Email Address Change
Regular readers may have noticed that the block of text at the top of the right column of the template of this blog has disappeared. It contained the Expansionist Party's email address at America Online. Unfortunately, that account was hacked a couple of months ago. Whoever did it locked me out, and AOL's insane procedures kept me from recapturing an email account I had had since perhaps 1993. Someone dared to change my mother's maiden name in AOL's records, and AOL didn't find that suspicious. The info AOL required me to provide either to recapture or to close down that screenname — which info might also have been changed by whoever stole that account (e.g., the number of the credit or debit card I last used to pay for service) was so old that I would have no record of it. I dropped my paid service years ago, and credit and debit card numbers change over the years, even with the same account.
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The woman on the fone asked about my home address, and I provided my current address and the last two before that, but that info did not match their records — or they did not actually HAVE any such records. Perhaps this was an inside job within AOL's current employees, or by a former employee who knew how to alter information at AOL.
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That AOL supervisor wouldn't say whether they did or did not actually have home-address info, even tho she asked for it. But how could they have such info but it didn't match what I told her by fone? I have had only 3 addresses in 37 years! But that woman said their records did not reflect any of those addresses. So I could not recapture that account.
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Nor could I figure out where the block of text atop this blog's template was stored, to change the email address there. That text did not appear in the template's HTML code, and it took a while for me to figure out how to delete that block (thanks to some research by XP's British coordinator, Jeremy P., which pointed me in the right direction). So I have been able to delete that old email address from this blog. I also deleted it from XP's small, interim website on Tripod.com (the webhost for our domain-name website, which was very big, malfunctioned, and I could not update anything, so I had to abandon that site too! — the Internet is such a MESS nowadays). But the old email address is still getting messages. I can see the number increment in the list of my AOL screennames, even tho I cannot log onto that screenname. I hope, but do not know for sure, that no one is carrying on email correspondence, pretending to be the Expansionist Party, and misrepresenting our stances, soliciting contributions, etc. The new, incoming emails I cannot see may all be spam, for all I know. At least I hope so.
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A Google Blogger support page gives info about how to put manual text into the template, but I have not had time to read and try out those instructions, and cannot say when I will be able either to put in manual text or figure out where Blogger was pulling the text that was atop the right column from, and revise it there, to be pulled up automatically in a revised template.
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In any case, if you would like to communicate with the Expansionist Party, please do so via the email address USExpansionists @ gmail . com . And if you have received suspicious email from XPUS @ aol . com within the past few months, disbelieve it — and forward it to me so I can know what is being said thru the hijacked email account I can neither access nor delete.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:58 PM

 
246 Filibusters = Obama Policies Blocked, Republican Policies in Place
I sent the following message today, via feedback form, to the Obama Campaign:

"137 filibusters in 2009-2010 — and 109 since 2011 — means that OBAMA'S policies are NOT in place and cannot be blamed for the economic mess we suffer. You MUST stop letting the Republicans pretend that they cooperated in bipartisan harmony, and the Democrats could have passed anything they wanted in 2009 and 2010. That is a lie. Why are you not CALLING them on that shameless, brazen LIE. You can LOSE unless you tell the people that what we have today are REPUBLICAN economic policies, not Democratic, because Republicans have used the filibuster 246 times during your Presidency to thwart everything you tried to do. ATTACK: demand an END to the filibuster, "holds", and everything else that has given us MINORITY — Republican — rule."

I don't think the general public appreciates in the slitest how many filibusters the Republicans have launched since President Obama took office. People know that Congress has been gridlocked, but the Republicans have, astonishingly, been successful in blaming both parties for a failure to work in bipartisan fashion, when it is only the Republicans who have refused to cooperate. Democrats have bent over backwards in trying to win Republican participation in finding real answers, broadly acceptable, to the Nation's shared problems, only to be kicked in the face over and over again. Is it any wonder that the Democrats are a toothless tiger? Almost all their teeth were kicked out when they were smiling nicely at the enemies of humanity, the very center of evil in the Western world, the Republican Party.
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The U.S. Senate website has an information page about how many filibusters were mounted in each 'Congress' (two-year session of Congress between elections). It shows that in the 111th Congress (2009-2010), there were 137 filibusters. There were only 91 attempts to break those filibusters, which means that 46 times, the Democratic majority didn't even TRY to overcome Republican obstruction. Of those 91 tries, only 63 succeeded. 63 from 137 = 74 times Republicans succeeded in blocking Senate action: 54% of the time (74 ÷ 137).
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In the 112th Congress, which is still going, the figures, so far (Congress can still act — or refuse to act — until just after the New Year, January 2nd), the numbers are 109 filibusters, 68 votes, 37 cloture votes that did shut down the filibuster; 109 – 37 = 72 times the Republicans succeeded in blocking Senate action, which = 66% of the time!
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So why aren't the Democrats placing the blame for Congressional gridlock and failed economic policies exactly where it belongs: on the Republicans? Why is the President not proclaiming to the world:

My policies are not in place. My policies are not to blame for the economy, because MY policies have been blocked by Mr. Romney's party. What we are suffering from now is REPUBLICAN economic policies: just let the Recession play out, and everything will be fine. Let every company that might go bankrupt, GO bankrupt. Let everyone who might lose their house, LOSE their house. That's the way the free market works, and it is the best of all possible economic systems, so you just have to rise during the booms and fall with the busts, because you can't do anything about the free market — because if you intervene, it's no longer the free market, and the blessings of the free market are so great that we have to accept the bad to get the good.
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At the very end of the last debate, Mr. Romney made the astonishing admission that "Government doesn't make jobs." His campaign has asserted this over and over again, and it's even on its website. The assertion is even more astounding on the website: "Hard-Working Americans Are What Create Jobs, Not Government". Think about that: "hard-working Americans" — not the idle rich. But Romney wants to cut taxes on the idle rich!
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Out of one side of his mouth, Mr. Romney says, "Government doesn't create jobs." Out of the other side of his mouth, however, Mr. Romney says "I will create 12 million jobs". How, if Government cannot create jobs? Oh, that's easy, just "get Government out of the way" and the magic of the marketplace will bring prosperity to everyone! If you believe in magic, vote for Romney. If you know that all "magic" is a con, vote against "magical" solutions to real problems.
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The unfortunate fact is that the last time Republicans were in charge of the Federal Government, they pushed Government so far out of the way that it did not regulate the insanely, irresponsibly risky behavior that produced a housing bubble and financial bubble, both of which burst, each making the other's fall faster, farther, and longer than either would have experienced alone. We can't get Government out of the way, because crazy, irresponsible rich people will destroy the economy again.
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Such people, thru their servants in Congress, have worked to prevent us from reining in the abuses that produced the Great Recession. Republicans have willfully done everything they could to OBSTRUCT my policies for the express purpose of prolonging the Great Recession — which they CAUSED in the first place — and deliberately hurting the working poor and middle class, so they could blame me and get this black man out of the White House.
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Don't be fooled. Republicans WANT ordinary people to be miserable. They want the poor and middle class to lose their jobs, lose their healthcare, and lose their houses, because Republicans are MONSTERS who cannot feel good about their lives of plenty and luxury — and indolence — unless other people are crushingly poor. They can't be happy unless YOU are UNhappy. And that goes for poor and lower-middle-class people in Red States at least as much as in Blue States. If anything, plutocratic Republicans hold the poor and economically distressed people of the Red States in GREATER CONTEMPT because they are so easily misled, by race-baiting, into voting against their own OBVIOUS interests. Don't play their game. Crush THEM, for a change.

If the Democrats REFUSE to make that case, it is very hard to believe anything but that they want to LOSE this election because they see horrendous things happening in the next year or two, for instance, (1) a second, worldwide, (Very) Great Depression that no one in the White House or Congress can do anything to stop, because its causes are outside our borders, and outside the reach of U.S. power; or (2) a nitemarish great war that Israel will start and attempt to drag the U.S. into, against Russia and China, with cyberwarfare attacks reaching deep into the heart of the U.S. "homeland" (that Fascistic term), wreaking vast disruption to power systems, banking networks, air-traffic control, and everything else that can be disrupted via the Internet — in every American home, business, and government office at every level, that is connected to the web. Perhaps security experts have advised that Israel will not pay any attention to U.S. demands that they not launch an attack that could produce World War III; and that the measures taken to date and that can be implemented before Israel attacks, will not protect us from cyberattacks of the most devastating sort. So it's better NOT to be in power when the you-know-what hits the fan than to be held accountable for things no one in the U.S. Government can prevent.
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If the Obama campaign permits Republicans to continue to blame "Obama's policies" for the prolongation of the Great Recession, you need to be worried. Very worried. Because the Obama campaign could win by a landslide, but seems not to want to.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:07 PM

 
Libya Attack and Other Trivia
My friend Joe in Belleville (a suburb of my city, Newark, NJ) sent me link to a news story, "Obama On Daily Show: President Defends Libya Response To Jon Stewart". I read it, then replied:

This is TRIVIA, and Obama should simply have said that there are 193 countries in the roster of nations — and ___ [number] of U.S. embassies and consulates on a planet of 7 billion people, all of them outside our borders. We do not control the planet, so cannot provide security for American emplacements everywhere on Earth, and it is absurd to suggest we can. We issue travel advisories to warn Americans of places that are too dangerous for them to go, but our career diplomats have to go to them anyway. One comment at the end of that story says U.S. diplomatic missions were attacked 10 times under Dumbya. I don't have any way to check that, but it seems credible.
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Obama has taken NO CREDIT, in this discussion, for ousting Muammar Khaddafi — who killed 259 Americans in the Lockerbie bombing during the [Republican] REAGAN Administration — with NATO action backed by the U.S. Why not? Again, it seems the Democrats do NOT want to win this election. I am very worried about what Democratic advisers see happening in 2013 that they don't want to be in charge for.
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I am very tired of this constant whining about tiny numbers. Four Americans were killed under Obama, overseas. Oh my GOD! 2,800 were killed AT HOME under Dubya [on 9/11]. 2,000 American military have been killed in Afghanistan in 11 years! Oh my GOD! 32,000 Americans are killed on our roads every year, with the lowest monthly figure being over 2,000.
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A dozen people get sick from E. coli, and the media are filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth; a few dozen die from tainted steroids, and again, the media go nuts. This is a country of 313M people. 2,437,163 died, from all causes, in 2009! The people of this country have got to grow the f* up and stop wailing about TRIVIA.

Sadly, no one in Government can say that these four deaths in Benghazi are trivia, and we cannot prevent all deaths. We need to remember that all life ends in death, and honor people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good, not pretend that we can protect everyone from everything.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
The Impending Suicide of the Christian Right
Atheists, Moslems, Buddhists, and "spiritual but not religious" secularists, rejoice! The Radical Right is about to gore itself on the horns of a dilemma.
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The choice this election is between a Protestant black man and a non-Christian white man. For the first time, the Christian Right can vote either race or faith, but not both. What will they do? What will they do?
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Will they evade the choice, and just not vote for President? If so, they consent to the re-election of that black man in the White House, but they will at least remain doctrinally pure.
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If they vote for the non-Christian, they are publicly accepting that religion should play no role in politics, which undoes their insistent teachings going back generations. They would very publicly embrace secularism.
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Or they can pretend that Mormonism is Christian, but that necessarily requires them to embrace the Book of Mormon not just as a new gospel but as a third Testament. Indeed, as the Newest Testament, the Book of Mormon would have to be embraced as correcting errors in the older Testaments ("Old", Jewish scriptures; and "New", Christian teachings), just as the New Testament corrected errors in the Old Testament.
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All evangelical churches will have to display the Book of Mormon with the present Bible, and all new Bibles will have to incorporate the Book of Mormon between the Bible's front and back covers, somewhere, equally with the Old and New Testaments.
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If a new Bible incorporates the Book of Mormon, should it do so by placing it at the end, as admission that it is newer, and therefore the literal "last word" on the will of God?
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Or could theologians look thru the current Bible and figure an appropriate place for the Book of Mormon, intact?
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Could they break up the Book of Mormon into its 'logical' parts and place chunks of it into different places scattered among present books of the Bible, in some arguably logical order? For instance, might it not fit after the Gospels that speak to the death and Resurrection of Jesus, so the narrative would now be that once Jesus was lifted up bodily (because the Tomb was empty of the body, not just the soul, of Jesus), Our Lord and Savior traveled the whole of the Earth, to teach the way of the Lord to people everywhere, including across a New World known to Him but not to the peoples of Palestine and the Roman Empire of that day?
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Oh, there are teachings in Mormonism that will be hard to reconcile with present Christian orthodoxy, such as that Jesus was not one with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and God Himself came from another planet with its own higher god. But if Christians can break down the 'One True God' of Jewish monotheism into a Trinity of three gods (or three faces of God, like the two faces of the Roman god Janus), and posit at one and the same time that Adam and Eve were the only people at the beginning of the world, but the human race did not arise from incest, I'm sure they can put forward diametrically opposed views and argue that they are completely consistent with each other — 'accept this in perfect faith of the Lord's mysterious ways'. And the people who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including that tricky Adam-Eve/other-people thing, will claim to believe that the traditional narrative and the Book of Mormon are fully consonant.
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But what if evangelicals don't WANT to accept the Book of Mormon as a new gospel that all Christians must accept?
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Then they must accept that Mormonism is NOT Christian, the Republican candidate for President is NOT a Christian, and anyone who votes for him votes to end the dominance in American politics of the Christian faith.
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However you think about it, if the Christian Right votes for the Mormon Mitt Romney rather than the Protestant Barack Obama, they are voting against Christianity, and thus demolishing everything they have worked so hard for all these decades, even centuries.
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So which will it be? The white heretic? Or the black Christian?
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To ease that stark choice, the Radical Right could say that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist, a seemingly nice man whose example leads true Christians astray into the old heresy of accepting that good deeds rather than faith in Jesus and acceptance of the purity and perfection of Christian doctrine bestows redemption, and it is that acceptance that will empower Romney to achieve dominion over the Earth and thus hasten the Second Coming of Christ. The election of Mitt Romney would thus mark the true beginning of End Times, and hasten the Rapture.
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Most Christians aren't looking forward to the world ending, but the Christian Right is not most Christians.
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Even if Mitt Romney should not be viewed as the Antichrist hastening the end of the world, he does threaten to produce End Times for the power of the Christian Right. Should they embrace the end of their secular power, and return to concerning themselves only with people's souls, not their politics?
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The Radical (political) Right is about tribe, not principle. You are either a member of the tribe, so can wander from supposed tribal principles yet still be accepted as a member of the tribe, or you are NOT a member of the tribe, and no principle you embrace will admit you to the tribe. The American Radical Right is a white tribe. It must hold together, and reject nonwhites, but especially blacks. It is thus an absolute, unequivocal duty to vote white. Voting black gets you booted out of the tribe.
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If race trumps faith, and the Christian Right "sells its soul to the Devil" — I don't believe in gods or devils, but people who do believe in the Devil say that Lucifer has many guises, and one of them could assuredly be a Mormon who would have Christians believe that Mormonism IS Christianity, so Christians can embrace heresy, estrange themselves from God, and thus consign their souls to the Devil — it cannot thereafter regain doctrinal purity. They will have sold their virginity to the highest bidder, and there is no such thing as a born-again virgin.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:11 AM

 
Romney's Sissy Walk
Why has there been so little talk about Mitt Romney's bizarre walk? He takes little-bitty strides of a very unnatural sort for a man of his height. That is obvious even when he is shown in isolation. But I recently saw Romney and Ryan walking side-by-side. They traversed the same distance, side-by-side. But Ryan walked with normal, relaxed, manful strides. Romney struggled to keep up, with little-girl steps barely more than half as long and almost twice as frequent as Ryan's. Why is that?
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It is extremely commonplace for very goodlooking men to be drawn to other very goodlooking men. Is Romney gay?
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Most very goodlooking men drawn to very goodlooking men are not, however, effeminate. Romney's manner, apart from his sissy walk, is not overtly fem. But his grotesquely inappropriate sissy walk has to make you wonder what is going on inside that pretty, but mainly empty, head.
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Perhaps like many men tempted toward homosexuality, Romney is adamant about keeping laws (such as DOMA, the so-called "Defense Of [heterosexual] Marriage Act") in place to keep them on the "straight" and narrow. But why would he think that a man attracted to men has to walk like a woman in stiletto heels?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Biden Rude?
I'm astounded at the brazenness of the Radical Right in condemning Vice President Biden for being "rude" to Congressman Paul Ryan in the debate in which Biden crushed that wicked twerp. Amazing. These are the very same people who for four years have been calling Barack Obama a foreigner, Muslim, Socialist, Communist, and every other thing they could think to call him except the one thing we all know they mean. The one word they didn't dare call Obama starts with N and ends five letters later with R. But Biden was rude!
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In all things political and moral, we can simplify the issue with a Hitler analogy. If Joe Biden had been debating Adolf Hitler, should he have been "respectful"? I don't think so. Paul Ryan wants to destroy Medicare, destroy Social Security, and undo a century of progress on all fronts, to leave half the country to the tender mercies of robber barons, to die of starvation and exposure on the streets, or beg for charity from the rich, or sign their freedom away to work for food and shelter alone, just to stay alive, but Vice President Biden, an honorable, caring man, is supposed to be "respectful" of that antihuman monster? No way in hell.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:06 PM

 
What Romney's '47%' Comment Actually Means
There seems to be a disconnect between what Mitt Romney said about the 47%, in his notorious fundraiser appearance in Boca Raton, Florida, May 17th, and what it necessarily means. Here's what Romney said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

I have seen no one land on the key passage, to explain what it inescapably means.

[these people] believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement.

This is what Romney's comments mean. When Romney complains about these people, what he is beyond question saying is that they are NOT entitled to anything. If someone cannot afford to buy his or her own food, or food for their children, they should starve to death, and their children should starve to death with them, or shortly after the parents perish.
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In Romney's view, no one is "entitled" to housing, so if they cannot pay a mortgage or rent, they should live on the streets, or in a car, if they have one, no matter the climate in winter.
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And if they cannot afford to pay for healthcare, they should get no healthcare! If they get sick, that's their problem. If they are involved in an accident, or fire, or are the victim of a crime, and have no health insurance, they should DIE, and get out of the way of 'decent working people' (and the rich, tho that is not to be said aloud) whom they are now parasitizing.
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Absent governmental assistance, all these 47% — 147 million people — should die or BEG for CHARITY from the rich. And the rich have no moral nor legal obligation to GIVE them CHARITY, because the rich have exclusive right to "their" money, and no one is entitled to take one cent of it without their approval.
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There's an even worse possible interpretation: a return to slavery, in which the rich will provide housing, food, and maybe even a little healthcare, but only if the poor indenture themselves to the rich and work for free, for as long as the rich demand, even to the end of their lives.
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147 Million Signs. What this country needs, in the view of 'people' like Romney and Ryan, is a return to slavery, or feudalist serfdom — whatever you want to call it — in which the poor and middle class are so reduced in circumstances that they will literally work without pay just to stay alive. Joe Biden was thus exactly right when he spoke of Republicans wanting to return blacks to chains.

But it's not just black people that the Radical Right wants to reduce to wage slavery, and debt slavery, and then actual, literal slavery. It's everyone who cannot, at any point in their lives, for any period whatsoever, take care of themselves, so suffer catastrophic economic devastation. If they have an accident and have no health insurance, so lose their savings and their house and their car, they should have no options but to sign themselves into bondage, whereupon the rich will take care of them, in a new, paternalistic, 'benign slavery'.
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There have in fact, in recent weeks, been aggressive defenses of slavery put forward by a few outspoken Southern Republicans. One Arkansas legislator recently called slavery "a blessing in disguise". Not all the pro-slavery propaganda is recent, just recently discovered, such as rhetoric going back to 2003 on the part of another Arkansas Republican, who called Abraham Lincoln a "Marxist". This is consistent with the endless drumbeat of Radical Right propaganda we have suffered during the entire Obama Presidency that calls Obama a "Marxist" too. Apparently, freedom is "Marxist"; slavery is a legitimate form of ownership of property.
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To put the great preponderance of Americans into slavery, the rich are contriving to destroy the domestic economy by opening up the U.S. market to unfair competition from countries whose pay rates are properly, if ironically, termed "slave wages", and by shipping abroad every job that can possibly be exported, so that a "race for the bottom" produces universal penury for the Nation's workforce. Not one single job is safe from this plan except retail sales, from which the corporations of the rich derive their domestic income. Even there, most jobs can be eliminated by self-checkout kiosks, where one employee can oversee six, eight, ten, or even more checkouts that would otherwise have been staffed one-for-one by human beings. When the unemployment rate is 30%, 35%, or more, and the jobs that remain pay almost nothing and entail no benefits, then the bulk of workers will have no alternative but to sell themselves into slavery, simply to survive.
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Tho we would like to believe that no such intention could ever be carried out, it is beyond contention that real wages have dropped drastically in recent decades, personal debt has skyrocketed, millions of mortgaged houses are "under water", and jobs are still being exported. Now the Radical Right — which seems to think itself immune from creeping enslavement, even tho they are among the least educated and thus least fit to survive competition from automation and the export of jobs — wants to turn over all control of the economy to the rich, on the strange notion that the rich really have our best interests at heart, and if only we let them make and keep as much money as possible, they will take care of the rest of us. Sure they will: on industrial plantations, with slave cottages within walking distance of the factory, and elementary schools — slaves don't need high-school nor college education — right there in "the community". No busing required.
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Romney, Ryan, the Tea Party — tho you haven't heard that term recently, have you? They haven't gone away, but only taken over the entire Republican Party, so the two are now one, and the less disrespectable name is the one put out for public consumption — are working very hard to persuade voters that trickle-down economics really works! And the "white trash" of the Red States are so uneducated and so easily distracted by appeals to racism, that they don't even realize that they are subverting their own future. 'And then they came for me' means nothing to them, because they don't read and know nothing of history.
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How is it that Democrats cannot show rednecks in Red States that they are being played for fools, and destroying their own future in voting for Tea Party madness? Why can't Democrats tell rednecks, "You are so eager to keep the black man down and throw that black man out of the White House that you really don't see that when the Radical Right has driven Obama from the White House and destroyed progressive taxation and Social Security and Medicare, they will take you on too. Read something, and learn what educated people mean when they say, 'And then they came for me.'
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Battle of the Forearms
The Obama campaign has not called Romney on his preposterous, contemptible, rolled-up-sleeves visual suggestion that he is a working man rather than a member of the idle rich. Instead, President Obama has started to appear with his own sleeves rolled up. How stupid.
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Obama's spindly, hairless forearms are no match for Romney's gorgeous, muscular, hairy forearms. Obama, an ordinary man, is up against a catalog model. He can't win on looks. He has to win on substance. And he has to confront the phoney Romney on his disgraceful, RIDICULOUS, rolled-up-sleeves, subliminal BULLSHIT and force him to STOP IT.

Mr. Romney, you are not a farm worker. You have never in your entire life worked as a manual laborer. What is this CRAP of rolled-up sleeves? The "work" you do — running for an office for which you are profoundly unqualified — does not make your forearms sweat, nor get your lower sleeves dirty. You are a PHONY — 100% artificial, 0% organic. Nothing about you is genuine. You will do anything, say anything, wear anything to try to fool people into thinking you are just like them — even tho you are not remotely like ANYBODY but the 1% richest and most selfish people in the Nation.

You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you're not, because you HAVE NO SHAME. You are a sad, sad, little excuse for a man who NEEDS, desperately, to become President of the United States — not to advance any political ideology nor to do anything at all for the people of this country, or the world — which any President of the United States must think about — but because you, a sad, sad, tiny, despicable caricature of a man, NEED emotionally to make yourself feel as tho you count for something, which, absent becoming President, you DON'T. You never have mattered in the national discourse, in the six decades and more of your life. And if you lose this election, you will not endeavor thereafter to remain part of the national discourse on policy. Because you don't CARE about policy, or ideas, or the national interest. All you care about is YOU.

I don't know if you are trying to redeem your father, who failed in his own quest for the Presidency, or show your father up. That is, I don't know, and perhaps no one knows, whether you are trying to become President because of a sick, obsessive, and excessive love for your father, or a sick, obsessive, and excessive HATRED of your father, because you feel he didn't love you enuf. But whatever it is, it's not healthy — not for you, and certainly not for this Republic.

Whatever the personal dynamics behind your disgraceful run for an office you cannot possibly manage, it doesn't matter. Get professional help for your father-worship or father-hatred. But get the hell out of public affairs, because you have NOTHING to contribute. You would disappoint everyone who votes for you, because you have NO principles and will never fite for ANYONE. Once you achieve the Presidency, it's all over for you, emotionally. You don't have to DO anything at all thereafter. That's not what people expect of a President. YOU are not what people expect of a President. You are a disgrace, a sad, tiny man who should be in therapy, not in a race for the Presidency of the United States, which is vastly, incomparably more important than you ever were or ever will be.

As for a substitute for the Romney-ordered rolled-up-sleeves crap, if Obama really wants to compete subliminally, he's got to play more basketball and sing more great songs.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Afghan Nonsense — War on the Cheap
The U.S. military is a bunch of morons, total mental defectives, trying to fite a war on the cheap. A theater of operations that needs hundreds of thousands of men on the ground is being fought with 120,000 NATO troops, only 68,000 Americans, and we are supposed to be surprised that the war is not being won! Worse, when the war is going badly, the military presses on with plans to draw down the entire operation, even if that means failing in every regard! Idiots.
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What needed to be done was to send in a MILLION troops from many nations and go house to house searching for weapons and signs of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other guerrilla fiters, and shoot them all. After a month of such searches and summary executions, the bulk of forces could turn to training trustworthy Afghans for a competent national force to keep the savages suppressed. Within two months more (basic-training time and military education for Afghan officers by West Point and other military academics) the bulk of foreign forces could be withdrawn, and Afghanistan would be warned that if it regresses to a danger to the West, "We'll be back. And next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy."
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Let us compare Jengis Khan's conquest of, among other places, Afghanistan, which was accomplished by 1220 A.D. The descendants of Jengis Khan ruled Afghanistan for the next 600 years. So don't tell me that subduing Afghanistan is impossible.
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How did the tiny country of Mongolia conquer the largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world? Some years ago, I did some reading on this topic, and two of the answers are (1) extreme cruelty and the willingness to depopulate entire cities and regions to get their way, and (2) forced labor by conquered people, including compelled military service. The Mongols at times controlled armies in which Mongols as such were a small minority. But the great majority were unable to combine against their masters because they were fragmented, and the Mongols made plain that any mutiny would be met by mass death, including collective punishments by anyone who might have known about the plan but did nothing to stop it — even if, in fact, they did not know of an intended mutiny.
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In today's terms, the Mongols occupied the rear of the battle group, with their guns trained on their military slaves at the front of the battle group. They brooked no refusal to obey orders, and killed as many people (conscripts from conquered peoples) on their own side as they had to in order to maintain order and continue their conquests. Get the picture?
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American troops should not be walking in front of, nor alongside, unreliable Afghan troops that may have been infiltrated with Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Afghan military and police should be clear that if they try to kill Americans, they will be killed first and in punitive numbers. Any attack upon any American soldier or civilian worker will be treated as an attack on ALL Americans, collectively, and be met with countervailing collective punishment.
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Defeat the Taliban or We Will Treat You All as Taliban — and Kill You All! The U.S. should make perfectly plain that the reason we invaded Afghanistan was to COUNTERattack a Taliban regime that attacked us on 9/11, and that we will never permit the Taliban to return to power and thus be emboldened to resume training fanatics to attack the U.S. again. Ever.
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We need to tell Afghans that we want to save them from a return to the Taliban's theocratic totalitarianism, but know we cannot do it on our own. The people of Afghanistan will have to fite the Taliban to its utter destruction. Warn them that if, thru passivity or co-conspiracy, the people of Afghanistan do NOT destroy the Taliban, we will ANNEX all of Afghanistan to the United States, and never leave. Moreover, if even that does not suffice to end civilian consent to a Taliban takeover, we will DEPOPULATE Afghanistan by killing every single person over five years of age whose loyalty cannot be trusted, and replace them with Americans and immigrants from starving populations in the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and elsewhere. The name "Afghanistan" will be erased from history. Old regional terms used before the term "Afghanistan" emerged will be restored to use, and Afghanistan will, in Soviet-era style, be rendered a national "non-person", such that no one 80 years from now will ever have heard the word "Afghanistan".
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Mind you, the media-mourned U.S. death toll in Afghanistan is TRIVIAL. 2,000 in eleven years? That is only 2/3 of the people who died on the one day of 9/11 because of Afghanistan's Taliban and groups it assisted. It is 400 fewer than died in the one-day attack upon Pearl Harbor in 1941, when we had less than half the national population we have now. It may be less than 1/3 our death toll of another single day, the Normandy invasions on D-Day, June 6, 1944. (There is no universal agreement on the U.S. death toll that day, but it was almost certainly higher than 2,000.) I'm not impressed by 2,000 deaths over 11 years, esp. given that that is less than 1/15th the death toll from traffic accidents in the United States in a single year.
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Great decisions on defense of our civilization must not be made on the basis of maudlin sentiment exploited by enemies of the United States to drive us back inside our borders, and let things outside our borders explode to our mortal disadvantage.
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We must make plain to the people of Afghanistan that if we decide that it really is a question of You or Us who are to die, we will always choose to kill You rather than consent to have you kill Us. And that can very well mean ALL of you.
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We have the wherewithal. Afghanistan has many mountain-ringed valleys in which a single hydrogen bomb would wipe out the population of the entire valley. Not one American need be affected by the total obliteration of the Afghan population and then, 50 years later, repopulation of even the worst-contaminated sites by non-Afghan immigrants. Areas not attacked with nuclear weapons could be substantially depopulated by carpet-bombing and the use of other weapons of mass destruction, then repopulated, again, with the starving from other countries.
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We have tried restrained warfare. If that does not work, we MUST consider TOTAL WAR against Afghanistan. We should have no more regard for Afghans now than we had for Japanese in 1945. And the whole world must remember that we are the only country in the history of the world to have used nuclear weapons — and we can do so again.
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In 58 B.C., Julius Caesar invaded Helvetia (modern-day Switzerland) and commenced a horrendous war against the Helvetians, as the start of his conquest of Gaul. He says in his own writings (as I recall from high-school Latin) that he killed 40,000 Helvetians who refused to submit. The entire population of the world at the time may have been only 160 million. The Wikipedia article on the Helvetians says that 268,000 Helvetians, 70% of the pre-war number, may have been killed or forced out of their homeland by Caesar. That was part of the Roman Empire's defense against early barbarian invasions, and in conquering Gaul, Caesar laid the indispensable base of the Roman civilization that survives to this day in a community of nations and cultures called Western Civilization. In short, had Caesar not conquered Gaul, there is no way to know what the world of today would look like. We can be certain that the United States would never have come to exist, nor to build the great Roman building that is our national Capitol.
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Are Afghans our Helvetians? Helvetia was only a small part of Gaul, but it is the conquest of Gaul, which became the bulwark of the Roman Empire, that empowered Roman civilization to survive and transmutate into Western Civilization. Dare we, really, run like cowards with our tail between our legs from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? This is a clash, not of civilizations, but of civilization against barbarism. Civilization must never retreat. Barbarians must be defeated, and civilized. Those who refuse to become civilized must be crushed, which may well mean KILLED.
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We cannot retreat behind Fortress America. There is no wall so high nor thick to save us from the new barbarian hordes. So either we go out and fite barbarism to total defeat, with the Peace Corps as much as our war corps, or we face a world of ever-increasing violence and barbarism, once the savages realize that they have us on the run.
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The situation today cannot be compared to the U.S. withdrawal in disgrace from Southeast Asia in the face of a Communist advance, because "worldwide Communist revolution" was plainly failing, in that the system was rotting at its core. The collapse of the Soviet Union, as its own people repudiated it, meant that we no longer had to defend against worldwide revolution intent on conquering US someday. The collapse of that civilization ended the Cold War's myriad small wars of Communist aggression toward total world conquest.
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Here, the collapse of civilizations is exactly what the barbarians want. They want ALL civilizations to fail, so they can impose their own retrogressive religious and cultural standards upon the unwilling. There is no unifying ideology here, despite casual talk in some circles of reestablishing the Caliphate. The forces of regression don't want a single, brilliant civilization under a centralized government. They want tribalism to regain control of the entire planet. The modern world is too big, too complicated, too scary for them. They want to go back to a technological age in which disconnected, tiny units went their own way, that is, to the ways of centuries past. Such people are a minority everywhere. By far most people in every society want IN to the modern age, not OUT. And they want human rights, just like ours. In fiting the barbarians, we are fiting for the future of the Afghan people as much as for our own future security.
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We have our own retrogressive barbarians here at home, who are actively trying to take us back more than a hundred years, to before the income tax's intentional redistribution of wealth; before antitrust legislation; before governmental welfare; before Social Security; before Darwinism; before union rights, civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights; before anyone even thought to say "God is dead". No thinking! Just obey. Obey whom? Obey them, the backsliders, the retrogressers, for whom all truth is between the covers of a Judeo-Christian Bible in which the God of Wrath IS the God of Love (but the God of Islam is neither of those), and Adam and Eve were the only two people on Earth, but their children married other people! We thought we had defeated these irrational fools, in a century of constant progress. But here we are, a century and more later, and they are rebounding!
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We can be gentle with barbarians, and have them ever menace us. Or we can crush them into nonexistence, leaving them only one choice: civilize or die.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:30 PM