Politics

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The Puzzling Apology Of Mr. Scalise And Should Republicans Talk To Democrats

I have been trying to understand the scandal of Mr. Scalise talking to an organization related to the Ku Klux Klan. He apologized although the facts remain murky whether he actually talked to the group. What struck me as odd is the implication that politicians should not talk with certain groups of people. Is this any different than a politician talking at a Black Panther Party meeting? Should a politician who believes that marriage is between a man and a woman not talk to homosexuals who believe differently? Should Republicans talk to Democrats? We seem to be stuck on demonizing people rather than discussing issues. I call this Alinsky’s revenge on the American people. To help clear up this subject here is a quote from the Washington Examiner, Democrats try, fail to burn Steve Scalise.

Then Slate, the reliably liberal online magazine that no one has ever accused of carrying water to put out Republican fires, found two people who remembered actually attending the 2002 meeting. They confirmed what the organizer of the European-American Unity rally had said, that Mr. Scalise was not there.

The organizer, one Kenny Knight, had managed David Duke’s campaign for governor in 1991 when he lost in a runoff to the incumbent governor, and was a neighbor of Mr. Scalise, newly elected to the state legislature. He booked a meeting room in a suburban inn and scheduled a session of the European-American conference for 1 p.m. He told the Jefferson Heights Civic Association to use the meeting room in the morning and invited Mr. Scalise, a sheriff’s deputy and a Red Cross representative to speak to that group.

Mr. Scalise is remembered as having talked about legislation he would introduce in the upcoming session of the legislature. The sheriff’s deputy talked about a neighborhood crime-watch program and the Red Cross representative demonstrated the latest techniques to revive drowning victims. Riveting stuff, to be sure, but apparently nobody wore a sheet or burned a cross.

If this report is true that he was talking to the Jefferson Heights Civic Association then his actions look like an elected representative honestly trying to do his job. This idea Mr. Scalise was doing his job when he talked to the group is echoed in the article by Stephanie Grace, Scalise’s pitch to Duke supporters seems plausible, who happens to be the source for the “He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage” comment.

In fact, by 2002, Scalise may have been so used to the idea of dealing with Duke voters that he really considered EURO just another part of his constituency, even if it was a distasteful one. Maybe not so different in his mind from the League of Women Voters, which he cited in an interview with The Times-Picayune as another group he’d addressed despite the fact that they didn’t agree on everything — an insulting comparison that suggests he still doesn’t fully grasp how bad this all looks from the outside.

So according to Ms. Grace’s analysis we have a politician who doesn’t grasp how bad something looks from another person’s viewpoint and is willing to talk to people he disagrees with. For most politicians this is not a scandal but a common workplace hazard when your mouth is moving faster than your brain. Vice President Biden is the most humorous example of a politician with this same affliction. The intriguing question is whether Ms. Grace believes Mr. Scalise’s problem is that he does not agree with the League of Women Voters on everything or that he could have handled their disagreement in a more politically correct manner? Obviously in hindsight Mr. Scalise should have handled the situations better but having valid disagreements with constituents as different as the League of Women Voters and EURO is expected. It is also expected than he would find common ground on some issues with both of these groups. We expect politicians to help reconcile our differences and move us forward. Interestingly his predicament is similar to the one currently facing the American people. Does America believe Republicans should agree with Democrats on everything or does America want their politicians to handle their disagreements in a more politically civil manner and move forward?  With a choice between demonization or progress, I suspect America wants progress in a civil manner every time.

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Eric Garner Did Not Die From The Chokehold

I watched the videos several times and I am convinced that the cause of Eric Garner’s death was not from the chokehold. The officer brought Eric Garner down to the ground with a chokehold but it does not look like he maintains it when the other officers assist in subduing Mr. Garner. It looks like the chokehold has been released when Mr. Garner is alive and saying I cannot breath. A likely scenario is that the officers knees in the back put enough pressure on Mr. Garner’s back to suffocate him. So now we are confronted with the situation that all of the officers assisting in the arrest share some of the blame for Mr. Garner’s death. Although I agree that this was an unnecessary death, I do not think the grand jury could recommend prosecution when multiple people were likely at fault.

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It’s The IRS, Stupid!

2014 Midterm IssuesIsn’t it odd that Judge Walton thought the “prospect of future harm” by the IRS is  “speculative”.   Look at this chart of 2014 Midterm Issues from a recent Gallup poll and tell me that the prominence of “the way federal government works” issue does not bother you. We have a Constitutional crisis going on and Judge Walton just gave the IRS a pass on the most egregious behavior by the IRS since President Nixon. Arguably the behavior of Ms. Lerner and the IRS cover-up is much worse than anything the Nixon administration did. At least he had the decency to resign when he was caught. So for all of those people who thought that “the way federal government works” is a very important problem, Judge Walton has made the problem worse. It looks like laws and courts exist solely for the benefit of government agencies. Has our representative government officially been killed and replaced with an administration accountable to no one and a judicial system more than willing to look the other way?

If there is such a thing as an afterlife, President Nixon is probably pissed. For lesser offences he resigned the Presidency to preserve our way of government. Sadly this generation does not care about a form of government he once held dear. Let us imagine for a moment President Nixon is looking down on us and what he would see.

  1. Ms. Lerner targeted conservative groups under the auspices of the IRS. She realized that her targeting behavior was forbidden by IRS rules so she starts a cover-up. President Nixon chuckles. She releases the information about the targeting at a conference. This does not go over well and she is subpoenaed by Congress.  President Nixon chuckles some more. She makes a statement to the Congressional committee asserting her innocence and then promptly pleads the fifth. President Nixon chuckles some more and thinks the more things change, the more they stay the same.
  2. Despite IRS policies that say that IRS personnel must have either disk or printed backup copies of important emails, the IRS cannot produce Ms. Lerner’s and several others emails. President Nixon chuckles. The IRS deliberately ignored written policies and implemented a decentralized backup policy that is dependent on individuals who commit a crime will be stupid enough to leave behind incriminating evidence. Any IT guy will tell you that is a policy born to fail. Conveniently when the subpoenas arrive, the disk drives start failing and the IRS can no longer produce the emails. At this point President Nixon is probably wondering that if he was able to lose the Watergate tapes like this IRS lost the emails, the world would be different place today.
  3. President Nixon is confused with the IRS corruption problem. Evidently corruption in the IRS is not the IRS’s problem. The IRS had written policies they chose to not enforce. President Nixon chuckles because there have been no consequences. Judge Walton’s court has just said that corruption in the IRS is not the court’s problem because the IRS has promised to implement the policies they were already supposed to have already implemented. Judge Walton says that IRS corruption is not his court’s problem because the “prospect of future harm” by the IRS is  “speculative”.  President Nixon is chuckling again. He thinks the word “speculative” is a nice touch.

In the city of no consequences our federal government is running amok and Judge Walton has given his blessing.

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We Took Pew Research News IQ Quiz

My wife and I think of ourselves as above average news hounds so we were curious to see how we compared to 1,002 randomly sampled adults in a national Pew Research News IQ Quiz given on September 25-28. The results are in. My wife missed two questions and I missed one. This was better than 92% and 96% of America. Both my wife and I guessed wrong on the question, “Approximately what share of Americans currently live at or below the federal poverty line?” I guessed low and she guessed high. The correct answer was 15%. Only 20% of America got this question right. This question and the question, “On which of these activities does the U.S. government currently spend the most money”, were the two toughest questions on the quiz. I was surprised my wife missed it since the growth of entitlement spending has become such an intractable problem. There are no wise men or women in the room when the discussion gets around to how to “fix” social security.

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We Will Defeat ISIL Just Like We Defeated Al Qaeda… Yeah, that’s the ticket!

As a person who has already expressed his misgivings about the Administration’s strategy to fight terrorism as a long counter-terrorism effort, this Duffel Blog post, We Will Defeat ISIL Just Like We Defeated Al Qaeda, is way too funny. Here it is included in its entirety.

Barack Obama Official PortraitThe following is an op-ed written by Barack Obama, President of the United States.

Just over a decade ago, under my predecessor, our forces embarked on a campaign to fight the Global War on Terror after Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our military performed flawlessly in Afghanistan, routing the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and ultimately, denied the terror group a sanctuary from where it could attack us again.

Today we stand secure, knowing that Osama bin Laden is dead, and his organization of Al Qaeda is decimated, unable to operate anywhere on the earth. And with our strike against Iraq, we have deposed a dictator and brought peace and freedom to a Middle Eastern country.

Now, I was critical of the Iraq war in 2003 and strongly opposed it for many years. I felt at the time that our actions in a country where we had limited understanding of the culture could see U.S. soldiers standing in the crosshairs of a sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

The war came to a close, and by all accounts, it was a rousing success. Our American Army defied the naysayers who likened the conflict to a Vietnam quagmire. The comparison was laughable of course, considering our involvement in Vietnam was almost two years longer than in Iraq.

But sadly, a new terror group has emerged. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, a band of brutal thugs who have overtaken parts of Syria and Iraq, could potentially attack us at home again. Much like our medical professionals who have found a cure for cancer, we will find a cure for the cancer of ISIL.

While I don’t wish to arouse fear and hysteria amongst the public, let me be clear: ISIL is a threat to every interest we have and it is beyond anything we have ever seen. It has an apocalyptic end-of-days vision that threatens our very existence.

So that’s why I have ordered an extremely limited engagement against ISIL forces and am assuring the American people that we will not put boots on the ground. We are clearly at war with these extremists, and when faced with an enemy of such dangerous magnitude, it is the only choice we have.

You may have heard my primetime address where I outlined my strategy to degrade and defeat ISIL. In the speech, I used our efforts in Somalia and Yemen as models for what we can achieve. With drone strikes over the past few years, we have completely destroyed Al Shabaab in Somalia and AQAP in Yemen, although we’re still trying to figure out what that acronym stands for.

I’d like to highlight a few more points here to assure the American people that we will win this war against these terrorists — at some point in the future which may be three to four, or even maybe six to seven years from now, but it’s kind of hard to say at this point — and the threat will be diminished.

First, we will begin conducting airstrikes inside Syria at a time and place of our choosing. Under the direction of Gen. Lloyd Austin at Central Command, the military will target key militant facilities, armament, and weaponry, until they smarten up and completely blend in with the local populace.

While we bomb ISIL, which is fighting against the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — who we don’t want to support because he’s a war criminal but we’re kind of supporting him but nevermind that — we will support moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army, which is fighting ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Assad.

We will take great pains to not enter someone else’s civil war, because that’s a first class ticket to failure.

Second, we will train moderate Syrian rebels and Iraqi security forces to take the fight to ISIL. As our experience has taught us in Iraq, the key to winning a war in the Middle East is to train up locals to “own” the battle and take charge of their future. In Mosul, we saw how our training efforts truly paid off, as Iraqi Army units bravely held ground when attacked by militants.

Our troops have long shown what can be achieved with shifting objectives, no strategic foresight, andvigorous support from the American people who don’t have to sacrifice anything. I call on each and every American to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree, bake an American flag cake, and support the troops who are fighting for your freedom.

In closing, I must stress that our war on terror began with Al Qaeda, but it did not end there. I pray that we soon reach our limited objectives in time for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

Thank you, and God bless America.

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Was The War In Afghanistan A Long Counter-Terrorism Effort?

mini-meLast weekend I heard one Administration supporter after another correcting journalists that the fight against terrorism is not a war but a long counter-terrorism effort. Okay, how is that different than that Mini-Me war in Afghanistan? I grew up during the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan War is giving me those same vibes. There is nothing that inspires fear and loathing in me more than administration officials talking about long counter-terrorism efforts and limited wars. I heard it before. If we embrace the Clausewitz thought that war is policy by other means then we have to conclude the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not one of our shining foreign policy achievements if our objective was a long term reduction in terrorism. Like Vietnam the war in Afghanistan has struggled to find the political objective for us being there for over ten years. Since we continue to struggle with our political objectives in Afghanistan, why should we expect a long counter-terrorism effort to have a different outcome? All you need to do is ask yourself two simple questions, what was the objective for the war in Afghanistan and did we accomplish it. With a foreign policy stuck on stupid I guess it is not surprising that we have even less international support for our fight against terrorism than we did with our previous wars in Iraq! I understand the sentiment to avoid mentioning the word, war, but the war in Afghanistan can probably be best described as a long counter-terrorism effort that failed. Without any significant policy changes it is a sign of insanity when you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

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The Folly Of Thinking You Can Fight Terrorism With Police Actions

It has been over a week since Joe Scarborough uttered these words, Obama saying he has no strategy against ISIS is a tactic straight out of “The Art of War”. I thought the the Obama administration had declared that the war on terror was “mission accomplished” and any future acts of terrorism would be best handled with either a shrug of the shoulders or an arrest warrant. In this law abiding world the wisdom of “The Art of War” was not necessary when arrest warrants would suffice. It is amusing to think this Administration might seek wisdom in their fight against terror from a book written two thousand years ago about battle strategies. To paraphrase Tommy Vietor, “Dude, the Art of War was more than two years ago!”

What intrigued me most about Joe’s comment was the idea that Joe and probably the most of the country thinks we are fighting a war on terrorism while the Administration seems to be locked into a police action strategy supplemented with a few extralegal drone attacks. Arguably the Administration’s greatest accomplishment in the battle with terrorism was when they ignored the legal issues with conducting a covert operation in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. It is kind of amusing to think of a Pakistani police officer knocking on Osama bin Laden’s door and announcing we have a warrant for your arrest. Successful police actions are few and far between in the fight against terrorism. The inconvenient fact is that the Administration has a strategy to fight terrorism and they do not want to talk about it since most people would blame them for the four deaths in Benghazi. It was the Benghazi fiasco that convinced the public of the broad policy failure associated with the police action approach. Nothing condemns a policy faster than a dead ambassador. I think most of the country expected a terrorism policy that improved upon what we learned during the Bush Administration. What we got was an outright rejection of everything we learned over the previous eight years and a new strategy that can be blamed for killing the ambassador. The Administration seems to have gone back to the Clinton terrorism strategy and replaced cruise missiles with drone attacks. Unfortunately this Administration is having the same lack of success fighting terrorism as the Clinton Administration. There was a good reason that the Bush Administration chose to fight terrorism differently than the Clinton Administration. The Clinton strategy wasn’t working! As we approach the anniversary of 9/11 I think the people fear we have laid the groundwork to repeat this tragedy.

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Clueless Politics In Texas

The news channels were bubbling this weekend with the riots in Ferguson and the indictment of Governor Perry on two counts of abuse of power. These are sad and avoidable issues that left me confused. My morbid curiosity finally got the best of me after I watched the video video of Ms. Lehmberg’s arrest for drunken driving. Even though I lived in Texas for twenty years her behavior was appalling even by Texas standards so I was curious why she was still in office.  The best source for information about Ms. Lehmberg’s arrest was the Austin Chronicle article from last year titled, “What Happens Next?” I suspect everyone thought this would be the time when leaders in both parties quietly agree to show her the door and quietly clean up the mess. A temporary district attorney would be in charge until an election could be held in November of 2014. That doesn’t sound too bad but that did not happen. The best explanations for the Perry indictment is that the public integrity agency is the only tool left for Democrats to attack their political rivals if they cannot win in the ballot box.  Despite losing the appeal in the Tom Delay case and the continued allegations that this agency is overtly partisan, I guess it is not surprising that her office chose to double down on the issue and decided to indict Governor Perry for abuse of power when he threatened to veto her funds.  The image of a district attorney conducting public integrity investigations from a prison cell has to look bad to independent voters. With the Democratic party struggling at the polls, this effort makes them look both foolish, desperate, and vindictive. In this case Ms. Lehmberg and the public integrity commission were better off when people thought they were a bunch of fools. Now they have removed all doubt.

Update: I read that some of the people on the grand jury have come out to discuss why they chose to indict Governor Perry. I do not know if discussing grand jury deliberations with the press is illegal but it is ill advised with so many of the cool headed Democratic and Republican political operatives saying the legal foundations for the indictment are very “sketchy”. The jurors’  willingness to talk to the press makes a strong case that the district attorney and the jurors are too personally invested in this decision for the average person to believe that this was the result of a careful evaluation of the evidence. If a Republican governor cannot get a fair grand jury in Travis county solely because he is a Republican then it is time to move the responsibility for public affairs investigations to a different location with less partisanship. Sorry Austin you blew it! It is time for a change and you have no one to blame but yourselves. You abused it so now it is time that you lose it!

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Does Socialism Work? A Classroom Experiment

Here is a old joke Dan Mitchell posted in 2011. I thought it was worth keeping and repeating.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
It could not be any simpler than that.

There are five morals to this story:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

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Broad Policy Failure… “Watching the administration is like watching a cross between Keystone Cops and amateur hour”

On the eve of what looks like Iraq’s demise, I think the case for a broad foreign policy failure by the Administration has been made. It is all over except for the shouting when a former Defense official says,

"The bottom line," the official added. "Watching the administration is like watching a cross between Keystone Cops and amateur hour."

Benghazi was the tip of the ice berg where we should have learned our lesson. Instead we get the same story being played out in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq. With great power comes great responsibility and we walked away.