Conservative's Wishful Thinking

By Alan Caruba

One of the themes running through conservative forums and blogs these days is the question of just when Barack Obama will resign from the presidency.

Secondarily, the concern is that he would do this before or after the November midterm elections, thus leaving the nation in the hands of Joe Biden, a longtime Washington insider and goofball.

The thinking of grass-roots conservatives is that Obama is just so over-whelmed and under-equipped to deal with the daily events, foreign and domestic, that he will run home to Chicago to work on yet another autobiography.

This is not going to happen. Obama is the casebook study of a pathological narcissist and everything that happens is always about him and is always somebody else’s fault.

This is what makes the BP oil disaster so delicious at the same time it is so awful. Like a giant oil slick from which he cannot free himself, this event will indelibly stain his presidency. He was too slow to respond to it and, during his belated press conference, strove to both assert that he was in charge “from day one” and that it was up to BP to solve the problem.

Compounding his problem is his announcement a month before the rig blew up that he favored offshore drilling. In politics, timing is everything and Obama’s is astonishingly slow and tone deaf. His announcement managed to anger a big part of his base, the Greens who hate oil everywhere except at the pump when they fill up their tank. Where that gasoline comes from remains a mystery to many of them who think it is a biofuel product made from soy beans and corn.

If you look closely, you will see quite plainly that Obama’s hair is turning white. He’s been in the Oval Office for a year and a half and he is aging before our eyes. This should surprise no one because he has never really had to deal with the challenges that tend to toughen up ordinary people.

Any president’s job is a daily series of domestic and foreign crisis. The skill-set most needed is leadership, followed by management. Americans know it when they see it and, so far as Obama is concerned, they are not seeing it.

What they have seen is one big mess after another made even bigger by a president who thinks big government is the answer to every problem. Most people, except for the 30% hard core of extremist liberals, have long ago concluded that big government is the problem.

A Marxist, Obama’s instinctual response was to nationalize every sector of the economy he could. Along with fellow Marxists, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, the long-sought goal of a Democrat-controlled Congress was too golden to pay any attention to the people who showed up at town hall meetings or who gathered in the hundreds of thousands outside the Capitol building.

This is why there will be a heedless rush to impose an increase in every kind of tax imaginable before they are turned out of office and political control returns to the Republican Party. The GOP lost power precisely because it too jacked up the cost of government. They have some good people in office who, after the midterm GOP victory, will take the painful steps to save the nation. Just like Bill Clinton, Obama will take the credit.

Consider this, however. President Bush ran $2.9 trillion in deficits in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. On top of that, he was fighting two difficult wars in the Middle East. In his first twenty months in office, President Obama’s spending exceeds Bush’s one hundred months in office. Obama is spending $5 for every $1 Bush spent.

The U.S. government under President Obama has spent or lent $12.8 trillion to date and the annual GDP of the nation is just about that amount or, in other words, equal to the value of everything the United States produced last year.

As noted in a recent book, “Killing Wealth”, “the private sector comprises five million companies and 115 million employees, while the public sector comprises 89,000 taxing authorities and twenty million public servants. Private sector employees earned an average $49,935 in 2008, while federal civilian employees earned 50 percent more---$79,197 for the same kind of work.” Some would argue that it really isn’t the same kind of work because making a profit is not part of the equation.

Others might point out that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are academics or full-time government employees who have never, like himself, had to run a business, meet a payroll, or satisfy investors. They are totally ideological. They are totally clueless.

Some weeks back, I asked if the United States of America was “too big to fail?” The answer is no. Greece is close to default and Spain and Italy are not far behind. The European Union is likely to dissolve as the only nation member that has any money or the prospect of making any is Germany. Bailing out the others is not a popular option for Germans and the French will not want to either.

Bailing out the United States will eventually become an equally bad idea for China, Japan, and other sovereign investors in our treasury notes unless Congress can or will staunch the insane borrowing and spending that has characterized the past decade.

Conservatives will get their wish about Obama when the 2012 elections roll around. Until then, he’s not going away.

(a) Alan Caruba, 2010

Israel's Next War Begins

By Alan Caruba

As this is being written, the news is about an Israeli effort to interdict a “humanitarian” flotilla of ships that refused to dock at its port of Ashdod to have its passengers and cargo checked. When Israeli troops boarded a Turkish ship in international waters on Sunday they were met with violent resistance that led to casualties.

The Israeli navy stopped six ships ferrying 700 people and 10,000 tons of supplies toward the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave.

I don’t know what the flotilla was delivering, but it is likely that among its passengers were Hamas terrorists and that there are weapons hidden among its cargo. That is why they refused orders to proceed to the Israeli port where tons of cargo routinely docks before making its way to Gaza.

The flotilla was a deliberate provocation. Naturally, much of the world will blame Israel.

Having been in a state of war since its founding, Israel routinely has interdicted shipments of weapons to the PLO and Hamas. One of the most notable was in January 2002 when the Karine-A, a Palestinian ship, was found to have more than fifty tons of Iranian weapons and explosives.

Largely unreported are the fierce battles Egyptian Special Forces are waging in central Sinai with Bedouin tribesman smuggling weapons and fighters into Gaza on behalf of al Qaeda. As always, the Middle East is an asylum for the insane who, when not trying to kill Israelis, stay busy killing one another.

I believe that war will come again soon and will originate in Lebanon. In the end, the decision will be Iran’s, not Syria’s, its sock puppet and stalking horse. Syria has reportedly provided the Lebanon-based Hezbollah an estimated 1,000 Iranian-made rockets and missiles, all aimed at Israel.

The last time the Israelis had to deal with Hezbollah aggression from Lebanon was in 2006. The conflict lasted 34 days. It is widely agreed that the Israeli Defense Force performed poorly and, not surprisingly, the most criticism came from the Israelis themselves.

Part of the problem at the time was an indecisive Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who has since been replaced by Benyamin Netanyahu. If “Bibi” gets any intelligence regarding a pending attack, he will not wait around for it to start. On word of the confrontation with the flotilla, he cancelled a June 1 meeting with President Obama and returned to Israel.

You may recall that in March Barack Obama accorded Netanyahu one of the nastiest receptions ever given an Israeli Prime Minister. Only the Dalai Lama fared worse, being ushered out the White House back door.

One might reasonably assume that the president is no fan of Jews after having spent twenty years in the Chicago pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright say hateful things about them and about America.

Obama has many close ties with black nationalists and anti-Semites such as Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. One of his longtime associates is Palestinian apologist Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor.

There is ample reason to believe another attack on Israel is likely. The Syrians have reportedly moved the number of their army units to the Israeli border and have been supplying arms to Hezbollah ever since the last war.

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been saying ever more crazy things of late. He even lectured the United Nations on the coming of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite spook whose return will require massive worldwide death and destruction. More recently Mahmoud got into a fight with the Russians over the proposed UN sanctions. Iran is running out of friends even if its oil is not.

The Israelis have been practicing war games that include long distance flights, the purpose of which may have something to do with dropping some very big bombs on places with Persian names.

While all this is going on, the United States is significantly building up its fighting strength in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf regions. Carrier Strike Group 10, led by the USS Harry S. Truman, pulled up anchor on May 21st and headed to the Middle East. That will put two carrier groups in the area. More vessels, including guided-missile cruisers and destroyers will be there as well.

No matter how it plays out, the Middle East is going to turn into a shooting gallery again. The Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinians in Hezbollah and Hamas are living testimony to why all those people demanding that Israel make peace with them are clueless or worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

World War Two Poster

Memorial Day Memories

By Alan Caruba

I have a few enduring Memorial Day memories. Most involve my Dad who never served in the military, being too young for the First World War and too old for the Second twenty years later.

Even so, there was never a Memorial Day in Maplewood, NJ when we did not go down to the park, also named Memorial, and watch the veterans, the police and fire units, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and the high school band march to the grassy area where town officials would give speeches about the fallen heroes. Little Maplewood had its share that had served in all of the nation’s wars.

Even as a child I understood my Father’s pride in his nation and in those who had fought to protect its liberty. Later, when I was in the military my other memory was marching through downtown Columbus, Georgia during the Memorial Day parades.

It is a different kind of holiday from Fourth of July. It’s about remembrance. It is focused on those whom Lincoln said gave their last full measure of devotion to their nation.

It is a sober holiday, but it is also a day for picnics and barbecues. In a way, those who died are honored by the mundane activities in which we engage on a day dedicated to their memory. They would have done the same had they lived.

What strikes me most is the way, then and now, so many young men enlisted to fight our wars. Others accepted conscription and fought bravely too. What is so very different is today’s all-volunteer military. Nobody has to sign up for duty, but they do.

The demarcation line came in the 1970s when Americans, seeing the carnage of war in Vietnam on their nightly television news, watching the casualty numbers grow, gradually came together to protest year after year until the conflict ended.

While we have great pride in our military, regarding it more highly than other element of our government, Americans have become detached from the bloodletting of war. They are fought at great distances. Mostly, Americans are highly resistant to any losses in battle despite the records in past wars of literally thousands of casualties. Those were wars we needed to win.

The news lately was of the one thousandth casualty in Afghanistan. We have been there since shortly after 9/11. We lose 40,000 people to death on our highways every year; more by far than the totals of those we have lost in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It doesn’t make it any less painful for their families, but in the long battle for freedom, it is a remarkably small price to pay and the extraordinary part is that there are still heroes willing to pay the price.

Plato said it best. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010