Deficits, Entitlements and Our Future.India. Judge Lamberth Rebukes. Times When Reality Trumps Morality.

The wedding ceremony came to the point where the minister asked if anyone had anything to say concerning the union of the bride and groom.

The moment of utter silence was broken when a beautiful young woman carrying a child stood up. She starts walking slowly towards the minister .

The congregation was aghast - you could almost hear a pin drop.

The groom's jaw dropped as he stared in disbelief at the approaching young woman and child. Chaos ensued.

The bride threw the bouquet in to the air and burst out crying.

Then the groom's mother fainted.

The best men started giving each other looks and wondering how to save the situation.

The minister asked the woman, "Can you tell us, why you came forward?   What do you have to say?"

There was absolute silence in the church.

The woman replied,  "We can't hear you in the back."

And that illustrates what happens when people are considered guilty until proven innocent.
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Democrats have no basic plan regarding running the country.  However, they do know how to run down the opposition. If this approach is enough to help them get elected then we really are going to have some serious issues down the road.

At some point, entitlements will absorb most of the government's revenue leaving very little for anything else. As we increase spending on benefits to buy votes, increase our intake of drugs I can envision a time when we will not be able to put together a division of motivated and physically able bodies to defend our nation.

Perhaps an overly dramatic assertion but you get there by simply extrapolating current trends. Hopefully, by then, our military will be comprised of robots guided by AI and we can sit back and watch NFL games as mechanical's protect what is left of a society no longer worth defending.
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A comment from a very old and dear friend and fellow memo reader challenging my pessimism.

"Dear Dick,

I loved your most recent post.  As always you capture the sweep of American politics very well.

You know how highly I respect your views and agree with most every one of them, but I differ with your pessimistic outlook for America.  Like you, I too was pessimistic when I felt we had tipped beyond the point of correction towards socialism during the Obama years and when Hilliary seemed to be the next presidential heir apparent.  However, with the reassertion of conservatism, Trump's election, and a renewed majority on the Supreme Court that may again interpret law according to the constitution, I have new hope that our nation is returning to its founding principles of freedom and self-reliance.  I offer you this view as encouragement. 

And in shifting to another of my most ardently held views, I remind you of my opinion that voting rights should be restricted to taxpayers.  Just as early Americans fought against taxation without representation from the King of England who imposed confiscatory taxes on the colonies to benefit England, so I object to those who pay no taxes to vote in a government that imposes confiscatory taxes on American taxpayers to benefit welfare recipients!  Furthermore, the freedom to exercise individual conscience gives moral validity to charity just as it provides moral recognition and gratitude from the recipients.  Taxes by contrast corrupt morality by undermining individual conscience and replacing gratitude with entitlement.  

With best regards,

S------"

My friend also was a state employee and responded to my view that if Stacey Abrams wins my pessimism will be more than justified. "I shudder to think of Abrams as governor and agree with you, should that happen it would be a major victory for the socialists and a major blow to conservatives.S------"

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On to India! (See 1 below.)
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Judge Lamberth's rebuke will roll right off Hillary's back because she is above the law but he is known for being a strict and excellent judge. (See 2 below.)
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After posting this, a concocted story has come out regarding Khashoggi's death.  Whether we like it or not we have to get through this embarrassing episode in our relationship with The Saudis and accept the fact that they are too important for us to create a vacuum in the Middle East and allow Iran to fill it because much worse will happen.

There are times in the dealings between nations when bad things, immoral things must succumb to reality. (See 3 below.)
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Dick

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1)Delhi, India

On Monday, Oct. 15, Rajeev Solomon met us at the Delhi airport.  He will be our guide from National Geographic for the next ten days.  He and a driver took us to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a wonderful hotel in New Delhi.  The “new” city was built by the Brits between 1931 and their departure in 1947.  It has wide boulevards, round-abouts, large “bungalows” (we would call them mansions) where they lived, lots of trees and parks, and all the government buildings.  Old Deli is an entirely different story.

Civilization has existed in India for more than 5,000 years, and in this area for 3,000 years.  The city of Delhi, located in the northern part of the country, grew from the south to the north, and is comprised of what used to be 8 separate cities.  The flat river plain on which it stands allowed various conquerors to abandon one city and just build a new one.  Beginning in 1193, Delhi was conquered by Muslims, and the great temples that had been built prior to the Muslims’ arrival were abandoned as the Muslims built their own great mosque and city just north of what had been the center of the city. 

Between the 12^th and 16^th centuries, three more cities were build, each of which had its own fort.  The sixth city, Purana Qila (the Old Fort) was founded by the Mughal emperor Humayun after he conquered the city in 1526, and parts of it remain today.  Humayan was a Turk with Mongolian blood.  The people mispronounced “Mongol” as “Mughal” and that gradually became “mogul.” Between 1526 and 1600, India was united by the moguls.

In 1639, the capital was moved by Agra to Delhi.  Ten years later, Old Delhi (AKA Shahjahanabad) was founded by Hummayun’s great-grandson, Shah Jahan, the same Shah who built the Taj Mahal.  He built a large fort and palace.

In 1911, the British moved the capital from Calcutta to Delhi and, in 1931, began to build New Delhi, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker.

The “official” population of Delhi is 25 million, which makes it the second most populous city after Tokyo.  Unofficially, there are probably several million more.

Note:  there are 1.3 BILLION people in India.  It will soon overtake China, because India has only just begun to try to educate people about not having so many children.  Our photographer, Matthieu, has been working on a fascinating story with a man named Paul Salopek.  You may have seen some of their work in National Geographic Magazine.  Paul is making a 21,000 mile walk to trace the paths that man took as civilization expanded.  Here is a quote from his most recent posting:

“In India, a country of 1.3 billion people, fully half the population lives in a water crisis. More than 20 cities—Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad among them—will gulp their entire aquifers dry within the next two years. This translates into a hundred million people living with zero groundwater. Farmers in the Punjab, one of India’s core breadbaskets, complain that their water tables have dropped by 40, 60, or 100 feet in a single generation.”

You can read the full article here:  Calling this piece by Paul sobering is an understatement.

The ride from the airport took about a half-hour.  Once we arrived and were settled in our room, we were on our own until the next morning, when we would meet the group.  It was already about 3:30, so we hung out in the room and had dinner in the very chic and contemporary Indian restaurant in the hotel. 

The next morning, we had the buffet breakfast (still none has held a candle to the Andaz) and then met our group in the lobby.  There are only 8 of us:  a couple from Massachusetts, couple from Reno, couple from Minnesota, and us.  We’re all roughly the same age, give or take 5 years, and have all traveled a lot.  We also have Matthieu Paley, our Nat Geo photographer, who will be with us the whole time, helping us to take better photos.  He is a 45-year old Frenchman who has lived in Turkey, spent  a lot of time in India and Afghanistan, and has just moved to Portugal with his German wife and two sons.

We set off on a city tour, led by a lovely lady named Sapphire.  Well, that’s the translation of her name, anyway.  She was a middle-aged lady with two daughters, one of whom is in Canada getting an advanced degree in dentistry and the other is at home preparing for college. 

Our first stop, believe it or not, was Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, in Old Delhi.   This country is 88% Hindu, but it was Muslim between the 13^th and 19^th centuries.  This mosque was built by Shah Jahan.  From here, we took a bicycle-driven rickshaw through some of the narrow streets of this part of town.  We stopped at a spice market, which made some of sneeze and tear up and cough, due to the dirt and spices in the air.  Sapphire led us into a dark hallway and up some stairs that I would never have even considered climbing if she hadn’t been leading the way.  Dark, dirty, and semi-crumbling – this did not look promising.  We emerged on a balcony over- looking the central courtyard.  I was still coughing and honking from the spices, but at least we were out of the worst of it in this open-air area.  The building was ancient, and there was a lot going on, but I found the whole place kind of creepy.   We did walk into one of the offices in the building – an attorney’s office, with 3 rooms, which were well-lit and had computers and big piles of files.  It seemed totally out of place in this decrepit building.

Then we were back in the rickshaws to ride back to the mosque to meet the bus.  The traffic was similar to Kathmandu, but noisier.  Everyone was honking their horn.  We’ve been told that they honk because no one uses the rear-view mirrors or turn signals, so the only way you know when there is a motorcycle coming up beside you is if he honks.  The rickshaws, pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, trucks, dogs, and cows were all vying for the same space.  At one point, there was gridlock.  A motorcycle was parked too close to a car, and the car could not get out.  Nobody could figure out what to do, so they all just sat there, honking their horns.  Here comes our hero, Rasheev, to the rescue.  He directed some young men to drag the motorcycle backwards far enough so that the car could move and bingo, off we all went.  Good work, Rasheev! 

Once we were safely back on the bus, we drove past several of the government buildings and India gate.  We stopped here to get out and walk among the many people who were milling about in the area to have a chance to take good photos of people.  Interestingly, people asked us if they could take selfies with us.  Mathieu told us that Indians like to take selfies with Westerners and post them on Face book as if these people are their good friends.  Didn’t matter – it was fun.

We had lunch at a lovely restaurant in New Delhi called Veda.  Next we were on to Lodi gardens.  This is a tranquil “central park” area around some ancient tombs.  Then it was back to the hotel for dinner in a private section of the same excellent Indian restaurant where Jim and I had had dinner the night before. 

Wednesday, we left early on the bus for a 4-hour ride to Jaipur, the capital city of the state of Rajasthan, just southwest of the state of Delhi.  Delhi is so big that it is its own state.

Here is a map of India to give you your bearings.  You’ll also see Nepal and Bhutan.   Here, too is the link to the photos:  https://www.mmemery.com/Delhi

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2)

Hillary Get's a Big Courtroom Smack Down

• By AAN Staff

In a fiery exchange at a Washington, D.C. courtroom, a federal judge excoriated career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from scrutiny over her private email server and Benghazi consulate scandals. (Fox News)

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

"I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case," Lamberth said during Friday's hearing.

The Department of Justice's Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, noted in a bombshell report in June that it was "inconsistent with typical investigative strategy" for the FBI to allow Mills to sit in during the agency's interview of Clinton during the email probe, given that classified information traveled through Mills' personal email account. "[T]here are serious potential ramifications when one witness attends another witness' interview," the IG wrote.

On Friday, Lamberth, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he did not know Mills had been granted immunity until he "read the IG report and learned that and that she had accompanied [Clinton] to her interview."

During one especially tense exchange, Lamberth accused the Justice Department's lawyer of "playing the same word games [Clinton] played."

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3) The story behind the story of Jamal Khashoggi

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

The disappearance and presumed murder of the Saudi exile Jamal Khashoggi has caused a crisis of relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to sign some papers relating to his marriage and never emerged again. Lurid accounts claim he was murdered in the consulate by a 15-strong team flown from Saudi Arabia the previous day in order to kill him.

This almost exclusively Turkish and Qatari narrative includes claims that a pathologist on this team dismembered Khashoggi’s body while he was still alive. For their part, the Saudis have maintained that Khashoggi left the consulate, and they had nothing to do with his disappearance.

Western mainstream media have mainly presented Khashoggi as a liberal journalist who opposed the regime of the purported Saudi modernizer, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), because he wasn’t really a modernizer at all; accordingly, MBS had Khashoggi killed.

A rival analysis has been doing the rounds that Khashoggi was actually an Islamist extremist, a former friend of Osama bin Laden and an acolyte of the Muslim Brotherhood, a hater of Israel who called on all Arabs to join the “resistance” against it and who opposed MBS not because he was undemocratic but because he wasn’t Islamic enough.

But even so, why would MBS have Khashoggi killed in this complicated, macabre and politically exposed way? Why did it need 15 men to do so? Why kill him at all if, as was also reported, Khashoggi’s criticisms of MBS had been relatively mild?

My own sources have now provided me with answers to these questions in an even more startling account.

They say Khashoggi was indeed still very much an Islamist connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Much more significant, he was intimately connected to the Saudi regime, which is bitterly opposed to the Brotherhood. He was, therefore, the ultimate insider who had gone rogue.

“He was a Saudi intelligence service asset for more than 20 years,” one of my informants told me. It was his report in 1994 that Osama bin Laden was inextricably under the influence of Egypt and the Brotherhood that convinced the Saudis bin Laden was a lost cause.

“Jamal worked very closely with the former directors of the Saudi Intelligence Agency Prince Turki al Faisal and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and most importantly, with the architect of Saudi intelligence, Brigadier-General Yousuf al Idrissi.

“These people had no problem with Jamal being out of the country. But he knew a lot of intelligence secrets, and so when he got too close to the Qataris and the Turks, who are now the arch-enemies of the Saudis, this is when Jamal really crossed the line.”

His fiancé, a Turkish diplomat, is the daughter of a former adviser to Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Khashoggi started tweeting pictures of himself with Erdoğan advisers. He was also planning to start a Turkish center, funded by the Turks and the Qataris, agitating for change in Saudi Arabia to champion dissent. But many of the dissenters he was championing were Islamists opposed to the attempts by MBS to modernize Saudi economy and society.

“This idea that he was somehow a liberal democratic warrior against a tyrannical enemy is just ludicrous. The man was part of the system. When you throw your hat into the ring in this very aggressive manner, forgetting that at one stage you were an intelligence operative and that being a journalist was just a cover, that’s when things get complicated.”

Increasingly alarmed, the MBS regime tried to bribe him. “Khashoggi was offered U.S. $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia, with a public guarantee that he would never be harmed. He refused.”

So the Saudis set out to bring Khashoggi back against his will. That’s why they sent the 15-strong squad, who had been alerted to the timing of his consular appointment. The intention was to extract him back to Riyadh, interrogate him and lock him up, probably for many years.

“If they’d wanted to kill him,” my informant said, “they could easily have paid $200,000 to the Chechen mafia in Istanbul who could have taken him out so easily and made it look like a robbery gone wrong.

“There was no kill order from Saudi Arabia. The planes that flew the squad into Turkey were owned by his friend, former Crown Prince Mohammed al Nayaf. Khashoggi would have been locked up and interrogated. They wanted to know who he had talked to and what he had revealed. They say some leaks from Qatar had his fingerprints all over them.

“So they set out to bring him back alive. The pathologist, a member of the inner circle, was there to ensure he remained sedated on the way back to Riyadh.”

But this, according to my source, was where disaster occurred. “The sedative gun malfunctioned and he suffocated from a massive overdose. He was 60 years old, he was overweight, his body couldn’t cope with it.”

What then happened to his body isn’t known.

“If I had been advising MBS.” said my informant, “I would have told him to leave Khashoggi alone. But MBS is trigger-happy. Hopefully, this will have taught him a very big lesson.”

I cannot verify this account of what happened. All I can say is that my sources are extremely well-connected and well-informed.

Whatever Khashoggi’s political views, it remains wrong to kill, muzzle or jail dissidents. Saudi Arabia remains a repressive tribal society and the original source of the Sunni Islamist extremism that now plagues the world.

For all his stated desire to modernize his country, MBS does not conform to Western ideas of human rights. He may have allowed women to drive (albeit accompanied by a man) and opened up cinemas, but he has also locked up dozens of dissenters. If my sources’ account of Khashoggi’s fate is correct, it shows MBS in a dismal light as arrogant, impetuous and deeply unwise.

But if, at bottom, Khashoggi was an enemy of the West for whom Islam was a political weapon, the reaction to his murder cannot be the same as if he had been killed in the cause of tolerance and religious freedom.

In any event, this affair has once again revealed the deep hypocrisy of the West. Many regimes with which it regularly deals have a dreadful record in jailing, torturing and murdering dissidents. No one gives this a second thought. The only reason the fate of Jamal Khashoggi has caused such a furor is that he wrote for The Washington Post and was part of the liberal media circuit that tolerates Islamists and disdains their opponents.

Khashoggi seems to have embodied the contradiction so fatally misunderstood by the West over the “Arab Spring”: that opposition to Arab authoritarianism does not necessarily mean an attachment to democracy and human rights. It can mean instead the desire for the freedom to destroy freedom through radical Islam.

This is surely the reason why, despite this debacle, the United States will continue to support MBS. It’s not because Jared Kushner is his friend, or President Donald Trump loves despots, or the West has always sucked up to Saudi Arabia. It is because the West faces two giant threats in both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime. And to aid it in that great civilizational fight, the West needs Saudi Arabia.

That’s why there’s now a tacit alliance between America, Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran, Turkey and Qatar. This must not be undermined by the Khashoggi debacle. However flawed MBS may be, does the West really want the return to power of Saudi Islamists determined once again to export Wahhabism throughout the world?

Maybe it might even give the United States the leverage with which to force MBS to do what he has so far signally failed to achieve—to bring Saudi Arabia out of the darkness and end one of the most backward and repressive regimes in the world.

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