“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK.
For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava.
We can all look back at the wonderful decision that was made to send more troops to Korea. If we had not, we could have been bogged down in a quagmire there that would have required 50 plus years of American lives, involvement and money. What a wonderful decision it was to send more troops to Vietnam. If we had not, we could have lost over 58,000 soldier’s lives; killed millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians and been forced to flee the country with our tails between our legs, deserting our allies to the horrors of communist retribution. Good thing our wonderful leaders had the wisdom and courage to send “more troops.” Now we are forced with the same dilemma; send more troops or face military defeat.
According to Macedonian Radio and Television On-line (MRT), a Russian professor predicts the United States will fall apart in July 2010. MRT reports, “‘Mr. Obama is similar to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was also making great promises for the Soviet Union, but the situation was only getting worse,’ he said. By next summer, according to Professor Panarin, the US will disintegrate into six blocs–and everyone will get their piece. ‘The probability that the United States of America fall apart in July 2010 is more than 50 percent,’ said Igor Panarin, Professor at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy within the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
While America was consumed this summer with quarrels over town-hall radicals, “death panels”, the “public option” and racism’s role in the plunging polls of Barack, what happens to health care is not going to change the history of the world.
US Navy missile ships started arriving in Israel on Sunday ahead of next month’s joint missile defense exercise between the IDF and the American military’s European Command.
Officials say US may leave some systems in Israel after planned drill.
Called Juniper Cobra, the exercise will include the Arrow missile defense system as well as three American systems – the THAAD, Aegis and PAC3 – that will all be deployed in Israel for the duration of the exercise.
In August, the Georgian navy seized a Turkish tanker carrying fuel to Abkhazia, Georgia’s former province whose declaration of independence a year ago is recognized by Russia but not the West.
“In 1877, Lord Salisbury, commenting on Great Britain’s policy on the Eastern Question, noted that ‘the commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.’
“Salisbury was bemoaning the fact that many influential members of the British ruling class could not recognize that history had moved on; they continued to cling to policies and institutions that were relics of another era.”
“Relics of another era” — thus did Stephen Meyer, in Parameters in 2003, begin his essay “Carcass of Dead Policies: The Irrelevance of NATO.”
“The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops.
“I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means.”
“(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Said U.S. Commander Gen. David McKiernan yesterday, U.S. and NATO forces are “stalemated.”
Such admissions by our military and political leadership in a time of war call to mind other words heard back in 1951, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur delivered his farewell address to the Congress:
The day before Richard Holbrooke arrived in Kabul, eight suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the Justice and Education ministries, killing 26 and wounding 57.
Kabul was paralyzed, as the Taliban displayed an ability to wreak havoc within a hundred yards of the presidential palace.
The assault came as President Obama is both conducting a strategic review and deciding how many additional U.S. troops to send.
Earlier, there was talk of 30,000, bringing the U.S. total to 63,000. Now, there are reports Obama may commit no more than the three brigades promised in 2008, and only one brigade now.
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”
Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, Bush, by omission, excluded BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai — though all operate auto plants here in the United States and all are feeling the same sales slump.
The morning after Barack Obama’s election, the congratulatory message from Moscow was in the chilliest tradition of the Cold War.
“I hope for constructive dialogue with you,” said Russia’s president, “based on trust and considering each other’s interests.”
Dmitry Medvedev went on that day, in his first State of the Union, to charge America with fomenting the Russia-Georgia war and said he has been “forced” to put Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad to counter the U.S. missile shield President Bush pledged to Poland.
Medvedev had painted Obama into a corner. No new American president can be seen as backing down from a Russian challenge.
To: Gov. Sarah Palin
From: The American Conservative Editors
Re: What Your Tutors Aren’t Telling You
Congratulations on being chosen as John McCain’s running mate. It’s an honor, if a dubious one. As you know, conservatives have reservations about McCain. To your credit, they have few such concerns about you.
You’ve given new life to a party whose brand was bankrupt. You’ve energized a campaign that was embarrassing its own partisans. Across America, crowds flock to see you—not that old man who barely wheezed his way through the primaries. If John McCain wins, he will owe you, as the guy in the undisclosed location says, “Big time.”
On Sept. 30, 1938, 70 years ago, Neville Chamberlain visited Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, got his signature on a three-sentence declaration and flew home to Heston Aerodrome.
“I’ve got it,” he shouted to Lord Halifax. “Here is a paper which bears his name.” At the request of George VI, Chamberlain was driven to Buckingham Palace, where he joined the king on the balcony to take the cheers of the throngs below. An unprecedented honor.
Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?
Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain’s operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech.
Did they hypnotize her, or was that unnecessary?
by Justin Raimondo – AntiWar.com
I have to laugh at the brouhaha Sarah Palin’s ascension to national prominence has stirred, especially the consternation in the Obama camp and the media (or do I repeat myself?). One can only imagine the spittle-flecked computer monitors of the anti-Palinistas – especially Andrew Sullivan, whose hatred of the caribou-shooting gal from up north has even surpassed his once-infamous hatred of the peace movement, which he habitually smeared as a “fifth column” secretly working on behalf of Osama bin Laden. I get to laugh, because, being a right-wing antiwar type, I don’t have a dog in this fight.
It’s a good thing Pat Buchanan’s not dead. He’d be rolling over in his grave.
At the Republican convention, Buchanan was taken in by the mass hysteria surrounding Sarah Palin. But even as he cheered, Pat inserted a caveat. He feared that Palin would be brainwashed by the nutty neoconservatives whom Buchanan has dedicated his recent life to debunking.
Sure enough. On Thursday we heard Palin telling Charlie Gibson that “perhaps” it might be a good idea to go to war with Russia over Georgia and the Ukraine.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The American Right has just died and gone to heaven.
Last night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.
A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues — from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani — to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on Sister Sarah.
A year after taking power, in June 1934, Adolf Hitler made his first visit abroad — to his idol Benito Mussolini in Venice.
Babbling on incessantly about “Mein Kampf “and the Negroid strain in Mediterranean peoples, the Fuhrer made a dismal impression.
“What a clown this Hitler is,” Mussolini told an aide.
Two weeks later, Hitler executed the Roehm purge and murdered scores of old Stormtrooper comrades. In late July, Austrian Nazis, attempting a coup, assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, a friend of Mussolini whose wife and child were then his guests.
He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.
Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.
As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 — and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued.
France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. Few American can forget the humiliation of Saigon ‘75, or the boat people, or the Cambodian holocaust.
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