Peters: The Afghan Screw-Up

Ralph Peters writes about military matters for the New York Post. After four years of the Obama administration, Peters takes a look at America's record in Afghanistan, and finds it wanting.

Peters' article is loaded with pithy nuggets of wisdom, for example this:

We invaded to smash al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for hosting them. Mission accomplished. Within six months. The correct military action would have been to remove our conventional-force presence while the jihadi bodies were still warm.

And this:

While we tied our forces down to worthless Afghan real estate, al Qaeda just went elsewhere. (Rule No. 1: When fighting a mobile enemy, stay mobile.)

And this:

Killing terrorists works, while trying to buy the love of their fan base doesn’t.

And this:

Local morale, not American money, is going to decide this conflict. People get the government they’ll fight for.

The Afghans on our side don't seem to be doing much fighting, other than shooting our troops (their coaches). You owe it to yourself to read Peters' scathing appraisal of our misadventures in Afghanistan.

Two Views

See a Washington Post article about two people working side by side in the same factory holding diametrically opposing views about U.S. politics. The article's author, Eli Saslow, does a reasonably balanced job of describing our political separation, except he does say that things are definitely getting better in their Ohio town. So, my judgment: mostly balanced, not completely.

Saslow's description of the way the Arm & Hammer employees have decided not to talk politics in order to maintain civility at work reminds me of the way we behave at big family gatherings. We simply cannot talk politics without hating each other, and almost everybody "gets it."

2012 Post-Mortem

Laura Hollis is a columnist for Town Hall, and a professor of law and entrepreneurship. She has written a post-mortem reaction to the 2012 election that has attracted a lot of attention - positive and negative - depending on one's political orientation.

My pal Earl C. sent it to me and I believe you'll find it interesting.

A Natural Tendency

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan writes that a reelected Barack Obama is overplaying his hand, which I interpret as acting like he has a mandate. She says this as though it is unusual.

I believe nearly all reelected Presidents act this way. They interpret being reelected as having gotten a glowing performance appraisal. The alternative interpretation is that the public decided they were better than what the other party had to offer.

In 2012 Team Obama spent little time talking about how great a job he had done in term one. They did their level best to convince us that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat with no interest in or understanding of Mr. and Ms. Average American. It appears they succeeded.

Having not run on his record, but on the other guy's failings, President Obama has no glowing performance appraisal. All he's got is the public's judgment that he is better than Mitt, a guy his people said was no good at all.

Almost anything he does will be seen as overplaying his hand, because much of the public sees him holding a pair of fours which beat Mitt's busted flush.

FDR on Welfare

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, father of the New Deal, nevertheless took a dim view of welfare payments to people. Here are his words from his annual message to Congress, dated January 4, 1935:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.

His alternative was to find people real jobs, easier said than done. My source is from Jay Nordlinger's column in National Review, scroll down.

Separatism

Here at COTTonLINE we've written from time to time about separatist movements in Europe and elsewhere. The National Interest has an article with a really comprehensive list of separatist movements in Europe and it does a fair job with other regions. I find this quote particularly striking:

Globally, the numbers tell the story very well: in 1914, on the eve of World War I, there were 59 independent countries in the world. By 1950, there were 89. By 1995, there were 192.

Separatism is a force that obviously has been gathering strength globally. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

Why Work?

The following are from an article in The Wall Street Journal:

Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously. Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline. Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000. In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day. Congress should find out why 

Then there are Social Security Disability payments:

Barely three million Americans received work-related disability checks from Social Security in 1990, a number that had changed only modestly in the preceding decade or two. Since then, the number of people drawing disability checks has soared, passing five million by 2000, 6.5 million by 2005, and rising to nearly 8.6 million today. In a series of papers, David Autor of MIT has shown that the disability program is ineffective, inefficient, and growing at an unsustainable rate. And news media have reported cases of rampant fraud.

Quote II of the Day

Maureen Dowd, resident harpy of The New York Times, certainly doesn't like Republicans but finds things not to like about Democrats either, including President Obama:

Obama underwhelmed on traits everyone thought he’d excel at: negotiating, selling, charming, scaring, bully-pulpiting, mobilizing, dealing with Capitol Hill and, especially, communicating.

Maureen, we've shared your "underwhelmedness."

Quote I of the Day

Ann Coulter, writing for Town Hall, about the subject of insane people committing mass murder:

Such people have to be separated from civil society, for the public's sake as well as their own. But this is nearly impossible because the ACLU has decided that being psychotic is a civil right.

Regular COTTonLINE readers will remember that we've written about this problem.

Ruminations

Suppose Mark Steyn is correct, suppose conservatives are an actual minority and headed in the direction of being more so. Perhaps Mitt Romney was being "conservative" when he estimated that 47% of the populace sought handouts. What do we do then?

Do we migrate to states where we can be a majority, and try there to govern ourselves appropriately while fending off an interventionist federal government? Perhaps.

Eventually our federal government will, as Margaret Thatcher said of socialist states, run out of other people's money. Then we will be yet another Greece or Argentina, stuck in a redistributionist trap from which there seems to be no peaceful way out

I am certainly in a gloomy frame of mind tonight. Let us be glad we were born early enough to avoid living through most of the hopeless mess ahead.

Steyn: The Future of Conservatism

Mark Steyn writes for Comentary about the future of conservatism. He calls Mitt Romney a "squish" and concludes with this thought:

Please don’t waste another four years obsessing over whether Barack Obama is a secret Muslim Kenyan Commie or whatever. He may be all those things, but the lesson of November 6 is that a majority of the American people agree with him. He’s not the exotic other, he’s all too typical. That’s the problem.

Much More on Mali

I just finished reading a detailed article on a website called Africa Is A Country about the situation in Mali. There are multiple players, both within and without the country, and the article lays them out.

Al Qaeda pops up again, apparently things are too hot for them now in Afghanistan or Yemen. I have the mental image of Whack-A-Mole; we whack 'em in one country and they pop up in another.

BTW, notice the serious Marine-style haircuts on those French troopers in the photo. I can't read their unit patches to see if they're Legion. They don't seem to be wearing para jump boots.

Legion Etrangere to Mali

When I read that France was sending troops to fight in former colony Mali, I wondered if they'd send the Foreign Legion. The answer is yes, see this Wall Street Journal article for more.

France has been policing their colonies and former colonies with the Legion for 180+ years. It is smart politics for two reasons. If the bodies of dead legionnaires are sent home, most don't come to France. Plus the Legion has a reputation for brutality, earned or otherwise, that causes opponents to avoid battle with them.

History Teaching Biased

Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writing for RealClearPolitics, reports findings that the U.S. history being taught U.S. undergraduates is heavily flavored with issues of race, class, and gender.

Furthermore, research interests of  faculty teaching introductory history courses are largely in issues of race, class, and gender. These issues are not unimportant, but they certainly do not constitute all that is important about U.S. history.

To be sure, most of the nation's early history was created by now-dead white men - so what? These  patricians - Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin - actually did a good job; a job of which all of us can be proud if only we are taught about their accomplishments.

USPS Hurting

An article in The Guardian says that David Williams, inspector general of the U.S. Postal Service, believes the USPS will either need a congressional bailout or go under this year. That is radical.

In spite of all its creaky, old-fashioned ways the USPS is still something I (and many others) would miss if it were gone. In its absence, people without computer skills or online access would be "off the grid," unreachable.

USPS needs the equivalent of a bankruptcy so it can dump its union contracts. In doing so they could end defined benefit employee retirement plans and replace them with defined contribution plans at considerably less cost.

Hat tip to Lucianne.com and Breitbart's Big Government for the link.

Noonan: Be Cheerful

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, writing about the gloom surrounding the Republican Party and its adherents:

Republicans in DC are feeling bleak.  Should they?  Nah.  Demographic and culture changes lean against them but despair is for sissies, and in any case the pendulum swings, even if its arc is sometimes wider or higher than expected.  What’s going on in the states, with the economic rise of the Reds, and the relative sinking of the Blues, is instructive, and Americans will take note.  Long term pessimists should maintain a daily optimism, a happiness and vigor in the day to day.  This is a time for creativity and guts.  Which means: it’s an exciting time to be alive. 

 Noonan is correct. Only two years ago we were celebrating a real win, in the 2010 midterm election.

Not Just Fiction

Remember the fourth Indiana Jones film, where a struggle for water was the villain's evil plot? And you thought it was just fantasy? It wasn't.

See this article from Transhumanity which lays out nine different world regions where nations may realistically come to blows over water. There are examples in southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and the Middle East.

It's a good thing northern and southern California don't have their own armies, as a battle over the north's water could certainly ensue. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

Head Start Doesn't Work

The Health and Human Services Department of the federal government has studied the Head Start program, upon which some $180 billion has been spent. According to a HotAir article by Mary Katherine Ham, Head Start was found by HHS not to be effective. Head Start kids, compared to non-Head Start kids from similar backgrounds, showed no improvement.

I particularly like this quote from a report by The Heritage Foundation:

Access to Head Start for each group had no statistically measurable effects on all measures of cognitive ability, including numerous measures of reading, language, and math ability.

Quote of the Day

Howard Dean, former Democrat governor of New Hampshire and presidential candidate, speaking today on CNBC's Closing Bell show, about why we have deficits::

Republicans want to cut taxes but are unwilling to cut spending.
Democrats want to raise spending but are unwilling to raise taxes.

I rarely find myself in agreement with Howard Dean, but he's correct. I did the quote from memory. I have the sense of what he said, if not his exact words. In other words, it is either a quote or a paraphrase.

Under or Over Population

There are on the order of 7 trillion human beings - overpopulation? Probably. On the other hand, population growth rates are declining and we may be headed for relatively serious population shrinkage. See this Slate article which explores the issues associated with population growth and decline.