kenlacrosse

BAD REVIEWS: Obama, Holder, Journalists, And Their Sources.

Initially, a federal district judge, Leonie Brinkema, issued an opinion that was favorable to Risen’s position. The Administration appealed. In 2012, despite pleas for restraint from major news organizations—including both the Times and Fox News—Holder approved an appellate brief that marked a low point in recent First Amendment litigation. It rejected any notion of a reporter’s constitutional privilege to protect sources in criminal proceedings. It dismissed the idea that reporting like Risen’s might be justified because it serves the public interest. And it described a working reporter who hears classified information during an interview with a government official as a witness to a crime, under the Espionage Act of 1917—no different under criminal law from a witness to a murder.

The brief was a plank in a wider Administration campaign to deter leakers in national-security cases by punishing them harshly and by acting aggressively to identify journalists’ sources. Holder has approved more media-leak prosecutions than all previous Attorneys General combined. This spring, however, after it was revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, as well as those of the Fox reporter James Rosen, the Administration backed down, and, on July 12th, Holder vowed to change how Justice would treat journalists in criminal cases.

The rest of this piece is basically special pleading on the part of journalists — hey, you wouldn’t treat us like Assange or Snowden or Manning, we’re your buddies! — that misses that the campaign to intimidate whistleblowers is all of a piece, by an Administration that has a lot to hide.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Obama’s First Big Mideast Blunder: Abandoning Iraq.

WHAT GOOD IS SPYING ON EVERYONE’S EMAILS IF YOU’RE TOO DUMB TO RESPOND TO WHAT YOU READ? Nearly a year before the massacre, the FBI intercepted emails between Nidal Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that officials called “fairly benign.” They are anything but.

Advocates for Fort Hood victims find this decision puzzling. “A US Army major is writing to this imam and essentially asking for religious sanction to kill American soldiers,” said attorney Reed Rubinstein, who represents a group of victims who are suing the federal government. “And the FBI’s Washington field office doesn’t even interview the man or make a phone call to his superiors. It’s utterly incomprehensible.”

I’d like to know more about the people who made these decisions.

REMEMBER, VOTER FRAUD IS JUST SOMETHING THE GOP MADE UP BECAUSE OF RACISM OR SOMETHING: Somali Immigrants Charged With Illegal Double Voting in Minnesota. “But will U.S. Attorney Todd Jones act? Double voting in a federal election is a federal crime. So far, the U.S. Justice Department has been slack in enforcing this federal law which protects federal (as opposed to state) interests. Meloweese Richardson in Ohio still has not been charged with double voting. Neither has Wendy Rosen in Maryland. There are more. Why isn’t Eric Holder’s Justice Department enforcing federal laws against double voting? Is it because they voted for the right candidates? Might it have something else to do with the perpetrators? These days, it could be anything.”

Ralph Peters and Barry Rubin wring their hands in despair over Obama’s decision to bet the farm in Syria — bet the house without even wanting to win the pot. Peters writes that calculation has nothing to do with it.”You might as well try to teach a snake to juggle as hope the Obama administration will think strategically.”

Before launching a single cruise missile toward Syria, Team Obama needs to be sure it has a good answer to the question, “What comes next?” … If al Qaeda and local Islamists seize Damascus, what will we do? …

What if we weaken the regime to the point where the fanatics rev up their jihad to drive out Christians and other minorities? What’s your plan then, Mr. President? After your night of explosive passion, will you still love the opposition in the morning?

Barry Rubin is so sure that President Obama is heading into a trap that he confidently predicts “America’s Impending Defeat in Syria”. The reason? How can you win when you don’t want to win?

The administration has trapped itself with two problems: the rebels who are being supported in Syria are extreme radicals who may set off bloodbaths and regional instability if they win; and a challenge has been given to the very reckless forces of Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. When the United States threatens these three players, the response is always: “Make my day!”

So this is the situation, and the Obama administration is bluffing.

it does not want to exert force and probably won’t. Iran and Syria would be quite willing to fight a war, but the United States –people and government — do not have the will to do so.

Speaking for myself, I am not so sure defeat is in the offing. The tactical power of the United States military is so great that it can give mediocre, even insanely incompetent commanders in chief mastery of the physical field. It can avoid defeat, but it can’t give victory to somebody who doesn’t want it either.

What is of greater concern than Syria is watching Washington in its blindness. It’s like seeing an out-control Michael Jackson in his last days, a disaster waiting to happen. You might think Jackson can make it through the day and even through the next day. But sure as shooting the day will come when too much Propofol, too little sleep, too little thinking will do its work. And in that sometime, somewhere the unbridled penchant for destruction will finally push the thing over its final limit.

It’s not Syria I’m worried about, but what comes after that.

There is about the impending Syrian disaster something of the air of a fait acompli. Right now the political system is almost too astonished to call for a Syrian strategy,  to do anything but shamble along sheepishly, having been habituated to act without thinking; having been conditioned to drool, like Pavlov’s dogs on basis of talking points shopped by failed novelists now working as national security advisers for strategic communications to talk show hosts. In that sense Syria is a lost cause — perhaps not in the military sense — but because Obama himself is a lost cause.

If the Republicans themselves understood strategy — another forlorn hope — then they too would even now be preparing for pursuit. Of course they are not, being Republicans. But as Obama’s mistakes pile up he will be forced to retreat with or without the GOP on his heels, much as the Old Guard did at Waterloo, first a step at a time, then at a halting trot, then finally at a full-fledged, pell-mell run, chased by forces he himself has unleashed. So too will the headlong confusion ensue, whether the Republicans prepare for it or not.

The Democrats, whose next generation have so long been stunted by the suffocating shadows of Clinton and Obama, are ironically presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. Their younger members can survive the wreck of the Obama’s next year in office, seize the once in a lifetime chance to form a new coalition unhampered by the dead weight of the 1960s past — if they prepare now. Charles Krauthammer is right. The era of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is over. What’s important now is jobs. And those won’t return unless things change.

The President really did fundamentally transform America. Look what he did to the Middle East. Look what his policies have done to the economy.  He is potentially taking the torch to the Jewish pillar of the Democratic Party soon. There is now no scenario in which Israel escapes unscathed from the blunders of the administration. And that will feed back — as all his blunders eventually must — into the Democratic Party. It is not inconceivable that Obama may become the Democrat’s Richard Nixon — he is already being openly compared to Nixon even by the press. It will be recalled that Nixon was persuaded by members of his own party to take a well deserved rest, advice which they presented upon realizing he was an albatross round their necks.

The comparison to Nixon is actually unfair to Nixon, who was guilty of a third-rate burglary. Nixon withdrew from Vietnam (which was Johnson’s boo-boo and which fell after he resigned when Congress withheld aid); he checkmated Russia and generally left things ship shape. No Benghazi, NSA, IRS, none of that mar Tricky Dick’s legacy. Compared to Obama Nixon was the model of competence.

One may laugh. Doubtless the Beltway crowd are looking round and comforting themselves with the fact that it still all looks the same today, so it will look the same tomorrow. But years ago I read an account of the Vietnam-era battle of Operation Apache Snow. The surviving NVA records indicated that the defenders, realizing they were to be attacked by American forces, and probably with a sense of their own impending demise, ordered their machine gunners to set up firing positions facing the dense, impassable forest.

“But sir,” one NVA machine gunner expostulated, “there is no field of fire there!”

“Ah my dear private,” the Vietnamese officer replied,  ”there is a forest there now. But you have never seen the American air force in action. Tomorrow there will be no forest there at all, not even a sapling. It will be smashed to matchwood. Set up the machine guns where I told you to.”

And the fields of fire open up where we least expect them to. Brett Stephens at the Wall Street Journal writes that Obama would be well advised to kill every member of the Assad family. Every last one.

Should President Obama decide to order a military strike against Syria, his main order of business must be to kill Bashar Assad. Also, Bashar’s brother and principal henchman, Maher. Also, everyone else in the Assad family with a claim on political power. Also, all of the political symbols of the Assad family’s power, including all of their official or unofficial residences. The use of chemical weapons against one’s own citizens plumbs depths of barbarity matched in recent history only by Saddam Hussein. A civilized world cannot tolerate it. It must demonstrate that the penalty for it will be acutely personal and inescapably fatal.

Maybe this strikes some readers as bloody-minded. But I don’t see how a president who ran for his second term boasting about how he “got” Osama bin Laden—one bullet to the head and another to the heart—has any grounds to quarrel with the concept.

There used to be an implicit Red Line prohibiting the assassination of a foreign head of state arising from the well-founded fear that Western leaders might themselves become targets of revenge. The way around that was to get the locals to do it. Saddam was convicted by Iraqis and hanged. Khadaffy went into the meat freezer at the hands of Libyans. What happens when or if you go after the president of a foreign country and his whole family with drones?

Won’t happen you say? Oh they’ve thought about it then … have they? Have they thought about anything? Red Lines ain’t what they used to be. Like that NVA commander said “there’s a forest there now boy …” But there’s not a forest there forever.

To the question, what does Obama do for an encore once he’s fired off two billion dollars worth of missiles? Your guess is as good as mine, but if he did have a plan then what is it?  It’s a Brave New World out there, with such people in it.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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A professor called Pepper Schwartz, in a “special to CNN,” advises that “Miley Cyrus is sexual — get over it.”

I have. It wasn’t difficult. I knew nothing about Miley Cyrus until her lewd performance caused a fuss. And I’ve know about our debauched culture for a long time.

But not so fast, says this black feminist. It turns out that Cyrus’ performance was a racist “commodification of black female sensuality”:

[C]an we talk about the problematic and racist nature of her performance? Her literal use of people as props? Her association of her newfound sexuality with the traditional codifiers of black female culture, thereby perpetuating the Jezebel stereotype that black women are lewd, lascivious and uncontrollably sexualized? Can we talk about the straight up minstrelsy of that performance? Can we talk about how not a single black person won an award last night even though the people who did win awards have been mining black music and culture for years?

Of course we can, but would you mind going easy on the academic jargon?

I understood this jargon-free part of the rant against Miley better:

[A]ll of her backup dancers were “black women with big butts.”

I don’t quite get the use of quotation marks, though. Either the women were black and the butts were big or they weren’t. And I’d find the author’s outrage more convincing if she didn’t quote from a blog called “BigTittieCommittee.”

Cyrus’ use of “black women with big butts” is only the starting point of her racism, though:

The other major problem with Miley’s performance is the association with her burgeoning sexuality with black female bodies. . . .Essentially, what Miley has done here is indicate that 1. She wants to be sexual and 2. She needs to associate herself with black bodies to do it.

By doing this, she in inexplicably intertwining the idea of sexuality as part and parcel of black womanhood; that is, that black women cannot exist without sexuality and vice versa, and that the only acceptable way to be sexual, is to “be black”. That idea plays into deeply racist ideas about black womanhood, the idea being that black women are wanton and lascivious, and cannot control their expressions of sexuality.

I don’t get how the “intertwining” can be “inexplicable” when the author proceeds promptly to explain it as racism. Maybe she meant “inextricably intertwined.”

In any case, by this point the author senses that she is reaching (“if you think that I’m grasping at straws. . . .”). If anything, Cyrus’ performance is about her inability to control expressions of sexuality, not any inability of her backup dancers to do so.

I don’t deny that Cyrus’ performance was offensive on enough levels to perhaps have encompassed race. But it’s probably best to follow Pepper Schwartz’s advice and get over it.

Don’t expect black feminists to do so, however. Towards the end of her rant, the author quotes a feminist who predicts:

A doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick.

I’m pretty sure she is right, and that the doctoral dissertation will be even more inextricably intertwined with the whiney, jargon-laden, standard-issue black feminist narrative than the author’s post, which comes from a blog aptly-named “Group Think.”

Hat tip to Bill Otis at Crime and Consequences.

UPDATE: For some reason, this story makes me think of a ditty that a veteran black civil rights advocate used to sing:

See that girl shake that thing.
We can’t all be Dr. King.

STEVE adds: This isn’t worthy of it’s own post, but by chance I’ll be talking briefly about Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus in class today.  Looks like we need a modern-day Xenophon to provide us with The Education of Miley Cyrus.  Heh.

John mentions below that the satellite global temperature data continue to run flat (but the climate campaign rolls on run-flat tires, so never mind), but here’s another fun factoid just out: with the summer drawing toward a close, so far this summer in the US has experienced the fewest 100+ degree readings at temperature stations in 100 years.  (See chart below.)

What should be concluded from this?  Precisely nothing.  However, if the data were otherwise, what do you suppose the climateers would say?  I doubt anyone would even be willing to make book on this.  Live by the extreme weather anecdote, die by the extreme weather anecdote.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Will The Smoke From Jack Lew’s Burning Pants Obscure A Debt Ceiling Deal?

Unfortunately, as Noam Scheiber has observed, Jack Lew has a bit of history with Republicans in Congress. Before he was Treasury Secretary, he worked on the 2011 budget negotiations for the administration. The Republicans were demanding $100 billion be cut out of the budget, which the administration thought was unreasonable as we were just pulling of a recession. Jack Lew’s answer was to come up with tens of billions of cuts that looked deep, but turned out to be mostly “cuts” in money that wasn’t going to be spent anyway. Unfortunately, as soon as the Republicans signed on the dotted line, the administration trumpeted its little trick to every fiscal reporter in town. As a result, the hardliners in the Republican caucus do not trust Jack Lew.

Since no one knows exactly when Treasury is going to run out of money, there’s no way to produce an alternate set of figures that Republicans will trust. That may greatly complicate things as negotiations get down to the wire.

These people aren’t even competent liars. A competent liar doesn’t brag about how he snookered people he’ll have to deal with in the future.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Fed-Up Saudis Look to Russia.

Talk about a cry for help. The Saudis have apparently judged President Obama to be rudderless in his Middle East policies, judging by their recent diplomatic moves toward Russia: They appear to have plied Putin with a deal to collude in the global oil market, while also urging him to distance himself from Syria’s Butcher Assad.. . .

This is jaw-dropping stuff, to say the least. Nothing was signed in this closed-door meeting between Putin and Bandar—Putin requested time for both countries to look into the specifics of such a deal. But the mere fact that our allies felt like they needed to go this route signals that something is seriously awry in President Obama’s Middle East approach.

Ya think? It’s almost as if Obama is trying to weaken our position internationally.

WHY DO THE GREENS WANT CHILDREN TO DIE?

Vitamin A deficiency also depresses the immune system, raising overall mortality from other causes such as diarrhea, measles, and pneumonia. For these diseases the additional toll is estimated at 1 million preventable deaths a year, or around 2,700 per day, mostly among children younger than 5.

Greenpeace, with its $335 million annual revenue, has nearly four times more funding than the entire International Rice Research Institute (most of whose work involves conventional plant breeding). Greenpeace has waged a decade-long campaign against golden rice because it involves transgenic technology. The scientists at IRRI insist that there was no other way to get genes for beta-carotene into rice.

Greenpeace’s scaremongering includes the regular production of glossy reports spreading unscientific myths about golden rice. In China last year it successfully created a fake media scandal which landed some of the key Chinese project scientists in jail. Greenpeace Southeast Asia spokespeople took to the media to speak in support of the destruction of the golden rice trial in the Philippines.

Don’t lecture me about corporate evil when a $335 million multinational “nonprofit” is fomenting violence against those who are trying to save kids.

Related: Greenpeace Founder: Biotech Opposition is Crime Against Humanity.

So much for Japan and China talking things out:

A senior Chinese diplomat is casting doubt on the likelihood of a meeting between leaders of China and Japan on the sidelines of next week’s G20 summit in Russia.

Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong said Tuesday such a meeting would be very difficult to organize, given the current state of relations that have been strained by a territorial dispute.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for a high-level summit with China. Reports suggest he is hoping for an informal meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the G20 meeting.

Li rejected the reported Japanese offers as disingenuous, saying meetings should not be held “simply for the sake of shaking hands and taking pictures, but to resolve problems.”

That’s diplo-speak for “buzz off.”

The best thing about President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, is that it’s practically foolproof. China has been blundering about the Pacific in such crude and obvious ways, that the countries around its perimeter are practically begging us for closer diplomatic and military relations. It would take a concerted and boneheaded effort to mess this up. Or for China to get smart and change its ways — but today’s news hardly makes that seem likely.

And then there’s this:

China is increasing its pressure on the Philippines to remove small detachments of sailors and marines stationed on nine islets and reefs in the Spratly Islands. In particular, the Chinese want the detachment stationed on a World War II era landing ship (the BRP Sierra Madre) removed. The Filipino navy deliberately grounded the LST on Second Thomas Reef in 1999, to provide a place for an observation team. Chinese patrol ships have recently come within nine kilometers of the LST, which China insists is there illegally. The Philippines warns China that it will resist any attempts to use force against the grounded ship. In response China is building more buildings (on stilts) on nearby Mischief Reef (which is only 126 kilometers from the Philippines’ Palawan Island). Second Thomas Reef and nearby Reed Bank are 148 kilometers west of the Philippines (Palawan Island) and well within the Philippines’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone). Although the EEZ is recognized by international law (and a treaty that China signed and uses to defend waters off its own coast) China says that does not apply here because all the islets in the South China Sea belong to China and there is no room for negotiation on that point.

How long before Manila invites the US Navy back to Subic Bay?

IT’S LIKE THE GREENS WANT MISERY AND DEATH OR SOMETHING: Golden Rice, Green Idiocy. “With golden rice, we have a real, cost-effective way to safely provide millions of people with healthier food. The anti-GMO crowd is doing its best Marie Antoinette impression, saying the world’s poor should get the vitamin A this new rice provides by eating more fruits and vegetables. A well-balanced diet is a luxury many can’t afford. Cheap, nutrient-rich golden rice can save lives.”

JULIETTE OCHIENG: My Nephews.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Democracy’s Dog Days. “The great lesson of the Obama administration is that the abuses of democratic plebiscites abroad are not contrasted, but amplified by the increasingly lawless American model, when it uses the IRS and the Justice Department to go after political opponents, allows senior officials to lie under oath to the Congress, and fails to execute faithfully those laws passed by the legislative branch. If we are to offer America as a model, then there must be some honesty and transparency about the Benghazi, Associated Press, IRS, and NSA scandals.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Rogue IRS Shamefully Targets Nation’s Veterans. “If the president wants to get angry about something, how about getting mad about the IRS leaping on the American Legion, requiring individual Legion posts to provide proof of their members’ eligibility, virtually accusing the veterans organization of being a cover for and sanctioning tax fraud? . . . ‘Unconscionable’ is an overused word in describing the abuses of power and the continual overstepping of legal and constitutional boundaries by this administration. But it certainly applies in this case. The American Legion is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit veterans organization chartered and incorporated by Congress in 1919, and now has more than 2.4 million members in 14,000 posts worldwide, according to its website. It has never had to deal with such a requirement until now.” It’s like they want to keep close tabs on veterans for some reason.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT IN THE 21ST CENTURY, IF YOU WANT A CLASSIC RACISM INCIDENT YOU PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO FAKE IT UP: Jersey City high school candidate for student gov’t sent racist texts to himself, school official says.

So it looks like getting a UN vote on Syria isn’t going to happen, which is no big surprise. Does this mean the President will go to Congress to get authorization? That also seems unlikely, with only 9% of Americans in favor of force — which is about the same percentage who say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Maybe Obama will get his permission, such as it were, from France and the UK.

But doesn’t teaming up with the Brits and the French to impose order on a small middle eastern country strike you as a bit… colonial?

The irony, it runs deep.

IT’S GOOD TO BELONG TO THE RULING CLASS: Filner’s “Fall from Grace” Cushioned by Federal Taxpayer-Backed Pension.

Ari Shavit’s evocative lede in today’s Haaretz is a reaction to the horror in Syria, He writes, “The End of the World is starting in Damascus … if civilians can be gassed to death in 2013, we face the end of the world that purports to be moral and enlightened”. Well perhaps the world was never really that enlightened to begin with: not even during the peace after the Second World War. People had simply had a bellyful of war and were momentarily intimidated into pacifism by the power of the hegemon, the United States.

WH Auden argued against imagining that we were ever innocent instead of being “simply children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.” And now that America has gotten out of the hegemon business and the memories of those mid-20th horrors are fading — we can help stamp them out by beating the surviving World War 2 veterans to death out of boredom — it seems we’re ready to go again. Rupert Brooke described the kind of boredom that besets us. He felt it in the air as his generation embarked for the fronts of the Great War a hundred years ago:

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

We don’t want what we have, that little emptiness of love. Foreign Policy reports that Congressional doves are now contemplating doing some leaping of their own, authorizing US intervention in Syria after reports of the use of chemical weapons by Assad. This despite Congress being told by General Dempsey that there were no moderate rebel groups ready to fill any power vacuum there.

But even if there ain’t no swimming hole, still we want the feeling of cleanness and the leaping into that dried up crater. Decrying the lack of US action in Syria, one commenter at the Daily Mail said: “Where is America and the UK? No oil I suppose!!”

Humanity is funny in that way. The only acceptable justifications for war are intangible. You can kill people for a cause. To do it for food or oil, now that were immoral indeed.

Bill Gertz says Dempsey’s message is clear. “U.S. military intervention in Syria on behalf of Syria rebels fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime risks embroiling the United States and states in the region in a wider conflict, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a letter to Congress.”

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey provided a mainly negative assessment of U.S. military intervention and warned that joining the war in Syria could assist Islamist extremists, help them gain access to chemical weapons, and further erode U.S. military readiness, already suffering from sharp defense budget cuts.

Using force is “no less than an act of war,” Dempsey stated in the July 19 letter, adding that any use of force should be based on confidence that it will achieve the U.S. policy of ousting the Assad regime.

Strategy is optional today. Outrage is mandatory. The argument that the international use of force is both “war” and ought to require a concrete aim — perhaps even a plan for something called ‘victory’ — is a quaint, almost obsolete notion.

People do things for the most abstract reasons today. It shows our advancement. For example, The Guardian describes the pressing plight of the person formerly known as Bradley Manning, now known as ‘Chelsea’. Manning has expressed a burning desire to become a woman and be provided with hormone therapy to that end. “But Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, where Manning is due to serve out her sentence, said on Thursday that it would not provide trans treatment beyond psychiatric support, in a move criticised as unconstitutional by activists and LGBT groups.”

The meanies. But the need for food seems less pressing than psychological fulfillment. By contrast to the front page treatment of Manning’s request,  only evil Fox News pushed the Army to reverse its closure of dining facilities serving multiple amputees recovering at Walter Reed.

The U.S. military has reversed a string of decisions that would have restricted access for severely wounded troops to a popular dining hall at Walter Reed hospital, after Fox News began reporting on complaints from veterans and their families.

The military earlier this month decided to invalidate meal tickets and reduce hours for the Warrior Cafe, the sole dining facility in building 62 — home to all multiple amputees and long-term, recovering patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Forgotten already? Well they should get used to it. One of the most sobering things about reading history is realizing the ease with which the deaths of a millions can be forgotten in only a few decades. I am currently reading Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, by Peter Harmsen.  I recommend it heartily. Even if you thought you knew all there was to know about the Second World War, if you haven’t read up on the Sino-Japanese conflict, you’ve missed one of its principal roots.

The comparison to Stalingrad is by no means far-fetched. Nine hundred thousand troops on both sides fought a three month battle for the city. Almost 93,000 Japanese troops perished. A third of million of Chiang Kai-Shek’s best troops died opposing them.  That’s without counting the civilians who did in Nanjing, which fell as part of the battle.

You might be interested to learn that the Battle of Shanghai was arguably the start of World War 2 in the Pacific and the decisive battle of the as-yet-unfought Chinese Civil War. For one thing, it shifted the Japanese war effort south away from the Soviets. For another the battle doomed the Kuomintang because Chiang expended and destroyed his carefully built army in that tremendous furnace. Unable to find respite in the war years that followed, the KMT never recovered to fight Mao’s Red Army, which stayed away from major conflict with the Japanese and so was tanned, rested and ready by the end of it.

Perhaps even more astonishingly, the Japanese were in real danger of losing the Battle of Shanghai, in part because the Chinese Army was advised by German officers, some of whom were Jewish and fleeing from Hitler.

Interestingly, the Battle of Shanghai was precipitated by an incident involving the still unsolved murder of a Japanese officer which drew both sides into the vortex. Wikipedia writes of that murder, still mysterious after all these years:

Mao Tse-Tung biographers Chang and Halliday assert that Chinese Army General Zhang Zhizhong was a Communist Party sympathizer, and staged the Ōyama Incident, including bringing a Chinese soldier condemned for an unrelated crime and killing him with Lt. Ōyama’s gun, to heighten credibility. Chang and Halliday point out that Gen. Zhizhong defied orders in publicizing the incident widely with the news media after it happened. They also quote Mao as saying that all-out war between Japan and China would weaken Chiang Kai-Shek’s government, giving Mao’s less-numerous Communists an advantage. If true this sequence of events would mean that Mao instigated the Pacific War, against the wishes of the major combatants, at the cost of millions of lives.

Yet great as it was, the Battle of Shanghai is remembered only in little read books and in British Movietone reels. The same might be said of the Maginot Line. This terrific site brings it back to life, the casemates, cupolas, ouvrages, troop shelters, fields of fire, interior reconstructions. At the time of its construction the Maginot Line was the missile defense shield of the French Nation.

It was completely bypassed. And it too lies forgotten.

In the last few weeks it has seemed as if the pillars were coming down. Not the columns of marble or girders of steel that uphold the buildings of our great cities; but the things that once supported our mental universe. Rationality, honesty or even simple gratitude to those to who’ve lost their limbs in our defense seemingly count for nothing; replaced by a kind of manic obsession with psychological fulfillment, the need to be amused at casting off all the old taboos.

In our innermost sanctums are raised up altars to things that were once abhorred and dark flames are kindled before half-remembered gods, so that even if our temples look the same, all within has changed as if by some monstrous possession. We are told that this transformation is good because it is modern; which if true that would be a most astonishing thing. How did the novel return return as ‘good’ after good itself was banished, simply by being amusing?

Perhaps because what has returned today is neither new nor good at all. Both hatred and love, war and peace and salvation and damnation are old as mankind. Shavit is wrong. The world never ends. But it does get the periodic makeover.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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Despite the intense efforts of John Kerry, I doubt very much that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is focused, like a laser or otherwise, on the umpity-ump peace talks with the Palestinians. If past performance is any indication, the Palestinians aren’t much interested in a two-state solution anyway. And, miraculously, if they are this time, let’s hear the details.

But given Netanyahu’s responsibilities and the realities of the world, his concentration must be on Syria — and, most especially, through that, Iran.

Toward that end, he has a serious problem — and that is the president of the United States.

Mr. Obama has promised the prime minister — who knows how many times — that he (Obama) will make sure that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the president also, the world well knows, warned the combatants in the Syrian civil war that the employment of chemical weapons was a “red line” he wouldn’t allow to be crossed.

He fudged on that one, mumbling the words “a whole bunch” or some such. But whatever his equivocation, it is long since erased by the recent mass murder in the Damascus suburb of roughly a thousand people, including many children. That carnage clearly passes the “whole bunch” test.

At this point, too, many nations have already concluded that the gassing was done by the Assad regime. (Vogue magazine take note.)

Nevertheless, Obama has yet to act. He is allegedly trying to build consensus (remember that?) at the United Nations — the “progressive” institution that gave us Oil-for-Food, Iran as head of its human rights commission, etc.

In fact, in the face of the Nazi-like behavior of the Assad regime, Obama is, as is his wont, calling in “absent.” The lede from the normally administration-friendly Reuters reads:

President Barack Obama called the apparent gassing of hundreds of Syrian civilians a “big event of grave concern” but stressed on Friday he was in no rush to embroil Americans in a costly new war.

One wonders how “grave” his concern would have to be for Obama to act. Would he, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, have bombed the train tracks to Auschwitz? It’s easy to be skeptical.

This is the kind of question Benjamin Netanyahu must be asking himself and, if Obama continues in the same waffling direction, the Israeli prime minister has his answer.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Exercise Can Help Us Sleep Better.

The preliminary message of these findings is heartening. If you habitually experience insomnia and don’t currently exercise, Dr. Baron said, start. Don’t, however, expect that you will enjoy or even complete workouts that occur on the day after a broken night’s sleep, or that you will sleep better hours after you’ve exercised.

The process is more gradual and less immediately gratifying than the sleep-deprived might wish. But the benefits do develop. “It took four months” in the original study, Dr. Baron said, but at that point the exercising volunteers “were sleeping at least 45 minutes more a night.” “That’s huge, as good as or better” than most current treatment options for sleep disturbances, including drugs, she said.

Not a quick fix, then.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): ‘A Nation of Sullen Paranoids:’ Too much security can produce a kind of madness.

If you believe the information will never be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent. If you assume you can trust the administration on this issue you are not following the bouncing ball, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who told Congress under oath the NSA didn’t gather “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans” (he later had to apologize) to President Obama, who told Jay Leno: “We don’t have a domestic program.” What we do have, the president said, is “some mechanism that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.”

Oh, we have more than that.

Indeed we do.

NOW OUT FROM PROF. NICHOLAS JOHNSON: Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms.

Probably the most important work on this theme since Robert Williams’ 1962 book Negroes With Guns.

BEWARE THOSE CRAZY PEOPLE WHO STILL BELIEVE IN THE CONSTITUTION: Defense Department Education Materials Warn of ‘Extremists’ That Speak of ‘Individual Liberties, States’ Rights, and How to Make the World a Better Place.’ “The guide is reportedly authored by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a Defense Department-funded diversity training center. Further, the documents cite the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) when identifying ‘hate groups.’”

I suspect that this kind of thing is costing the military a lot of credibility with people who normally support it. I also suspect that Obama’s fine with that. And given the SPLC’s record, does this mean that soon we’ll see drone attacks on “pickup artists?”

HOW DID I MISS THIS LAST WEEK? Intelligence Official Says He Was Fired For Not Lying To Congress; Says Rogers & Feinstein Don’t Know What’s Happening.

A veteran intelligence official with decades of experience at various agencies identified to me what he sees as the real problem with the current NSA: “It’s increasingly become a culture of arrogance. They tell Congress what they want to tell them. Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein at the Intelligence Committees don’t know what they don’t know about the programs.” He himself was asked to skew the data an intelligence agency submitted to Congress, in an effort to get a bigger piece of the intelligence budget. He refused and was promptly replaced in his job, presumably by someone who would do as told.

I’m losing confidence in our institutions.

I can’t bear to take in the speeches being offered today in commemoration of Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington speech that took place 50 years ago this week.  A note from Ken Masugi this morning observes that most of the speeches are partisan drivel and Obama cheerleading, a sign of the appalling decay of the so-called civil rights movement today.  Ken notes separately how the Martin Luther King monument on the Mall perfectly exemplifies this decay, preferring the older Freedman’s Memorial from 1876 instead:

The fuss over the lame misquotation on the statue (“I was a drum major for justice…”) is nothing compared with the greater disgrace of the mediocrity of the statue. The civil rights revolution transformed America; the stubborn King just stands there, arms folded, glowering across the Tidal Basin, with Jefferson off to his left. Its size (at 30 feet, half again the height of Jefferson) undermines the real King’s message of equality. This monstrosity from China is art in the fascistic mode (cf. Mt. Rushmore).

While King’s significant statement on how the object of a color-blind society where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is getting some play, I wonder whether anyone will also look back on another significant moment of King’s teaching also from 50 years ago—his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.  There, in the middle, is King’s embrace of something utterly anathema to today’s left: natural law as understood by Aquinas, etc.  In fact, King mentions Aquinas specifically.  Here’s the relevant passage:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Try reading this today to a roomful of liberals, and watch them squirm.

P.S.  Yes, this last bit about a law that “a majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself” is indeed an ironic commentary on how Obama has exempted Congress from the terms of Obamacare.  Yup.  King the conservative shows up again.

The administration appears convinced that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own population, according to the NYT and may be moving to chastise it. The BBC however cautions that there may never be any actual evidence of the chemical weapons violation. “UK Foreign Secretary William Hague warned that evidence could have been tampered with, degraded or destroyed in the five days since the attack.”

With the BBC innoculating the administration against future media accusations of ‘faked’ WMD evidence by declaring any proof imperceptible in advance, the NYT describes the administration’s possible game plan. “WASHINGTON — As President Obama weighs options for responding to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, his national security aides are studying the NATO air war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations.”

With Russia still likely to veto any military action in the Security Council, the president appears to be wrestling with whether to bypass the United Nations, although he warned that doing so would require a robust international coalition and legal justification.

“If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it, do we have the coalition to make it work?” Mr. Obama said on Friday to CNN, in his first public comments after the deadly attack on Wednesday.

The Clinton era is a gift that keeps on giving. Unlike the lawless George W. Bush who went through the trouble of going to the UN and Congress to begin his illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama has learned from Clinton how useful is the loophole of “responsibility to protect”. If Obama uses Kosovo as a precedent, this will be the second time the US has intervened without the usual legal preliminaries to rescue a Muslim population.

Meanwhile, David Axe describes the capabilities of Naval forces now closing on in the Syrian coast.

Although Axe doesn’t quite say it, the goal of Navy is to destroy the Air Force — the Syrian Air Force that is. If the Navy is allowed to sweep the Syrians from the sky — assuming that they are not simply there to send a limited message — then swarms of drones are sure to follow once air dominance is gained. And then it will be all over. Assad may flit among hideouts for a while, but sooner or later the drones will get him. His goose will be cooked and the Syrian rebels, whoever they might be, will be in power.

How will the Navy probably accomplish its goal?

First will come the sleet of land attack missiles. “In the early 2000s the U.S. Navy took four old nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, removed their atomic rockets and transformed them into undersea arsenals, each packing up to 154 Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles that can be launched while the sub is still underwater.”

It was Florida that opened up the Libya intervention two years ago, firing more than 90 cruise missiles to destroy dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s air defenses, clearing the way for NATO air strikes. …

As recently as this spring Florida was back in the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s patrol area, centered on the Mediterranean. The 560-foot vessel returned to her base in Georgia in June and her sister vessel USS Georgia apparently took her place on deployment. But then in July a Navy photograph depicted Florida departing base “for routine operations.” Meanwhile Georgia was last publicized patrolling the Indian Ocean.

In short, Georgia is within quick sailing distance of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, meaning she could be available to launch missiles against Syrian defenses. And if Florida is also being sent back to the Mediterranean, the Navy could have no fewer than 300 sub-launched Tomahawks lurking off the Syrian coast.

That’s just for openers. Then come the Burkes.

The U.S. Defense Department has specifically mentioned four vessels in connection with a possible assault on Syria—all of them 500-foot-long Arleigh Burke-class destroyers deployed with the Sixth Fleet. The USS Mahan, USS Gravely, USS Barry and USS Ramage, each packing a mix of 90 surface-to-air and cruises missiles, are all in the Med.

Then come the thousand-foot aircraft carriers, all packed with standoff-missile firing air wings.

Indeed two of the Navy’s thousand-foot-long nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are within a quick jaunt of Syria. The USS Nimitz and USS Harry S. Truman—each with around 70 jet fighters, support planes and helicopters plus several additional destroyers, cruisers and submarines—are both listed as being with the U.S. Fifth Fleet as of Aug. 23. The Fifth Fleet patrols the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.

Given enough time the Navy can probably grind the Syrian airbases to dust, reduce their radars to junk, incinerate any command and control facility worth mentioning. And then with Assad blinded, aerially impotent and defenseless will follow the drones. First the high flying recon drones, operated by the USAF this time, to mark and spot each target of interest. Then the shooting drones. Bam. Bam. Bam.

A few days ago, commenters in the Daily Mail wrote “THIS HAS TO STOP NOW”. By “the somebody” to do the “stopping” of course they meant the USN, the USAF and if necessary the USMC. The truth is that from a military point of view, the United States can pretty much do a job on anybody, a fact normally decried by “world public opinion” until they want “somebody to stop” something. Then everyone’s agreed, the Navy works real good.

The only thing that can possibly stop the US is the Russians in combination with the Iranians, which if it results will create a wider war. The normal method for registering Russian existential objections is the Security Council. But Obama’s not going there, nor is he apparently aware of the existence of Congress whose job it formerly was to “declare war” — a hundred year old practice that white men invented to “grab oil” which nobody remembers any more.

And the reason for these checks and balances is the same reason why dual keys exist in nuclear missile firing silos or submarines. Because this power is so awesome. And with power comes the great responsibility to ensure this unbelievable might is used with due consideration and wisdom. There is no doubt that the USN can pulverize Syria. But to what end? To what strategic end?

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
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Mark Steyn:

At the low end, about 40 percent of Americans now do minimal-skilled service jobs — the ones that, in the wake of Obamacare, are becoming neither full-time nor part-time but kinda-sorta two-thirds-time in order not to impose health-insurance obligations on the employer. In the middle, a similar number of Americans are diverted into those paper-shuffling jobs that do provide health benefits — say, in the “human resources” department of the bureaucracy; the kind of job in which you pass the time calling someone in Idaho to say you need them to fill in a W-9 before you can send them a 1099, or vice versa. And, at the top end, privileged Americans spend six-figure sums acquiring college degrees that admit them to an homogenized elite that tells itself Obamacare makes perfect sense for everyone except them. The U.S. economy can never recover until more of its real “human resources” are engaged in genuine wealth creation.[Emphasis added. For emphasis.]

I used to marvel at the productivity of the American worker. Not the HR papershuffler, not the lawyer, not the clerk, not the salesman, and certainly not the government worker. I mean the productivity of Americans engaged in the production of actual wealth — whether they make, grow, engineer, or mine it. Because everybody else, each and every one of us, relies on their powers of wealth creation in order to find our work as HR papershufflers, laywers, clerks, salesmen, and lawyers. Then on top of all of them are the children, the elderly, and the welfare recipients.

In my lifetime they have been a small sliver of our population pie — and shrinking. We keep making it more difficult or expensive or just goddamn plain illegal to do the things which create real wealth. And then we keep adding more layers of lawyers and papershufflers on top.

We haven’t so much reached a point where Atlas is shrugged, as we have reached the point where the camel can’t take even just one more piece of straw on its back.

So what did we do, when our economy was creaking and ready to crack? We saddled it with ObamaCare. And then we hit our finance industry with Dodd-Frank. That’s two really big straws.

The Fed has kept the printing presses rolling — the equivalent of giving the camel a couple Red Bulls as it sweats and groans under the strain. And President Obama has been breaking his own signature law left and right — the equivalent of temporarily removing a few straws.

But at some point we have to get this country back into the business of producing real wealth, or eventually — probably sooner than most people think — there won’t even be any papers to shuffle.

A number of articles examine the reasons why Barack Obama got into his current foreign policy fix. Powerline argues he let Turkey and Qatar run his Syria policy whenever he wasn’t taking his cue from Saudi Arabia. His best buddies were going to handle Syria for him. And they’re still at it. The Kingdom has rolled out the big guns for the final push. CIA has come to the conclusion, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Saudis think Assad needs one more shove to nudge him over the edge because they’ve put Prince Bandar in charge of boosting the rebels.

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar—for two decades one of the most influential deal makers in Washington as Saudi ambassador but who had largely disappeared from public view—is now reprising his role as a geopolitical operator. This time it is to advance the Saudi kingdom’s top foreign-policy goal, defeating Syrian President Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies.

Bandar, the go-to-guy in Washington. The effect of these efforts has been more money and guns for the rebels through Turkey, as the Guardian recounts.

Rebel groups in Syria’s north say they have received their largest shipment of weapons yet, in a fillip to an anti-government campaign that had stalled for many months.

Leaders of militias supported by backers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar say several hundred tonnes of ammunition and a limited supply of light weapons were allowed across the Turkish border in the past three days, in what they said was the first large-scale re-supply since earlier this year.

The weapons are believed to have been sent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and were warehoused in Turkey for many months. Senior rebel commanders contacted by the Guardian say they did not include anti-aircraft missiles, but several dozen anti-tank rockets were among them.

But Edward Luttwak, writing in the New York Times, asks what good the guns are if both sides are America’s enemies. He writes “In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins”.

Indeed, it would be disastrous if President Bashar al-Assad’s regime were to emerge victorious after fully suppressing the rebellion and restoring its control over the entire country. Iranian money, weapons and operatives and Hezbollah troops have become key factors in the fighting, and Mr. Assad’s triumph would dramatically affirm the power and prestige of Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanon-based proxy — posing a direct threat both to the Sunni Arab states and to Israel.

But a rebel victory would also be extremely dangerous for the United States and for many of its allies in Europe and the Middle East. That’s because extremist groups, some identified with Al Qaeda, have become the most effective fighting force in Syria. If those rebel groups manage to win, they would almost certainly try to form a government hostile to the United States. Moreover, Israel could not expect tranquillity on its northern border if the jihadis were to triumph in Syria.

True, all true. But you can imagine how persuasive Bandar and Erdogan might be alone with Obama. The tea, exotic furnishings, lapses into a foreign language, the confidences, anecdotes, the intimation of secret knowledge they’re willing to confide in him. Like nothing you would get from a Mormon or a mid-Western plumber. Why he has the inside track! Unfortunately that whispered policy has led to catastrophe.  Julie Pace writing for AP describes the disappointment the President must be feeling.  ”For Obama, world looks far different than expected”.  It’s not working. He the expected a place on Mount Rushmore but finds himself and the country he leads shrunken on the international stage.

Nearly five years into his presidency, Barack Obama confronts a world far different from what he envisioned when he first took office. U.S. influence is declining in the Middle East as violence and instability rock Arab countries. An ambitious attempt to reset U.S. relations with Russia faltered and failed. Even in Obama-friendly Europe, there’s deep skepticism about Washington’s government surveillance programs.

…”The president has not had a long-term strategic vision,” said Vali Nasr, who advised the Obama administration on foreign policy in the first term and now serves as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “They’re moving issue to issue and reacting as situations come up.”…

But the perception of a president lacking in international influence extends beyond the Arab world, particularly to Russia. Since reassuming the presidency last year, Vladimir Putin has blocked U.S. efforts to seek action against Syria at the United Nations and has balked at Obama’s efforts to seek new agreements on arms control….

Michael O’Hanlon, a national security analyst at The Brookings Institution, said the president miscalculated in assuming that a few signs of improved ties would be enough to overcome years of distrust with the Russians.

Obama’s responses to adversity have been typical. It must be Rush Limbaugh’s fault. His handlers apply euphemisms like ‘miscalculated’, ‘unexpected’ or ‘difficult’ as synonyms for the unutterable word ‘blunder’. Or else the tame press argue that America’s influence in the world was bound decline anyway and Obama’s made the best of a bad hand inherited from Bush.

More than a year ago Peter Beinart led the way by writing that the “Egypt Policy Shows How Well Obama Has Managed America’s Decline”. Time concluded that “Egypt No Longer Matters. It’s time for Washington to recognize that Cairo is not the center of the Arab world” after Morsi was thrown out of Egypt. The Washington Post talked down the current spat with Russia by arguing they are so minor as to be inconsequential. “They [Russia] just don’t care enough about those disagreements to go through the trouble of fixing them … It’s just not the priority.”

It’s gone from denial to outright lying. To quote Hillary Clinton “what difference does it make” if everything’s all fouled up? But the blatant stupidities are starting to worry even Colin Powell who says there’s no point to acting in Syria without knowing who you’re helping.

“I have no affection for Assad,” Powell told Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” while mentioning he knows the Syrian president and has personally dealt with him. “He’s a pathological liar.”

However, Powell said, “I am less sure of the resistance. What do they represent? Is it becoming even more radicalized with more al Qaeda coming in, and what would it look like if they prevailed and Assad went? I don’t know.”

That’s Common Sense 101, but the point is apparently one too difficult — or too simple — for the President to grasp. Obama is trapped by his own propaganda, the victim of his own myth. He came to power on the strength of his supposed genius; his messianic transcendance. He was destined to make the world America’s friend; usher in a world without nuclear weapons; and fundamentally transform the nation. He was even going to make the oceans fall. Why he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of achievements he had not yet even attained.

It is these expectations that weigh down on him like lead. Had Obama not made any of these vaunting boasts he might not look like the fool he is now. But as his speech on “Red Lines” exemplifies the teleprompter can write check his autopen doesn’t even know how to sign.

Perhaps the only remaining reason for striking Syria without first deciding policy is simply to demonstrate to low information voters that he’s still President; that he can still do something, even if that something is pointless. The dangers be damned.  Forbes says Russia is spelling it out for him, warning Obama not to “repeat ‘past mistakes’ in the Middle East when dealing with the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad. Washington said Assad used it before. Russia said they did not.”

This is a not so subtle way of reminding Obama that if WMDs can disappear from Iraq, they can disappear in Syria too. Al-Qaeda and/or Hezbollah will only be too glad to receive them.  It is also a way of saying that if Obama was the beneficiary of Russia’s disinformation against George Bush, Obama can be its victim too.

Russia’s warning underscores the need for President Obama to stop and take stock. Many words are whispered in the President’s ear. The Russians, Turks, Saudis, Qataris and even the Iranians may be running so many false flag operations that the President may unintentionally be doing their bidding. Rather than lashing out blindly, he should ask himself: what am I doing? Who am I working for?

And the unfortunate answer is: you work for guys like the mid-Western plumber. The folks who drive Fords, shop at Safeway’s and who may even own a gun or two. The people who elected you.

The fundamental weakness in Obama’s policy process was that he conducted it in secret. He was rife with secret plans; a secret plan to spread the Arab Spring; a classified “kill list”, a secret plan to suspend aid to Egypt, a secret surveillance system with secret courts, a secret wiretap on all of AP. A secret this and a secret that.

These were indications of an unwillingness to share power, as felt perhaps by a superior being contemptuous of Congress and the Supreme Court.

Obama’s compulsion to make decisions personally, to consult only himself and a few cronies, made policy making extraordinary vulnerable to the influence peddling of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other powerful lobbyists. It moved debate over major issues from the public sphere into backrooms where Bandar, Erdogan, Putin and Xi could work their magic. It’s true the President was advised by Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, but even their sagacious advice proved unequal to the task.  Under the permissive gaze of the media the shift from policy making by constitutional processes to one by ignorant celebrity rule became complete.

Checks and balances were instituted for a reason, but the President felt he didn’t need them. He disabled the circuit breakers. Yet perhaps the fundamental reason why Barack Obama’s Syria policy is so broken is because he crafted it so narrowly; outside the venues provided by the Constitution, relying instead on his self-ascribed genius, a narrow set of advisers and so-called friends to steer him right. In the event they put him on the road to perdition.

Now, as the Navy nears Syria, he is even now trying to paint his way out of the corner in the same old defective way: with bluster, bluff and a sense of his own infallibility. If the past is prologue we know how his new Acme project will end. “It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. … That is the position – that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit.”

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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A 1-standard-deviation rise in teachers' union dues per teacher is associated with a 4% fall in student proficiency rates, according to a study of 721 U.S. school districts in 42 states by Johnathan Lott of the University of Chicago Law School and Lawrence W. Kenny of the University of Florida. Dues support union lobbying, which typically pushes for policies such as blocking merit pay and limiting the Teach for America program. Consequently, student proficiency is lower in states with stronger teacher unions, the researchers say.