have information and operational feasibility.”

During an IAF operation in March to strike a Hezbollah arms convoy in Syria, regime air defense fired three surface-to-air missiles towards IAF jets. It was the most serious incident between the two countries since the war in Syria began six years ago.

Following that incident, Liberman warned against any further launching of missiles by the Syrian regime, threatening to destroy all Syrian air defenses.

1a)Hate Donald Trump. Love his stance on Iran
It may be dissonant and indigestible for his detractors, but the president's right to kick the West out of its complacency on Iran

Congress may thwart him, and America’s allies want no part of it or him, but Donald Trump’s effort to refocus the world on ending the Iran deal’s sunset provision and lack of restraints on Iranian missiles and terror is actually correct.
 President Trump’s announcement of a new policy on Iran last week has been greeted with dismay by most of America’s allies, Republican critics, as well as the Democratic resistance.
 Given Trump’s intemperate nature, his lack of detailed policy knowledge on most subjects and his contempt for diplomacy, the assumption - on the part of most people outside of his loyal base of supporters - is that he’s as wrong about his desire to end the nuclear deal with Iran as he was about violent racist marchers in Charlottesville.
 But in this instance it is Trump's detractors who are divorced from reality.
 Despite Trump’s desire to find a way out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it won’t be as easy as he originally thought. The refusal to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal will only be translated into action if Congress heeds his request to pass legislation deciding when and how to implement new sanctions.
Since the Republican majority can’t seem to get out of its own way on issues that are even a higher priority for the GOP, and Democrats are eager to defend Barack Obama’s legacy as well as determined to resist Trump, the odds of that happening are slim.
 If, as is likely, Congress does nothing, the "adults" in the administration, who persuaded the president not to take any immediate steps to blow up the deal, will continue to be able to act as a brake on his impulses.
 Yet Trump’s position is not irrational. As the deal’s critics feared all along, Western silence about Iran’s willingness to push the envelope on illegal purchases of nuclear equipment also raises questions about whether these governments are too committed to the deal’s preservation to effectively respond to violations.
But even if the assumption that Iran is technically in compliance with the terms of the JCPOA is correct in the most limited sense, there is still good reason for the West to begin the process of strengthening a fatally flawed agreement.
 The justification for the deal was that any pact - even one that legalized a heretofore illegal nuclear program, whose restrictions begin to expire in a decade and also ignored Iran’s terrorism and missile development - was better than nothing. But the price for Iran’s assent to even these generous terms was steep, in terms of the collapse of international sanctions and the release of frozen assets up front, even before Tehran demonstrated good faith.
 Despite President Obama’s promises, the threat from Iran is still real. The sunset provisions, combined with the international seal of approval given to both Tehran’s nuclear program and its advanced research efforts, mean the date when the world must reckon with an Iranian bomb still looms in the not-so-distant future.
Rather than taking advantage of what Obama termed an opportunity to "get right with the world," Iran has continued to behave like a rogue nation. It remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and its military adventures in the region and continued political intrigues have enabled it to create a functional land bridge via Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, where its Hezbollah auxiliaries rule. Its renewed alliance with Hamas also should raise suspicions.
 It is dereliction of duty on the part of Western leaders to simply sit back and rest on Obama’s faux laurels while Iran not only gets closer to a nuclear option but works toward its goal of regional hegemony.
Yet that is exactly what the supposedly wiser heads - attacking Trump for stirring up a hornet’s nest on Iran - have been doing.
Trump’s decision to increase sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the group that not only runs Tehran’s terror network, but also controls a large slice of its economy, was a move in the right direction. The same can be said of any effort that that will put Iran on notice that the U.S. will insist on the removal of the sunset clauses and an end to Iran’s terror funding and missile building.
 Nor, despite the claims that Trump has no concerted plan in mind, is it true that the U.S. won’t be able to act on its own. Should it be necessary, the U.S. can declare that no entity that does business with Iran can legally interact with the American financial system, and it can therefore drag the Europeans and even the Russians and Chinese back to a position in which Iran will again be effectively isolated.
 Worries about Trump’s capacity to understand this issue and stick to a coherent position are not unreasonable. But, as was true when Obama was making concession after concession to Iran during the negotiations, the choices before us are not limited to the deal as it is now, and war. 
 Trump is right that the West must start thinking about how to restrain an Iranian regime that was both enriched and empowered by the JCPOA. Hard as it may be for non-Trumpists to admit, his speech should push the international community to undertake a discussion that is long overdue.

 1b) By BEN SHAPIRO


In May 2014, President Obama, looking desperately for a foreign policy victory, traded five terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to the Taliban in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, a sergeant suspected of desertion. Bergdahl’s alleged desertion necessitated the use of American troops to search for him; six were killed during that process.

President Obama welcomed Bergdahl himself to the Rose Garden, along with his parents, where he lauded their “courage” and the media cast Bergdahl in the role of hero; National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who made a habit of fibbing to the American public on national television during her tenure in the job, told Americans that Bergdahl’s service was “honorable” and added that he served with “honor and distinction.” Obama defended his decision by stating, “I make absolutely no apologies for making sure that we get back a young man to his parents and that the American people understand that this is somebody’s child and that we don’t condition whether or not we make the effort to try to get them back.”

On Monday, Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. Bergdahl apologized — too late for his dead comrades — and stated, “At the time, I had no intention of causing search and recovery operations….It’s very inexcusable.”

All of which utterly undercuts the Obama administration’s stated reasons for the Bergdahl deal altogether. And demonstrates how they were lying continuously for months — as they did with the Iran deal, as they did with the Benghazi debacle. The Obama administration never stopped dissembling with regard to their foreign agenda. Bergdahl was no exception.
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2)It’s Not Just West Point. U.S. Military Academies Have Become Disneyland For Politicians



The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military
brass, not viable contributions to U.S. defense.




By 
The military world and military academies—I’m a tenured civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis—were rocked by an October 11 “open letter” exposing the rotten underbelly of our sister academy at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy.
The letter was penned by Robert Heffington, an Army officer and West Point graduate who taught there for several years before retiring. Only his retirement made it possible for him to publish the letter, since officers in uniform cannot publicly disagree with superiors. Within 24 hours, West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslan Jr., head of the administration Heffington holds responsible for its deficiencies, respondedby evoking the “thousands of graduates who sacrifice and serve honorably every day.”

Heffington’s letter is a scorcher. It pulls no punches and concludes it’s questionable whether West Point, founded in 1802, “should ever remain open.” Heffington’s “BLUF,” Bottom Line Up Front: “First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other.” He goes on: “The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline.”
Heffington notes that students are admitted to play Division I football, which degrades academics: “we routinely admit athletes with ACT scores in the mid-teens across the board. I have personally taught cadets who are borderline illiterate and cannot read simple passages from the assigned textbooks.” Faculty members who object are silenced, he says.
To this, I say “Amen, brother.” Heffington’s letter caused me personal joy and professional agony. I’ve been making a number of the same points about Annapolis, an essentially identical taxpayer-funded institution, for the last several decades, earning repeated salvos of our administration’s ire and attempts to silence me. (West Point has few civilian professors, and no tenured ones.) So it was gratifying to hear someone else say the same things about our sister institution, with more vitriol than I usually employ.
So much needs to change with our institutions, yet there no signs of any changes even being contemplated. This is bad news for the taxpayers who are footing the bill and depend on them for one-fifth of the new officer pool. It’s also bad news for the disaffected, cynical students who have lost faith in the system. I think Heffington saw the cynicism without understanding its source. I think I do.

The Reasons to Prefer a Military Academy Are Few

Most upper-class students at service academies have lost faith in the system, because it’s based on lies. First, these places produce about one new officer in five nowadays, far fewer than their glory days. Most other officers come from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, Officer Candidate School, or direct commissions. West Point (USMA) produces about half the number of officers of Army ROTC. Service academy graduates cost taxpayers about half a million dollars each plus wrap-around health care and so on, four times what the average ROTC officer costs and eight times what OCS costs.

That’s right: you can go to Virginia Tech ROTC for four years, put on a uniform a day or two a week, party as you like, have sex when you want (sex is forbidden at the academies), major in what you want, graduate, and serve alongside academy graduates—and no data show you’ll be a worse officer. The students know this because they all have iPhones and Google.
The defenders of the academies fall back on that tired cliché of calling them “national treasures.” Up to World War II, they probably were, because that’s where almost all officers came from. We need officers, so if that’s their source, the source is a “treasure.” Only it turned out that officers can come from other sources! So it’s simply not true that all the pointless and infuriating things you have to do at the academies are necessary for being an officer, because 80 percent of officers don’t do these things and are just as good.
Defenders of the academies, invariably themselves graduates who got a college education at taxpayer expense, say they “set the tone” for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard. There’s no evidence of this, and in any case I hope it’s not true, because their tone is one of deep disillusionment.

Hate to Break It, But We’re Not the ‘Best and Brightest’

Another of the big lies, as Heffington shows, is the assertion that military academy students are the “best and the brightest.” I can’t tell whether the military brass really have no clue, or this is just hype to keep the tax dollars flowing and make the students feel it’s worth it. In fact, our SAT scores are about 100 points per test lower than Ivy-level schools, and the spread between upper and lower levels much greater. About 20 percent of our class consists of students recruited for athletics or given preferential admission to achieve racial goals (meaning non-white), and cannot get in even at the low level of SAT scores of 600 on each test with As and Bs in high school.
Not a problem; we send them at taxpayer expense to the relevant prep school, where nine months of a 13th grade are supposed to remediate what may be intrinsic mental slowness or decades of poor education. Typically it doesn’t, and these students fill our pre-college classes in English and math and fail to graduate at higher percentages. The truly gifted students (we have some) realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. We have no magic chemical test for good “leaders” to make up for academic deficiencies. We don’t even require an interview for admission. Come to my classes to see how little “wow” factor many have.
Another lie is the wild exaggeration of our selectivity. I’ve been on our Admissions Board, so I have expertise Heffington doesn’t. We claim to get about 20,000 applicants, but define “applicant” as no other college does, by including the 7,500 high school juniors who want to come to our six-day summer seminar (only 2,500 come) and recently, all Navy ROTC applicants to any institution, as well as stubs of applications where a kid was convinced to enter his or her name and address and little more.
When I was on the Admissions Board, we considered about 4,500 applications for about 1,800 admits. That’s not the 7 to 8 percent “most selective” statistics the brass continue to report to U.S. News and World Report and the U.S. Department of Education. The students see the disappointing quality of those around them and begin to figure out that somehow these cannot be the “best and the brightest.”

Many Of Our Key Promises Are Broken

Because we admit to serve racial goals and to fill our teams, and because higher graduation rates make us look better, we aren’t about to throw anybody out. So what Heffington says is true: we “remediate” honor offenses nowadays, inability to pass the Physical Readiness Training, and just about everything else. Faculty members have also given up thinking that reporting plagiarism will result in any meaningful action.
Another set of lies is in the way that a policy of “no sex” has survived from the days when it made sense, back when we were all male with no out gays. Now we have one-third women, gay students, and, briefly, transsexual students. They all live in the same dormitory and are full of hormones. Of course they’re going to be having sex. They know what other college students do, and they know they’re not on ships (which also have problems with sex), so the lies the administration tells them about how this is like being deployed don’t impress them.
Finally, the officers they are supposed to emulate are fairly clueless and, according to the students, generally not very good role models. They aren’t here long enough to figure out what’s what, and because they are in the students’ chain of command, the students don’t talk freely with them. By contrast, I have had countless hall and office no-holds-barred conversations with midshipmen over three decades.
What the officers say to students frequently makes no sense: the training staff pitches the same full-bore fit at small infractions as at large. Plebes are told they have “just killed a platoon of Marines” if their uniform is out of reg. They know it isn’t true, so they tune out the adults shouting at them.

We’re All Going Through the Motions

The only reason for the military to get hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run stand-alone colleges with standard classes is that these classes are somehow different. People on the outside think we’re Hogwarts. We aren’t. We teach the same subjects as down the street at the University of Maryland. Worse, the cadets and midshipmen are sleep-deprived and unwilling students, except for the few dozen top achievers who are candidates for coveted national scholarships. As Heffington notes, they can re-take an F for a higher grade in the summer—at taxpayer expense. Still, with grade inflation, that rarely happens.

The vast majority are going through the motions, sleeping in class, memorizing, then mind-dumping largely technical material they forget anyway and whose utility has never been shown. (Electrical engineering for pilots, SEALs, or Marine Corps? Nonsense.) How do I know? They tell me. They won’t tell an 0-5, or anybody wearing a uniform, who can punish them for it.
I have to go to great lengths to get them involved in English, a subject most freshmen (plebes) have no interest in. Two semesters are required, which is good thing because typically their writing is terrible and they cannot organize their ideas coherently. But because the classes are mandatory and they came to be in the military, most are resistant. I have to win them over. We do things they like, such as push-ups and jumping up and down every 20 minutes to keep them awake. This is what it takes. Remember: I’ve been here more than three decades.
Do we teach them leadership? Well, we have courses called that, but at best these are intro psychology classes, and the high numbers of U.S. national academy graduates relieved of command in recent years or caught up in the Fat Leonard scandal suggests that our brand of “leadership” isn’t effective. Leadership, whatever that is, isn’t learned in a classroom.
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military brass, not viable contributions to US. defense. They’re like all those military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and lots of fun. The superintendent lives in a Victorian mansion complete with waitstaff and has a reserved parking spot when he has to go two buildings over. The institution is the staging ground for their retirement ceremonies and funerals, and countless empty colloquia all based around the “leadership” we purport to teach but don’t.

It’s Basically a Military Disneyland

What does make us different from another college is the wrap-around control of students’ lives that leaves them unmotivated and mad, Mickey Mouse regulations that change from regime to regime, are applied randomly, and have no proven officer development benefits. The students realize they are cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average officers. This is why they dress sloppily, answer back, and seem to take no pride in what they do—all the things Heffington saw as a direct affront to his officership.
For me, one of the most unsettling developments of the military in recent decades has been its courting by politicians to further their own personal agendas. A horrifying example was the disgusting commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence at our last graduation repeatedly telling the military that it was better than the civilians it defends, and his attempt to position President Trump as “the best friend the military ever had.” Who doesn’t support our military? This is creating enemies that don’t exist.
The military is supposed to be apolitical. It’s a tool, not part of a specific political party. We need to do what the British did with Sandhurst: turn undergraduate education over to the ROTC programs and colleges, and use our beautiful buildings (and West Point’s incomparable location on the Hudson) for military graduate courses.
Our service academies are anachronisms trying to pretend they aren’t. The students have caught on. The administration hasn’t, and never will, because then they’d lose their taxpayer-sponsored country clubs. Defense? Nah. It’s all about show. The students, and the taxpayers, pay the price.
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Every Republican and/or Conservative can spend hours pontificating about how the Mainstream Media (MSM) does not come close to presenting the facts fairly; it is grossly biased.  That has grown exponentially since Donald Trump became president.  Read this and you will not doubt the veracity of this scenario.

This tale started when Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the Forward (“News that matters to American Jews”), sent out an email asking for help.  The Forward was founded in 1897 (formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward).  She expressed her concern as to what her publication “had done to contribute to the coarsening of our public discourse and the fracturing of civic comity.”  She asked for help by “sending your thoughts.”

As a leader in the Jewish Community who has spent more than 25 years trying to enlighten what I believe are misguided Jews, I saw this as an opportunity.  I wrote her to comply with her request.  I started by saying “Relentlessly and viciously attacking Republicans and a sitting president, your publication has added to the coarseness of the public discourse.  As a fellow journalist, I can tell you among the center/right of center, your relentless attacks on Republicans and the President makes you irrelevant.  Not creditable.  Dismissed out of hand.”  I added some other comments, then ended with “You said you wanted feedback, well there you have it.  Maybe if you had more voices like mine or Dennis Prager's you would seem a little more balanced.”

A couple of days later Ms. Eisner responded “Thank you for writing. I am interested in publishing more voices like yours. Would you like to pitch some ideas to [our opinion editor]?” I thanked her and obliged.

I thought this was a great opportunity.  Certainly, I would be lambasted or ridiculed by most of the readers, but I can handle that.That comes with the territory of being a Jewish Republican.  That is old hat to me.  The thought is if we don’t express differing views in their venues, they will never experience anything other than the echo chamber of thoughts they read every day. I was truly excited.  This is a well-read publication by the active Jewish community.

I corresponded with the opinion editor and we agreed I would write a column on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).  The Forward had published typically pro-DACA columns highlighted by a Columbia University professor viciously attacking President Trump for everything except beating babies.  It was a perfect issue to start with defining a difference.

I went to work.  This column had to be above reproach.  I knew I would be attacked. Even though I was well versed on the subject, I read everything I could, particularly the statements by the Jewish leaders.  I also knew I had to kill them with kindness; no sarcastic comments (I do that sometimes) and virtually no negative terminology. There was no endorsement of President Trump nor a statement against DACA – just a rationale for taking a legal path if you want DACA to exist and supporting immigration reform.

Most of the people who read my weekly column are familiar with my style and thankfully many of you have grown to appreciate what I write each week.  The idea was to make the Forward readers like what I am communicating even if they do not agree with everything I write.  

I submitted the column and then waited for the editor’s response.  She initially said she liked it and would get back to me. When she responded it was nothing short of stunning.  A Jew had not seen this much red since Moses parted the Red Sea. She had rewritten my entire column.  It did not resemble my column in fact or tone. For example, she had completely cut a brilliant quote from Andrew McCarthy about how inappropriate and wrong Obama’s comment on Trump’s action had been. Gone.

I let her know what she had done to my column was wrong and unacceptable.  Her response was if I did not like it we could kill the column. She stated that the changes were for language flow and fact-checking.  When I asked what facts were in question because I had everything sourced, her response was: “Ok, so just kill it?”

Not to leave something like this alone, I called her and as you can guess that went well. She made some comment that led me to remind her I have been writing columns longer than she has been alive and had never had a column completely altered like this.  After some more back and forth in which she made clear she was pro-DACA (I couldn’t tell from her butchering of my column), I told her that she was not abiding by Ms. Eisner’s desire to have different voices in the Forward.

That is when she objected and told me “I have run three right-wing columnists recently.  I ran Ben Shapiro; you agree he is right-wing.”  When Ben ran the column on the Daily Wire it was titled Everybody’s Lying About Charlottesville.  The title of the column she ran of Ben’s was Trump Isn't the Only One Lying About What Happened in Charlottesville.  No wonder they ran the column.  They will always run a column by the other side when they can use it to advance their own arguments.  Then they will brand the writer a “high-minded” individual until they go back to deriding him.  

 I had high hopes for writing for the Forward.  I would get their readers out of their echo chamber.  Maybe even some would like what I was writing and read my columns in Townhall.com or elsewhere.  The liberal press doesn’t really want its readers to consume divergent opinions because they might wise up to how they have been misled. But we must try because otherwise those poor people will live with their misguided thoughts for the rest of their lives.  That is a fate worse than death.
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