The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

THE BIG STICK: Trump’s Missile Attack on Syria Is the New ‘Smart Power’

Posted on | April 7, 2017 | Comments Off on THE BIG STICK: Trump’s Missile Attack on Syria Is the New ‘Smart Power’

 

President Trump’s statement Thursday night at the White House:

My fellow Americans: On Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.
Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.
Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.
Tonight, I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types. We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed. And we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail.

The military action:

The United States fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria overnight in response to what it believes was a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 100 people.
At least six people were killed, Syria claimed, but the Pentagon said civilians were not targeted and the strike was aimed at a military airfield in the western province of Homs.
The action completed a policy reversal for President Donald Trump — who once warned America to stay out of the conflict — and drew anger from Damascus and its main ally, Russia.

The domestic political consequences? Let’s just say Democrats will have a hard time saying Trump was wrong, considering that this was exactly what Hillary Clinton had suggested in an interview Thursday. So the President had political carte blanche to launch this attack, and finally enforce the “red line” Obama had failed to enforce against Syria.

The Obama administration talked a lot about “smart power,” but Trump actually used it. Military power is meaningless, as an instrument of diplomacy, if your would-be adversaries think you won’t use it. While it is unwise for the United States to pursue the kind of “nation-building” interventions that have characterized our post-Cold War foreign policy, neither is it wise for America to allow its international prestige to be undermined by a perception that we are unwilling to take risks. War is always an uncertain venture, and we cannot predict the consequences of military action against Syria, an ally of Russia. Yet there are also consequences of not acting, of doing nothing and thereby sending the message that your likely response in the future is . . . nothing.

“Talk softly, but carry a big stick,” Teddy Roosevelt famously said, and it is occasionally necessary to use that big stick to whack someone over the head, to demonstrate what the big stick can do.

Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Leadership. That’s what we lacked for eight years. In the early hours of Friday morning in Syria — late Thursday evening here — our military, acting on the order of our commander-in-chief, avenged the slaughtered innocents in Syria and sent a clear message that we will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. Well done!

We may withhold congratulations until we see what effect this strike will have, and how Trump deals with future developments. At this point, it appears Trump’s action was the smart thing to do, but we have seen in the past that seemingly smart decisions can produce bad results. Personally, I have long felt that the United States and Russia should not be enemies, and it was only Soviet Communism that created this hostility. Vladimir Putin came to power during an era when the Clinton administration had fumbled away the opportunities America had in the post-Cold War era, and Putin’s ruthlessness is well known. The accusation (made by Hillary Clinton just yesterday) that Russia interfered in the U.S. election raises the question, “Why?” And now that Trump has attacked Putin’s ally in Syria, what did Russia gain by its alleged “hacking” of the election?

As a symbolic gesture, Trump’s attack on Syria has enormous importance, but we do not know what it will mean beyond mere symbolism.

 

Category: Donald Trump, Military, Syria

Fake Hate: Guess Who Made ‘Hundreds’ of Hoax Calls Targeting U.S. Jews?

Posted on | April 6, 2017 | Comments Off on Fake Hate: Guess Who Made ‘Hundreds’ of Hoax Calls Targeting U.S. Jews?

 

Hundreds of bomb-threat hoaxes and other harassing calls have been phoned into U.S. Jewish community centers, synagogues and other Jewish organizations in recent months, but finally, law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrator of this anti-Semitic crime wave.

Neo-Nazis? No.

Radical Muslims? No.

Trump-supporting “alt-right” nationalists? No.

An autistic Israeli-American teenager:

The suspect arrested [in March] for a wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the United States employed an array of technologies, including Bitcoin and Google Voice, to make himself virtually untraceable for months, The Daily Beast has learned. But in the end, it only took one careless slip-up to lead police to his door.
Police arrested 19-year-old Michael Kaydar, who has joint Israeli-U.S. citizenship, at his home in Ashkelon, a coastal city in southern Israel. He’s suspected of phoning in over 100 bomb threats to JCCs and Jewish day schools in 33 states since January, with the most recent calls made [in early March]. Police also suspect him of making similar threats in Israel, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

The teenage hate-hoaxer’s parents claim that their son cannot be held responsible because he is suffering from autism and a brain tumor:

The father of the Israeli-American teen behind hundreds of hoax bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US issued an apology “from the bottom of our hearts” to all American Jews on Monday, and stressed “there was no hatred” behind the threatening calls.
Speaking two days after the 18-year-old’s mother had blamed her son’s autism and a tumor on his brain for the hundreds of hoax calls he made, his father also said that it was “illness” that was responsible for his son’s actions. “The child is different. He is unique,” said his father, who appeared in silhouette on Channel 2 news and was identified by the pseudonym Eli. (A police gag order [on Israeli media] prevents the naming of the 18-year-old suspect, who is being identified only as “M.”) “There was no motive of hatred. The motive was illness.” . . .
In comments on Monday. M’s mother said her son has been diagnosed with autism and could not control his actions due to a tumor in his brain.
She said she was “shocked” to discover her son was behind a spate of US bomb scares and wished “I had known and could have prevented it.” . . .
The teen, whose family lives in Ashkelon, is facing charges of extortion, making threats, publishing false information and is accused of sowing widespread fear and panic.
Police say he was behind a range of threats against Jewish community centers and other buildings linked to Jewish communities in the United States in recent months, and is alleged to have made hundreds of threatening phone calls over the past two to three years, targeting schools and other public institutions in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
His mother . . . said it was clear from a young age that her son, while highly intelligent, could not function in the regular education system.
She said she was 40 when she gave birth to him, in the US, and that he had an unusually large head, and did not develop speaking skills at a normal rate, but was very good at solving puzzles and was later diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. . . .
He couldn’t cope with the formal framework of preschool education, she said. When he was about 6, the family moved to Israel, and he could not function in the school system.
The boy’s parents decided to homeschool him, and the mother gave up her job as a biochemist to care for her child from first grade through twelfth.

So, a woman who worked as a biochemist and became a mother at age 40 has a child who is, for lack of a better phrase, mentally defective. Resisting the temptation to  go off on a tangent here, I’ll just say that there are known risks of delayed childbearing, and this is one of those risks — your mentally defective child turns out to be an evil genius:

The Israeli-American teenager behind hundreds of hoax bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US reportedly earned millions of shekels’ worth of digital currency by selling counterfeit documents over the internet.
Police suspect the 18-year-old — whose name is sealed under gag order in Israel — sold forged identity cards, passports and driver’s licenses over both the internet and the dark net in exchange for bitcoins, a cryptocurrency often used in illicit transactions online, according to a Channel 2 report Thursday. . . .
Investigators are said to have have learned of his counterfeiting activity online after discovering millions of shekels’ worth of the digital currency in his bitcoin account, and are currently working to determine who purchased the forged documents, Channel 2 reported.

This is 21st-century parenting: Your mentally defective child is such a weirdo you couldn’t let him attend school, but yeah, just let him have unrestricted Internet access, because what could possibly go wrong?

Well, we could go off on another tangent about that — why do you think feminist Tumblr is such a hellhole of craziness, huh? — but the point here is that, contrary to liberals claiming that Trump’s election spawned a wave of anti-Semitic harassment, it was just this one teenage weirdo.

 

Category: Crime, Israel, Racism

The Kaiser and the Clintonistas

Posted on | April 6, 2017 | Comments Off on The Kaiser and the Clintonistas

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana remarked, and young people today know so little about the past that they are well and truly doomed. The teaching of history has been replaced by indoctrination for progressive activism, as Jane Shaw has recently explained, which means that the more “educated” a young person is, the less they are likely to know about the past. There are patterns in history, and the more we study history, the more easily we recognize the repetition of these patterns. In the last couple of weeks, my bedtime reading has been Martin Gilbert’s history of the First World War, a book I’ve already read twice, but one thing about good books is that you can enjoy re-reading them at intervals of five or 10 years.

At any rate, while re-reading Gilbert’s book, I took note of a certain pattern that some people with bad memories are condemned to repeat:

Few things are more likely to precede defeat than the conviction that you are on the verge of victory. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Germany had every reason to believe that it would triumph over its enemies in the First World War. France had been bled white in repeated attacks on the German army’s fortified lines, England was suffering from shortages of both munitions and military manpower, and Russia was descending into a revolution that would, within a year, enable Germany and its Austro-Hungarian allies to shift enormous numbers of troops and guns to the Western Front. Yet the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917, proved to be the counterweight that shifted the balance. By the autumn of 1918, the fond hope of Germany victory had been exposed as a delusion. The ultimate result of the Kaiser’s war was the destruction of the Kaiser’s empire, and of much else besides.
What is true in war is true also in politics. Hubris is nearly always the precedent to unexpected defeat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory; less than four years later, LBJ could not even win his own party’s nomination for re-election. In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; less than two years later, he was forced to resign from office. More recently, after George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election, some imagined that this victory was the harbinger of a “permanent Republican majority” — a GOP electoral hegemony based on a so-called “center-right” realignment — but two years later, Democrats captured control of Congress and in 2008 Barack Obama was elected president. Obama’s success in turn led Democrats to become overconfident, and Hillary Clinton’s supporters believed they were “on the right side of history,” as rock singer Bruce Springsteen told a rally in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election. Unfortunately for Democrats, history disagreed. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

 

Category: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, History

Full-Length Laser Cats Film?

Posted on | April 6, 2017 | Comments Off on Full-Length Laser Cats Film?

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized

Coming This (Down)Fall: #RiceCapades

Posted on | April 5, 2017 | Comments Off on Coming This (Down)Fall: #RiceCapades

by Smitty


I’ve been pretty much wrong with every thing I’ve ever predicted, politically.

Undaunted, let me offer the following rough outline:

  1. Trump has Congress appoint a special prosecutor.
  2. They do a thorough investigation of #OccupiedResoluteDesk’s abuses, direct and indirect.
  3. They publish a redacted copy.
  4. Trump pardons Obama.

Think about it:

  • Obama wants to go to court. He can drag out every last bit of punctuation in court, while his thralls tear up the country.
  • Trump has far more to lose than to gain by actual litigation. What are you raaaaacists actually going to do to Teh One?
  • By just putting it out there and pardoning Obama, Trump executes irrefutable judgement on Obama. And Donald can claim healing, bi-partisanship, hugs, and cupcakes.

(image source)

Category: Barack Obama

In The Mailbox: 04.05.17

Posted on | April 5, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.05.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Hidden Bible Trick Helps Remove Unwanted Belly Fat
Michelle Malkin: The Northwestern University Rape Outbreak That Wasn’t
Twitchy: Congressional Candidate Brianna Wu Already In Trouble With The FEC
Louder With Crowder: Nigel Farage Throws Down, Calls Leftist EU “Mafia Gangsters”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: One Ring To Bind Them All
American Power: Sheriff Joe’s Tent City For Illegals In Pink Underwear Closed Down, also, Lawrence Culver’s The Frontier Of Leisure
American Thinker: Real Collusion – The Clinton And Podesta Record
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Bring The HEAT: MC-12S EMARSS
Da Tech Guy: Cernovich v. MSM – Drudge Clinton II Or Tina Brown Newsweek II
Don Surber: Trump Trolling Forced The Media To Cover Obamagate
Dustbury: To Which We Do Not Yet Aspire
The Geller Report: Silencing/Starving Out The Opposition – The Demonetization Of Google Ads/YouTube Is Underway; Dissidents Will Be Silenced
Hogewash: Cassini’s Grand Finale, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Shocker! Illegal Alien Crossings Into America Plummet Under Trump
Joe For America: Whoopi Wimps Out On Promise To Move To Canada If Trump Wins
JustOneMinute: Thinking The Unthinkable
Power Line: One More Sign That Liberals Have Lost Their Minds, also, Listen To Ilhan Omar Or Else
Shark Tank: Florida Legislature Takes Aim At Public School Testing Laws
Shot In The Dark: Speaking Justice To Power
STUMP: Exactly How Screwed Are Chicago Pensions?, also, Rhode Island Pensions – Let’s Be A Happy Family!
The Jawa Report: Why Hello Pat, also, Where’s Vinnie?
The Political Hat: Woke Babysitting
This Ain’t Hell: Dan Rather, The Phony Marine
War Is Boring: The Demobilization Of Permanent-War America
Weasel Zippers: Schumer Says Trump Should Have Consulted Senate Dems Before Picking Supreme Court Nominee, also, NYPD Defies Bill De Bolshevik’s Sanctuary Promise
Megan McArdle: The New Party Of “No”
Mark Steyn: Steyn Live In Ottawa!, also, There’ll Always Be An England


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Category: Linkagery

Destroy #HeartProgress

Posted on | April 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

“Together we can fight for a better tomorrow. One where pedosexuals, homosexuals, and many other genders can live in a society where they can be themselves and are protected from bigotry, racism, and xenophobia.”
— “Heart Progress,” on YouTube.com, Jan. 1, 2017

Tuesday, while I was working on a column for the American Spectator, I checked Twitter and encountered the outrage involving a hashtag, #HeartProgress, that is being used to promote pedophilia. As conservatives have long predicted, the crusade for the normalization of homosexuality (the LGBT “rights” movement) has encouraged pedophiles to make similar arguments for their own sexual “rights,” seeking to add “P” for pedophile to the acronym: LGBTP.

The people promoting #HeartProgress — including Ernst Steiner, Clive Martin and Eric Lewin — are making arguments so offensive that I almost suspect them of being trolls attempting to provoke an angry response. Yet we know that there are indeed such people in the world and I reported on the pro-pedophile activism movement before, so what arguments would we expect these freaks to make, other than the ones that Steiner, et al., are now making on Twitter? That is to say, they are claiming that hostility to pedophiles is a form of prejudice, like “racism” and “homophobia,” which must be eradicated for the sake of equality and progress.

Here’s the correct response to that argument: “Racism” and “homophobia” are not illegal. You have a right to your own opinion. No one has the authority to tell you what you are allowed to think. For many years now, I have watched conservatives foolishly attempt to defend themselves against accusations of “racism” and “homophobia” by issuing denials. However, the correct way to defeat this tactic is to answer the accusation with a question: “What do you mean by that word?”

What is “racism,” after all? What is intended by slinging this word around haphazardly, as the Left now does, so that it seems everybody and everything can be condemned as “racist”? You voted for Trump? You’re a racist — RAAAAACIST! (There Are 5 A’s in “RAAAAACIST”).

Assuming that you have not been engaging in violence or illegal discrimination against people on the basis of race, nor advocating such lawless infringement of people’s right to life and liberty, what is the justification for some stranger to accuse you of “racism”? And while we’re asking questions, let’s ask this: What is the authority of your accuser?

Who has appointed this person to go around monitoring you for evidence that you may be guilty of politically incorrect Thought Crimes?

This is really what is at issue in most accusations of “racism” — or “sexism” or “homophobia” — in the 21st century. Assuming that you haven’t joined the KKK or painted swastikas on a synagogue or committed some other overtly hateful act, why are you being targeted by this accusation, and who is the person playing Thought Crimes prosecutor?

Andrew Breitbart often responded to his critics by saying, “So?”

Some left-wing fanatic would get up in his face trying to engage in character assassination — because liberals assume that all conservatives must be Bad People — and Andrew would say: “So? What’s your point?”

This is what conservatives need to learn about rhetorical combat. The leftists love to play the role of Thought Crimes prosecutor, to scour around for some evidence that their targeted opponent is a bigot, a “hater,” so that they can discredit them through character assassination. That’s what they tried to do to Clarence Thomas, and it’s a game they keep playing because they know it puts conservatives on the defensive. And the way to fight back against this tactic is . . . don’t be defensive.

If your conscience is clean, and you know you are not a “hater” (or at least you are no more prejudiced than the person pointing the finger of accusation at you), then stop acting as if you are guilty. Turn the accusation around and question the motives of your accuser.

Cui bono? Who benefits? What advantage is your accuser seeking to gain by this unjust and slanderous accusation against you?

This is why I don’t worry about being accused of “homophobia,” because the people who make such accusations have no authority. That is to say, no one who actually knows me would think I am the kind of person who goes around insulting or attacking homosexuals, and any claim that I am afflicted with an irrational fear (which is what “phobia” means) is manifestly absurd. If by such an accusation, someone means to say that I am generally in favor of heterosexuality, well, why wouldn’t I be? And shouldn’t everybody? Whatever your own personal preferences or private behavior might be, doesn’t society have an interest in the encouragement of heterosexuality? Yet I am not here to engage in such an argument — I think no argument is necessary, as the truth of the matter seems quite self-evident — but rather to say that a common prejudice in favor of heterosexuality ought not be regarded as evidence of “homophobia.”

For many years, I have watched as gay activists have hijacked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement in a way that was clearly dangerous — and, I would add, entirely unnecessary. The claim that gay people were suffering unjust oppression prior to Lawrence v. Texas (2003) was absurd, and as a matter of public policy and constitutional law, I think everything Justice Scalia said in his dissent in that case was correct.

Here we are then, in 2017, and we find #HeartProgress flying the rainbow flag in favor of pedophile “rights.” Do you see now that conservatives were not wrong in warning against the slippery slope? We were not paranoid, or promoting slanderous stereotypes, when we warned that the arguments for the normalization of homosexuality would, as night follows day, be used to justify or excuse child molestation.

Like I keep saying: People need to wake the hell up.



 

Category: Crime, Gays, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 0404.17

Posted on | April 4, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 0404.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Halfway There
EBL: Susan Rice Looks Good In Orange
Twitchy: Because She’s NEVER Lied In An Interview Before – Susan Rice Claims “I Leaked Nothing To Nobody”
Louder With Crowder: Marvel Exec Admits Changing Characters For Diversity Was A Bad Move


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Mark Latham, Public Internet Beggar
American Power: Candice Jackson Appointed To Lead Education Dept. Office Of Civil Rights
American Thinker: Benghazi Liar Susan Rice’s Treachery Continues
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Icons Of Rock News
Bring The HEAT: H.R. McMaster Only Authorized To Stay In 3-Star Hotels For Government Travel
Da Tech Guy: The Unexpectedly Chronicles – Silence Is Suddenly Golden For Left/Media
Don Surber: Like Watergate 44 Years Ago, Obama’s Scandal Slowly Unfolds
Dustbury: It’s A Round Here Somewhere
The Geller Report: Nightclub Closed After Muslim Call To Prayer Dance Remix Sparks Outrage
Hogewash: All The President’s…Men?
Jammie Wearing Fools: Fake News Leader CNN Rushes To Susan Rice’s Defense
Joe For America: Illegal Immigrant Humiliated When She Pretends To Pay Her Taxes
Power Line: Science v. Dogma On Climate
Shark Tank: Rep. De Santis Asks Trump To Revoke Congressional Obamacare Subsidies
Shot In The Dark: The Russians Are Coming!
STUMP: Mortality Monday – How High Can Omega Go?
The Jawa Report: ISIS Attacks St. Petersburg, Russian Retribution Swift & Brutal
The Political Hat: Venezuela On A Knife Edge
This Ain’t Hell: SecVA Shulkin Wants To Fire Pr0n-Watching Employee
War Is Boring: The Bloodstained Rise Of Global Populism
Weasel Zippers: WaPo Opinion Writer Claims More Newspaper Jobs Than Coal Jobs Lost, also, Justice Department Warns U.S. Companies Not To Discriminate Against American Workers
Megan McArdle:
Mark Steyn: The Tragedy Of The Commons, also, Russian To Judgment


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Category: Linkagery
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