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Only for those who have the patience for a long but exceedingly informative read:
https://besacenter.org/wp-
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I was going to write a brief piece about how the radical Democrat Party has truly lost it's way, gone of the deep end driven by lust for lost power and hatred. The wheels have come off their deranged train.
Then, I received these two items from dear friends and fellow memo readers and they are far more practical and professional than anything I could write.
"Dick- this is an email I sent to one of my ol’ Ranger buddies. We are both retired soldiers. We both have 3 boys that served in uniform and he rightfully detests the idea of sending anymore of his kids into senseless wars and has become a Tulsi fan. My edited response follows:
When Iran gets nukes, they will no longer be merely a “regional” problem. Too bad international leaders are not rational. If anyone thinks that a WWIII is avoidable, that person is living in “My Little Pony” land. The NATO nations are currently blackmailed by their fear of loss of access to oil from the Gulf as may well be China. They refuse to take a side. They will, sooner or later, have a choice forced on them. The Russians are guided by their own egotistical and inappropriate sense of former greatness. The entire Russian economy is now the size of California’s. Turkey is becoming more Islamist and militant by the day. North Korea has been collaborating with the Iranians for years in developing missile and nuclear weapon technology. And the various Muslim political leaders are all seething with hatred for the West. And let’s not forget that Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers with huge standing armies, have been in an uneasy truce for decades. This is a prelude to massive armed conflict. I do agree with Gabbard that having only a few thousand troops in Iraq and Syria makes them targets for asymmetric aggression. But what to do? Pulling them out signals to Iran (“Death to America! Death to Israel!”) that they have a free hand in the Middle East. The mullahs have not only all but taken over Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, but have been colluding with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They even gave safe passage to Osama bin Laden.
Now they have agents in Nicaragua and through much of Latin America. Remember our trip to teach survival techniques to FBI agents in Salt Lake City in Dec 2012? One of them who was an agent in SoCal told me that he spent all of his time tracking Hesbollah agents who were laundering money for the Mexican mafia to raise funds for their sleeper cells in LA and beyond. Seven years ago. How is Tulsi Gabbard going to deal with the global reach of the Iranian regime? As an officer of the US Army, her harsh criticism of her Commander in Chief borders on treason. It is actually a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. She should immediately resign her commission or stop campaigning on a platform of criticizing the President.
Before both WWI and WWII there was great anti-war sentiment in the US. Who wants to send their children to war in another country? Even so, if we had not gone, especially in WWII, the world would be a much different place. What if the Nazis still controlled all of Europe? And Imperial Japan ruled China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and the Pacific Islands?
And what if the Mullahs with their deranged and evil religion gain control of all the Middle East and some of Latin America?
President Trump is playing 3-D chess. The stakes include access to nuclear weapons by a deranged regime and access to 50% of the worlds petroleum reserves. ALL OF US should support and pray for the President. I see none of that from the cast of characters running for the Democratic nomination. No acknowledgement of the difficulty of his job. In general, they are much more interested in human sexuality, abortion on demand and free stuff for everyone. What a pathetic cast of characters. They all seem to live in “My Little Pony” land.
Add this to your blog if you like
Happy New Year!
B--"
And:
This from my other dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 1 below.)
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Apparently most Americans still prefer strength to weakness and appeasement. (See 2 below.)
And:
It is not that Biden is too old to remember. He has been lying most of his life. But then he is the consummate politician. "Old" Joe agreed with Obama/Kerry's Pallet Drop. Now he is wiggling out of his former position.(See 2a below.)
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Pitiful Pelosi needs to join the Move On.Org group! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Way to go Desert Sun Newspaper ....
Trump was right on Iran. Democrats are suffering from mass amnesia
The Desert Sun
By Scott Jennings, CNN Contributor
I have spent the last 20 or so New Year's Eves glued to the SyFy (SciFi?) Channel’s “Twilight Zone” marathon. My wife and I love the writing, the plots and picking out famous actors in their one-off roles for the classic television series.
Maybe I’ll write an episode of my own, complete with a Rod Serling-worthy opening monologue:
“The year is 2017. Donald Trump is inaugurated as president of the United States, and mass amnesia has washed over America. Half the country can no longer remember anything that happened before Jan. 20. The former president, Barack Obama, is literally sitting right there. Yet, his own party cannot remember one thing about his eight years…”
Obama memory hole
It is one of the strangest phenomena of the Trump era — the memory-holing of Obama’s executive powers. Democrats continuously act as though they’ve just fallen off the Washington turnip wagon when Trump does anything.
Trump’s illegal immigration policies are draconian! He’s deporting too many, they screamed, forgetting that…Obama deported more. A lot more. And, you know those cages on the southern border? Obama built them, not Trump.
Trump’s defying congressional subpoenas! No president has ever stonewalled Congress, they screamed, forgetting that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, was held in contempt of Congress for…defying subpoenas related to the Fast and Furious scandal. There were at least eight other times when Obama’s Administration defied congressional oversight, even preventing people from testifying (sound familiar?).
When Trump announced his “America First” policy during his inaugural, Democrats apparently took it as literally as one can.
Now, they howl over Trump’s latest outrage: the airstrike that killed Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani, who was in Iraq fomenting attacks against the American embassy and, evidently, plotting future hits on American targets.
Washington Democrats whined about Trump authorizing a drone strike without their notification or consent. This, after Obama authorized at least 2,800 drone strikes in Iraq and Syria without congressional approval.
Obama's drone strikes
“When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency. By his third year in office, Obama had approved the killings of twice as many suspected terrorists as had ever been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay,” Newsweek reported.
Obama practically invented modern push-button warfare, for goodness’ sake! Eventually, the American people will have to choose between partisan disingenuousness or rank stupidity to explain Democratic reaction to Trump’s perfectly precedented decisions.
On Iran, Trump made a bold choice and sent a strong message that we aren’t going to take the regime’s provocations and hostility anymore. Obama sent them pallets of cash. Trump sent an MQ-9 Reaper.
Anyone who knows how this will all shake out is lying. They don’t. But the commander in chief took out the world’s most notorious terrorist, one with plenty of American blood on his hands. Trump is the good guy here, not the terrorist.
Yet, Democrats couldn’t wait to pounce. How many statements included perfunctory “yeah, Soleimani was a bad guy, but…” construction before hammering Trump?
Here’s a pro-tip: If your statement has a “but” in the middle (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren), just eliminate the throat-clearing, political pablum that came before it and say what you really mean. We get it. Iranian Guy Bad, Orange Man Worse.
This attitude will cost Democrats in the upcoming election. Not just on foreign policy, but across the board (they speak of the economy as though we are in another Great Depression). They just can’t give Trump an inch no matter how safe or prosperous the world is, thanks at least in part to the president’s decisions.
It hasn’t always been this way. After the death of Osama bin Laden, Republicans praised Obama’s decision to get him.
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney declared, ‘The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.’ New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said, ‘I admire the courage of the president.’ And Donald J. Trump declared, ‘I want to personally congratulate President Obama,’” according to the New York Times.
But no such allowance is given to President Trump, when he kills a terrorist. As commentator Guy Benson tweeted, “The US auto industry is alive, and Baghdadi/Soleimani are dead,” referencing the ISIS leader Trump had killed a few months ago and recalling Obama’s reelection slogan.
Or, as Mr. Serling might say, “Democrats will soon wake up from their amnesia to an old lesson: Past is prologue. And it’s a Shakespearean seminar most acutely taken…in The Twilight Zone.”
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2) Tehran’s Retaliation, Trump’s Reply
Early returns show deterrence beats appeasement with Iran.
The Editorial Board
Maybe the Apocalypse isn’t upon us after all. The lesson after Iran’s missile strike on U.S. bases in Iraq early Wednesday is that deterrence seems to be working.
More than a dozen ballistic missiles hit two U.S. bases in northern and western Iraq, but no Americans or Iraqis were killed in the attack. Iraq says Iran gave advance warning, so U.S. and Iraqi troops had time to disperse or seek shelter. Iran has made advances in missile targeting, as we learned in the attack on Saudi oil facilities. Yet this time the missiles seemed not to have been precise.
All of this suggests that Iran tried to make a show of hitting back at the U.S. for the killing of terror chief Qasem Soleimani while trying to avoid killing Americans. The latter seems to be the red line that President Trump has drawn for an American military response, and Iran knows the U.S. could eliminate much of its military and industrial capacity even from a standoff distance.
“Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defense,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted. “We do not seek escalation or war.” Iranian state TV reported 80 Americans killed, but that was propaganda to impress the loyalists at home and its proxy militias abroad.
Mr. Trump responded Wednesday morning with strong but also conciliatory remarks from the White House. “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned,” the President said. He announced unspecified “additional punishing economic sanctions” while the U.S. considers other responses to the attack.
His dual goal seemed to be to reinforce deterrence while also offering a path for Iran to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear deal and become a normal country. Speaking directly “to the people and leaders of Iran,” he said, “the United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.”
Such a change of mind in Tehran may be a long shot, at least until the U.S. presidential election in November. Then again, this offers more hope of progress than did the appeasement strategy that Barack Obama and John Kerry carried out with their 2015 nuclear deal. Soleimani used that financial windfall to spread revolution. Mr. Trump was right when he said Wednesday that “the missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last Administration.”
All of this was more productive than Mr. Trump’s threats and Twitter bluster earlier in the week. He looked deliberate and in control, albeit still forceful, defying the image of a reckless, impulsive Commander in Chief eager for war that his opponents are hoping to campaign against.
The showdown with Iran is far from over, and the mullahs may strike again in the coming months using proxy forces that give it deniability. On that score the President missed an opportunity to make clear that an attack on Americans by an Iranian-linked group would be treated as an attack by Iran. The immediate battleground will continue to be Iraq. Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should focus on maintaining the U.S. presence to help patriotic Iraqis resist becoming another satrapy of Tehran.
The other challenge is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and Mr. Trump asked the U.K., Germany, France, Russia and China to join him in seeking to renegotiate the 2015 pact. The latter two won’t agree, but it’s past time for the Western Europeans to realize that the deal has fatal flaws including its early end date within a decade.
Combined with Mr. Trump’s renewed deterrence and “maximum pressure,” a united front might convince Iran’s leaders that they are better off negotiating a new deal and a path out of economic isolation instead of pursuing the dead end of Soleimani’s Mideast revolution.
2a) Joe Biden’s Deterrence Policy: Stop Trump
The Democratic Party’s national security strategy is where it was in 1972, a year their candidate lost big.
By Daniel Henninger
Aside from the stunning photograph of Qasem Soleimani’s mangled car outside Baghdad airport, the most astonishing sight after the attack was the universal ambivalence, at best, from Democrats.
Not long ago—before Donald Trump—any president’s use of force against an overseas enemy would get at least 24 hours of partisan restraint. No more. The Democrats’ jack-in-the-box talking point was that Mr. Trump had brought us to “the brink of war.”
Startled by this reaction, former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in these pages: “It may be that today’s Democratic Party simply doesn’t believe in the use of force against America’s enemies in the world. I don’t believe that is true, but episodes like this one may lead many Americans to wonder.”
If the party’s presidential front-runner is any barometer, the use of credible force is off the table. In a foreign-policy speech Tuesday, Joe Biden said, “The only way out of this crisis is through diplomacy—clear-eyed, hard-nosed diplomacy grounded in strategy.”
There you have it: In the mind of Joe Biden—former vice president, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s most notable “moderate”—the only two policy paths available are “war with Iran” (his words) and diplomacy. When did national strategy get so simple, or simplistic?
A byproduct of Mr. Trump’s maddening persona is that it causes his opponents to lose their ability to think straight—about anything. Mr. Trump has been president for more than 1,000 days, but you would think from the commentary and coverage that every moment has been an exercise in moronic idiocy, without exception—including killing the head of Iran’s Quds Force.
Can the Democratic nominee realistically sustain a stance of absolutist rejection until November? If somehow Bernie Sanders ends up as the nominee—with a foreign policy of “hell no, we won’t go anywhere”—discussion of national security becomes largely irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg’s constantly shifting opportunism makes it difficult to see him securing broad party support.
But Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Mike Bloomberg (who distanced himself from Sen. Sanders—an “assassination”— on Soleimani) would have to confront the Trump foreign policy with reality rather than rhetoric if one of them becomes the nominee. Right now, they could use a reality check.
Two important ideas seem to have dropped out of the Democrats’ national-security lexicon: provocation and deterrence.
With the Soviet Union as adversary during the years of the Cold War (an abhorrent period for Mr. Sanders and his under-30 socialist base), there were Democrats in the Senate, such as Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn and Mr. Lieberman, who understood that a committed foreign opponent, such as Iran today, will probe and provoke the U.S. to the edge of armed conflict. And that adversaries won’t stop pushing unless the U.S. puts in place a credible policy of deterrence.
With Barack Obama’s presidency, a new generation of strategic thinking devalued the idea of active deterrence in favor of, as Mr. Biden said this week, “only” diplomacy. Exhibit A: Secretary of State John Kerry’s desperately agreed-to nuclear deal with Iran in 2015.
For the record, I don’t believe either of Mr. Obama’s Democratic defense secretaries, Leon Panetta or Ash Carter, wholly embraced this view. It resided in the White House and State Department with enthusiastic buy-in from Mr. Biden.
His posture this week on Iran—and there wasn’t much indication that any active Democrats dissent from it—is what came to be known during the Cold War years as a bluff—strong words recognized by an adversary as an implausible threat. In short, this is the bluff strategy of Mr. Obama’s “red line” over Syria’s chemical weapons, which will sit forever as a defining event in U.S. foreign policy. (Yes, he allowed the elimination of Osama bin Laden at his hideaway in Pakistan.)
The capricious Mr. Trump is no model of sustained deterrence, notably in his troop decisions in Syria. But the default position of his critics that he should present U.S. actions for preclearance by talking with allies or Congress should be seen for what it is—a policy of talking about talking, or next to nothing.
It has been a revealing week. The Democrats ended it about where they were on national security for the 1972 presidential election between George McGovern and Richard Nixon, which they lost, big.
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3) Impeachment Without End
Nancy Pelosi will let you know when she’ll deign to allow a Senate trial.
By The Editorial Board
Will Nancy Pelosi ever send the two House articles of impeachment to the Senate? We’re going on three weeks since the House voted, and Congress is back in session, but the House Speaker said Tuesday she wants to see what kind of trial the Senate will hold before she deigns to appoint House managers to make their case.
This is a parody of impeachment. House Democrats said they had to rush to vote before Christmas because President Trump poses a clear and present danger, but now the urgency is gone. The House didn’t subpoena John Bolton, the former national security adviser, but now the Senate must call him or the trial won’t be fair. The House refused to call witnesses requested by the GOP minority, but now the Senate GOP majority is supposed to heed every request by the Democratic minority.
This farce is being played at the expense of the Constitution, which lays out that the House has the “sole power of impeachment” while the Senate has the “sole power to try all impeachments.” It doesn’t say the Senate trial must be held according to the stipulations of the House Speaker. If she were a Republican, the media would be howling at her with derision. But because the impeachment press hates Mr. Trump, it is playing along.
Her political calculation isn’t obvious. Perhaps she really thought she could dictate to Mitch McConnell, but now the Senate Majority Leader says he has enough votes among Republicans to begin a trial with opening arguments on both sides and a decision on witnesses to come later. That’s what the Senate did for the trial of Bill Clinton.
Maybe she hopes to delay the trial past the first presidential contests in early February to spare Democratic Senators running for President from having to sit in Washington. Or perhaps she’s hoping for more evidence to appear that would let the House vote on even more articles and dump them on the Senate closer to the election. Keep the impeachment machinery up and running from now through Election Day.
The political risk for Democrats is that all of this looks more cynical by the day. In one sense this is truth in advertising, since this impeachment is so weak, the process was so rigged, and the votes were so partisan. But Mrs. Pelosi is also trivializing what ought to be an important check on genuine presidential abuses. Her precedent could do lasting damage.
The cynicism seems to be weighing even on Senate Democrats, who have begun to lose patience. “The longer it goes on the less urgent it becomes,” said Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) this week. “So if it’s serious and urgent, send them over. If it isn’t, don’t send it over.”
Our advice has been that Mr. McConnell and the GOP move to hold a Senate trial whether or not Mrs. Pelosi sends over the articles. That would probably prompt her to deliver the articles lest Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler miss the star turns they’ve been pining for as impeachment managers. But in any case hold the trial, on the current evidence vote to acquit Mr. Trump, and settle this the old-fashioned way—in the November election.
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