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I appeared on Silvio Canto Jr.'s talk show from Dallas last night.  It's here.

OCTOBER 24,  2011

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 9:54 P.M. ET: 

THEY KNOW – Despite all the sugarcoating going around, the Iraqi people appear to understand full well the implications of Obama's total withdrawal of America troops by year's end.  Some 73% of Iraqis polled say the withdrawal will mean that Iran will act more aggressively toward their country.  And 51% believe their security situation will get worse once the Americans leave.  Only 22% say the Iraqi military could protect the nation's borders with the Americans gone.  I wonder if they've figured these things out in the White House.  I wonder if they care.  I wonder if the military decisions are being made by Obama's political staff in Chicago.

DON'T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA – Cristina Kirchner has been reelected president of Argentina in a landslide.  Kirchner is a bit of a pain in the neck.  She has stressed her country's demand for sovereignty over the British-held Falkland Islands, which Argentinians call the Malvinas, and which Maggie Thatcher defended so valiantly in 1982.  Her large reelection victory almost assures that she will try to exert major pressure on Britain to negotiate away its sovereignty.  British prime ministers have given her no cause for optimism.  The British assertion of sovereignty is as strong now as 30 years ago.  Naturally, the Obama administration's stand is mush.  Obama should stand with our close ally, Britain, but won't.

PERRY ROARS BACK – We've been critical of Rick Perry here for a lackluster first month of campaigning, but he is fighting back.  Today he unveiled a remarkably well-done proposal for a flat tax, with provision to opt out for those who want to keep their current rates.  This is common sense, and addresses the fear factor inherent in any tax plan.   Perry's plan also includes special provisions for those in low-income groups, answering the charge that a flat tax would be regressive.  Perry is also beefing up his staff with experienced Washington hands, expanding his vision beyond Texas, trying to fight the image of a local politician.  Good for Perry.  The man fights.

THE OCCUPIERS AND CRIME – Shootings in New York City have gone up dramatically since the Occupy Wall Street crowd appeared on the scene, and some high-ranking police officials think there's a connection.  The number of shootings two weeks ago soared 154% over last year's number.  The NYPD is complaining that anti-crime units are being pulled from critical assignments to control the "occupy" crowds.  At any one time, 10% of the force can be assigned to crowd control stemming from protests.  New York's modern anti-crime program, begun by Rudy Giuliani, has been spectacularly effective, and is a model for many other cities.  But now it's in danger of losing some of its effectiveness because police numbers are being overwhelmed.  Overwhelming the authorities to crash the system is an old technique of the political left.

October 24, 2011     Permalink   

YANK AMBASSADOR YANKED – AT 8:38 A.M. ET:  In a grim sign, the U.S. has pulled its ambassador out of Syria to protect him.  From The Politico:

Amid escalating protests in Syria after Muammar Qadfafi’s death, the United States pulled Ambassador Robert Ford out of Syria over the weekend due to concerns for his personal safety and accused the government of incitement against him, the State Department said Monday.

“Ambassador Robert Ford was brought back to Washington as a result of credible threats against his personal safety in Syria,” State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner said in a statement.

“At this point, we can’t say when he will return to Syria. It will depend on our assessment of Syrian regime-led incitement and the security situation on the ground. We hope that the Syrian regime will end its incitement campaign against Ambassador Ford,” Toner added.

The withdrawal of the American ambassador, which according to Reuters occurred over the weekend, comes during the seventh month of an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Demonstrations in Syria escalated over the weekend after the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

“Gadhafi is gone, and you’re next, oh butcher,” Syrian protesters chanted Friday in protests, according to the AP, adding, “Your turn is coming, Bashar.”

COMMENT:  We should pull all Americans out of Syria to prevent a hostage situation from developing.  Then, along with our allies, we should make clear that Assad will quickly suffer the same fate as Gadhafi, probably while dressed just as badly, unless change comes to Syria and it distances itself from its buddy, Iran.  Breaking up the Iran-Syria axis is critical to American interests in the Mideast.

Then we'd have to worry about what comes next, which is now a very real worry as a civilization stuck in the Middle Ages tries to advance.

October 24, 2011        Permalink

AND MORE WARNINGS FROM A GUY WHO'S BEEN THERE – AT 8:18 A.M. ET:  Building on our first two posts this morning, a seasoned general is bluntly warning that Obama's plan to withdraw forces from Iraq is a disaster.   We will pay a price.  From the Washington Times:

President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.

Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.

Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.

“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”

U.S. troops will be vacating Iraq at a time when neither Baghdad’s counterterrorism skills nor its abilities to protect against invasion are at levels needed to fully protect the country, say analysts long involved in the nearly nine-year war.

“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.

“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”

COMMENT:  Blunt, truthful talk.  Obama will argue that he tried to keep troops in Iraq, but the Iraqis wouldn't agree to our requirements.  Others, and it's pretty clear that Keane is among them, believe we could have reached an agreement if Obama's heart was in it.  But now Obama can say that he ended the Iraq War, which will play well in the sandboxes of the left.

The key element here, of course, is our failure to cut the Iranian regime down to size.  The Tehran terrors feel they have the run of the Mideast.  They are unafraid because we have made them unafraid, and they are enveloping Iraq with their special kind of love.

October 24, 2011       Permalink

GRAHAM WARNS ON SECURITY – AT 7:58 A.M. ET:  Some Republicans don't like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – apparently he isn't pure enough – but Graham has been a stalwart on national security.  And now he is warning that he are taking our eye off the ball, with potentially catastrophic consequences. 

As we pointed out yesterday, the 1960s crowd at The New York Times labeled Graham a fearmonger, but in fact he's on the button, and we'd better start listening.  From Fox:

Countering conventional wisdom that President Obama's foreign policy successes bolster the president's credentials ahead of the 2012 election, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that the Republican presidential candidates must be more forceful in challenging his decisions.

"To the Republican Party: national security matters, step up on it. ... We've got a jobs problem. We've got a national security problem that is growing by the day," Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Sunday."

Graham credited the president with killing Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden and supporting the overthrow (and death) of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, but, by Graham's account, the president has failed by allowing Tehran to get a leg up in Iraq and get that much closer to nuclear weapons.

Obama has thrown Israel "under the bus," Graham said; he has blown his policy on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and has made a politically expedient decision to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 2012, before the election.

Obama's decisions are being "run out of Chicago, not Washington," Graham said.

"At the end of the day these are decisions President Obama has made. I think they are strategically unsound and I think we'll need to step up and challenge him," he said.

COMMENT:  Sadly, foreign- and defense policy have been played down thus far in the campaign.   The economy dominates, as it did in America in the years before World War II.  Also, sadly, part of the Republican Party is turning neo-isolationist, a catastrophe for this country.  Graham has warned that the party of Ronald Reagan may be no more, a jolting statement.

I'm glad Lindsey Graham is speaking out, and speaking to his own party.   There are other things in politics besides the tax code.

Our foreign policy under Obama is incoherent.  It goes every which way, to good actions like taking out bin Laden, to very bad actions like appeasing the Iranian and North Korean regimes.  It's a foreign policy on the cheap.

October 24, 2011       Permalink

SOME ACTUAL REPORTING, READ ALL ABOUT IT – AT 7:37 A.M. ET:  Tunisia voted yesterday, in the first independent election since the "Arab spring" started in that country. 

We're being fed a line that the Islamist party expected to get the most votes is just a sweet, moderate group, nothing to worry about.  But some excellent reporting in the Jerusalem Post paints a very different picture, a picture we're not getting through the "sophisticated" lenses of mainstream American or European journalism:

Western media routinely describe Tunisia’s Ennahda party as “moderately Islamist.” The once-banned movement’s own past, however, reveals a tendency to violence, and its current platform raises serious questions about the role of Islam in arguably the Arab world’s most secular state.

Ennahda, or “Renaissance” has its roots in the Islamist university groups that proliferated in the Muslim world’s universities following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The party was officially founded in 1989, two years into the 14-year reign of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Two years later Ben Ali banned the party, and over the course of his term jailed tens of thousands of its leaders.

Ennahda was legalized in January of this year, following Ben Ali’s ouster in a month-long popular revolt. One thousand supporters welcomed back the party’s founder and leader, 70-yearold Rachid Ghannouchi, on his return to Tunis from European exile in January.

The Islamist party now appears set to take a majority, or at least a plurality, in the Arab world’s first post-revolutionary elections. Ballots were held Sunday and results are expected the following day.

Ennahda presents itself to outsiders as nonviolent, but the movement’s members have been implicated in both incitement and violent actions against Tunisian and foreign targets.

The party supported the 1979 embassy takeover in Iran, and evidence suggests it was responsible for bombing four tourist hotels in the 1980s. In 1991 its operatives attacked the headquarters of Ben Ali’s party, killing one person and throwing acid in the faces of several others, and that same year Ghannouchi called for attacks on US interests in the Middle East in response to America’s invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War.

COMMENT:  But watch the usual suspects in Washington whitewash the whole thing.  I can just see the old Arabists, clinging to their illusions to the last, testifying before Congress that this Tunisian group really is moderate and has "evolved." 

You know, that guy in Germany with the little mustache doesn't really mean what he says.  It's the land of Beethoven and Brahms.

We can ask ourselves, however, why groups like this are voted into power whenever Arabs get their first chance at democracy.  It has a great deal to do with what people are taught...in schools and by the media.  Sadly, our own press never tells us much about Muslim educational systems or the kind of media that exists in these countries.  The aforementioned Hitler told the world that all he needed was the minds of youth, and he would produce the kind of society he wished.  For too many years we have ignored what was being taught in these backwater countries.  And we've ignored it in our own.

October 24, 2011     Permalink

OCTOBER 23,  2011

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 10:41 P.M. ET:

REAL CLASS – The deterioration of The New York Times continues, marked in part by a failure of self-control.  Responsible newspapers write responsibly.  In an editorial on prisoner policy today, The Times's notoriously leftist editorial board referred to "the usual gang of fearmongers, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman..."
What a disgrace.  Agree with them or not, those are three of the most knowledgeable authorities on national security in the U.S. Senate.  They are not a gang, nor are they fearmongers.  The Times is engaged in a modern-day McCarthyism.  In addition, The Times today continues its tradition of running a hit piece on any Republican who rises in popularity.  The paper is running a piece "exposing" Herman Cain's past.  It seems, shock, he spent some time in lobbying.  Should we call the cops?  The meter maids?  The Times devotes special attention to blacks, women or Hispanics who stray.

SETBACK – The interim leader of Libya has announced that the post-Gaddafi country would be run in accordance with Sharia law.  Already a law has been lifted banning polygamy.  So men, get a bunch of engagement rings.  I recommend six.  This move toward fundamentalist Sharia is a setback for Libya's young idealists, who clearly had a secular, democratic state involved.  It is also a setback for the West, which could easily wind up with a state more dangerous and hostile than the one run by Gaddafi  This occurs as we await the results from Tunisia's elections today, where Islamists are also expected to do well in a country generally considered secular.  We've got to watch the Arab spring with two eyes.

LOOK AT THE ROLE MODELS– A new, discouraging report says that the number of African-Americans entering science and engineering is dropping, not growing as one would expect from all the affirmative action programs available.  Although blacks make up 12% of the population, they receive only 7% of the science bachelor's degrees, 4% of master's degrees, and 2% of Ph.D.'s.  The report gives a number of theories as to why the statistics are so gloomy, but I would say, from what I've observed, that culture – what gets rewarded in a community, who gets looked up to – is at the heart of it.  A disproportionate number of science degrees goes to Asian-Americans, who come from social groups that revere learning, especially in the sciences.  The parent, remember, is the first teacher.

October 23, 2011       Permalink

SNIPPET OF THE DAY – AT 12:10 P.M. ET: 

From the Financial Times:  The Queen is coming perilously close to joining millions of her subjects in “fuel poverty” as energy bills for four palaces and a draughty castle absorb a rising share of her income...The Queen herself prowls the corridors, switching off superfluous lights, a Buckingham Palace employee said.

I'm sure Barack Obama will send Her Majesty a case of those new energy-efficient bulbs we're now required to buy.  Or at least candles. 

RIGHT OUT OF THE SIXTIES – AT 11:52 A.M. ET:  One of the most prominent memories of the sixties was the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. 

So, when I see demonstrators confronting cops in Chicago, I recall those days.  Ah yes, I remember it well.

The "occupy" movement has hit Chicago, and the inevitable arrests have begun.  The movement, in many cities, is becoming increasingly unruly and in some cases violent.  We should watch carefully what is happening because we may well see a repeat at next year's political conventions.  From Fox: 

CHICAGO – Anti-Wall Street demonstrators of the Occupy Chicago movement stood their ground in a downtown park in noisy but peaceful defiance of police orders to clear out, prompting at least 100 arrests early Sunday, authorities said.

Occupy Chicago spokesman Joshua Kaunert vowed after the arrests that protests would continue in the Midwest city.

"We're not going anywhere. There are still plenty of us," Kaunert told The Associated Press after the arrests, which took police more than an hour to complete.

Elsewhere in the nation, police reported 11 arrests overnight in the Occupy Cincinnati protests. Police said those arrested had stayed in that city's Fountain Square after Sunday's 3 a.m. closing time and each was charged with criminal trespass.

In Chicago, police began taking people into custody just before 1 a.m. Sunday. Those arrested were led in groups to vans and two large white buses as others clamored to be arrested.

COMMENT:  What is sad is that there are plenty of things to criticize about the operation of the economic system.  There is plenty of corruption to go around.  But, as usual, the left finds it necessary to descend to the lowest level of adolescent grossness.  Instead of getting intelligent arguments we get crude behavior and irrational screaming.  Then they wonder why they don't get anywhere.

In fact, a startling high number of Americans – some 37% in a new poll – support the basic complaints of the occupy movement.  That number will erode, though, as the movement destroys itself and makes a mockery of its own beliefs.

But wait 'til next year.  The conventions may be a lot more interesting than usual.

October 23, 2011       Permalink

A LITTLE UNFASHIONABLE TRUTH FOR A CHANGE – AT 10:57 A.M. ET:  One of the more distorted stories of our time is South Africa.  The standard media narrative is that South Africa was all about apartheid, which it bravely threw off.  Once that happened, the country was given a kind of statehood.  No questions asked, no doubts allowed.

In fact, South Africa is a disgrace.  It is a crime-ridden society where rape is the crime of choice.  Although ostensibly a democracy, it doesn't lift a finger to advance democracy in Africa.  It was an ally of Muammar Gaddafi.  Now South Africa once again shows its true colors...or its one true color – red.  From Reuters:

Given that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner and given the close relationship between Beijing and the ruling African National Congress, it didn’t come as a huge surprise that South Africa was in no hurry to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama.

Tibet’s spiritual leader will end up missing the 80th birthday party of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a fellow Nobel peace prize winner. He said his application for a visa had not come through on time despite having been made to Pretoria several weeks earlier. (Although South Africa’s government said a visa hadn’t actually been denied, the Dalai Lama’s office said it appeared to find the prospect inconvenient).

Desmond Tutu said the government’s action was a national disgrace and warned the President and ruling party that one day he will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government.

Tutu himself is no prize.  He hasn't done a thing of value in almost 30 years.

It’s the second time the Dalai Lama has been unable to honour an invitation to South Africa by Tutu after failing to make it to a meeting in 2010.

South Africa will certainly win more plaudits in Beijing, which last week agreed to $2.5 billion in investment projects with during a visit by South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.

But pro-Tibet activists say South Africa is undermining its credentials as a country of freedom and democracy, established after the end of white minority rule a generation ago.

COMMENT:  What credentials?  Freedom House, a center in New York for the study of democracy, has ranked the democracies of the world in terms of their devotion to human rights in their foreign policies.  South Africa was at the bottom.

We get very little real reporting on what South Africa has become.  Criticism of the country doesn't fit the approved narrative of fashionable journalism.  I doubt if it will change until South Africa descends into violence, which is bound to happen.

October 23, 2011       Permalink

THE ARAB SPRING HAS SPRUNG – AT 10:39 A.M. ET:  The first free election since the Arab revolts is being held today in Tunisia, where the Arab spring began.  Tunisia is a pretty moderate country, but there are still fears that the Islamists will hijack the revolution. 

TUNIS, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Tunisian voters poured into polling stations to vote on Sunday in their country's first free election, 10 months after a vegetable seller set fire to himself in an act of protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings.

The leader of an Islamist party predicted to win the biggest share of the vote was heckled outside a polling station by people shouting "terrorist" -- highlighting tensions between Islamists and secularists that are also being felt in other countries touched by the Arab Spring.

Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, prompted by his despair at poverty and government repression, provoked mass protests which forced President Zine al-Abidine to flee Tunisia. This in turn inspired revolts in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the moderately Islamist Ennahda party, took his place in the queue outside a polling station in the El Menzah 6 district of the capital.

"This is an historic day," he said, accompanied by his wife and daughter, who were both wearing hijabs, or Islamic headscarves. "Tunisia was born today. The Arab Spring was born today."

But as he emerged from the polling station, about a dozen people shouted at him: "Degage" French for "Go away," and "You are a terrorist and an assassin! Go back to London!"

Ghannouchi, who spent 22 years in exile in Britain, has associated his party with the moderate Islamism of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. He has said he will not try to impose Muslim values on society.

But the party's rise is worrying Tunisia's secularists who believe their country's liberal, modernist traditions are now under threat.

COMMENT:  I love the reporter's term "moderate Islamism of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan."  Does the reporter read the papers?  Erdogan has emerged as an ally of Iran and an Islamic militant.  The people of Tunisia have reason to be worried if this other "moderate" Islamist gains power.

If the Islamists get a serious foothold in Tunisia, it won't be a good omen for other Arab countries like Egypt or Libya, where Islamist forces are even stronger.

October 23, 2011     Permalink