Cinderella's Bloody Glass Slipper

Since I had to carry a gun for my work, I needed to qualify every six months. Missing the target was not an option. It never is.

This morning I went downstairs for breakfast. I turned on the radio. And there it was: The obligatory jabs at both Trump and Palin – and all this by a New York local radio host who’s considered ‘conservative’. It seems we’ve all been down this road before. We just never learn. Back then, our fav piñata was Bush. What we wouldn’t give to have him back again!

Obama remains untouched. Every word of his is routinely afforded the gravitas it no longer deserves. We try so hard to fit this wicked stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s glass slipper. It must be the slipper’s fault. And yet, midnight is fast approaching when everything turns to pumpkins.

The Left has no compunction in slicing off toes. In fact, they have the surgeons constantly standing at the ready. Never mind the spectacle of blood, smear and dishonesty which disgusts and, at the same time, fascinates. They work in tandem with the media, like a well oiled machine. Slice here and dice there, and the shoe is made to fit despite the corns.

There, on the front page of the WSJ, the headline reads, “Karzai Told to Dump U.S” – by Pakistan no less. Inside, there’s a story about the trial and conviction of ‘Big Fish’ Lee Farkas, former chairman of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage. Only, it turns out, that Farkas wasn’t such a ‘Big Fish’ after all; that our government was behind it all (in the form of Fannie and Freddie Mac).

It’s just that the government has now assumed the status of ‘sacred cow’ and can never be touched. Instead we send up thousands to atone for the government’s sins. As Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. – author of “A Mortgage ‘Big Fish’ Disappoints” – laments, the whole thing “fails to confirm the media intuition that the housing boom and bust were brought on by the criminality by mortgage CEOs.”

Same with the spike in gas prices at the pump. It couldn’t possibly be due to Obama’s policies (even though he explicitly told us that he wants us to pay more for gas). It couldn’t possibly be due to the collapse of the dollar due to the government policy of printing images on paper and pretending it’s real money.

Overseas hangs the giant Libyan question mark – and Egypt, Iran, Syria and the entire Middle East. Then, there’s Russia and China; South America. What is it this president believes?

Bolton says there’s no rhyme or reason to Obama’s foreign policy. Really? Everywhere we look we lose. Sounds suspiciously like a plan.

At the very least, Kaddafi knows what he wants and he’s willing to go for it, even if it kills him. Anyone who can articulate what he wants, short of sh*t-canning their own nation has a leg up on Obama at this point. I’m not saying that Obama isn’t smart or doesn’t have goals. …and isn’t it remarkable how Obama just managed to get us to sh*t-can our own just by the ruse of releasing his birth certificate?

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Guest Contributer: Tom From NJ

Tom replies to my post entitled: "Massacre At Mazari-i-Sharif: It's A U.S. Pastor's Fault."

"We even tolerate the intolerant."

All too true, Peter; at least if the tolerated intolerant hail from one of PC's Most Favored Victim groups. That this is largely PC-driven is proven beyond doubt by the grotesque fact that Muslims as a group -- including the most radical, violent and, yes, intolerant among them -- have achieved full-fledged MFV status among the Liberal Establishment of both parties and the MSM. The latest stomach-turning development here is General Petraeus' mealy-mouthed apology for the Koran burning staged by self-proclaimed Christian minister Terry Jones and his huge throng of tens of like-minded haters.

The good General is no doubt a fine and dedicated officer but he has apparently fallen victim to the military professional's most prevalent occupational malady -- fighting the last war. Petraeus has been trying to adapt the deference to Islamic mores and traditional tribal structures that powered the successful surge in Iraq to a very different situation in Afghantistan, where the shorthand for Islamic mores and traditional tribal structures is most often spelt T-A-L-I-B-A-N. In Iraq, the Sunni elders had their own excellent reasons to morph into active foes of al-Quaeda; in Afghanistan, the incentives for tribal leaders vis-a-vis the Taliban seem almost 180 degrees opposite.

Unfortunately, the response of the General, and the Obama Administration, has been to double-down on an increasingly expensive and ineffective strategy, with his public reaction to the Florida Koran burning being the latest example. Petraeus rightly condemns the Koran burning as an offensive and intolerant act, but he never even mentions, must less denounces, the murderous temper-tantrums of Afghan Muslims that resulted in the deaths of innocent people, even the beheadings of a pair of UN mission officials, nor does he call any attention to the fact that the worst of these tantrums have been whipped up by lying imams who claim repeatedly that burning Korans by the dozen is virtually routine in Great-Satan America.

Now Senator Lindsey Graham, John McCain's poodle, is joining in with a strange and dangerous doctrine that the "loose lips sink ships" ethos of World War II be applied to the "war" that the USA is currently engaged in. Senator Graham, may we dare ask -- what war are we now engaged in, exactly? None has been declared, certainly not in the same way as WW II, and wouldn't we want such a clear legal basis before we limit our traditional American free speech, which in your statement you damn with faint praise as "a good idea, but . . .?"

Never one to miss an opportunity for working a scam, Hamid Karzai is also jumping in on this Koran-burning issue. Admittedly Karzai -- unlike General Petraeus -- condemns the murders as well as the book-burning, but how he and his well-respected, wildly popular regime is going to investigate to describe and explain what really happened. Can anyone doubt, based on the slippery Karzai track record, that the results of this "investigation" will be heavily couched in terms of "blame America first?" Followed by an even larger bill presented to Wash-DC by Karzai for his invaluable and selfless services in "opposing" -- ha, ha! -- the Taliban?

In any case, Petraeus, Karzai, Obama, Graham, the MSM, and all the rest of our dhimmis-in-training will sooner or later blame alleged American "intolerance" as the root cause of murderous anti-Western protests in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Ummah. None will question why, after all the sacrifices in blood and treasure Americans and their Western allies have made to benefit or "protect" -- today's buzz-word -- various Muslim populations, significant percentages of those same populations seem fully prepared to believe any outrageous charge that those same Westerners are nothing more than tools of the Jews and/or Crusaders in sheep's clothing waging war on Islam. Which is to say, could these murderous tantrums actually be the result of MUSLIM intolerance? But to say so is not PC and is, therefore, taboo, unlike willingly undermining our Constitutional protection of free speech, the better to tolerate the intolerant. God save America!
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My comment: They engage in 'murderous tantrums' because it works for them. Can you blame them? Like children, the more they act out, the more we allow. Tolerance only works up to a point.

Assassination Prohibition

China has actually been conducting military exercises with Russia (among others) under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as late as September of last year. It was labeled “Peace Mission 2010”.

During the exercise certain Russian deficiencies came to light. No doubt, Russia is in the process of rectifying these shortcomings. Russia and China do not mock each other publicly as both are openly mocking the U.S. Both know that POTUS Obama has withdrawn from the game at his own peril.

The signing of the START treaty was universally seen as a public humiliation of Obama and America. Obama knows this, but does not care. He is above geopolitics. He has his own agenda. So far, we can only guess what this agenda might consist of. We might assign naiveté to Obama; we might even assign incompetence. We might allow him to play out his utopian farce until a new man can take over in orderly fashion. Both Russia and China appear to be in agreement that it won’t hold together that long. Something will happen before Obama leaves office - it will likely be something our present president won’t know how to handle. In fact, they’re counting on it. Both are seeing to it that they are prepared.

Afterwards, it’ll be a new game.
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Ever since President Ford’s Executive Order# 11905 in 1976, the option of political assassination has been pretty much off the table. A subsequent EO in this regard (Carter’s EO# 12333) reiterated the assassination prohibition. President Reagan was the last president to address the topic. At the same time, he seemed to have no problem whatsoever in sending a lethal package right into Col. Kaddafi’s Tripoli tent, killing about 100 including Kaddafi’s fifteen month old daughter, Hana. I don’t imagine he would have lost much sleep had Muammar had been killed as well. Because no subsequent executive order or piece of legislation has repealed the prohibition, it remains in effect today.

It seems to me that all this smacks of a gross double standard: faceless grunt soldiers appear to be fair game, while those who sent them out to kill are off limits. Nowhere was this point brought home to me more forcefully than watching Madeleine Albright toasting the North Korean dictator, Kim Yong-Il, while much of his nation was starving in some bestial work camp. It showed me that there appears to be an understanding among the privileged that guarantees their continuance simply by being a member of some exclusive club.

This raises the issue of just who can be considered a ‘political target‘. What exactly constitutes the threshold of political leadership. Is the unelected Hu Jintao a legitimate leader? Is the fraudulent Karzai? Is Kim Yong-Il? Is Ahmadinejad? Chavez? Mugabe? Rush Limbaugh?

Certainly, North Korea and others have been giving us huge problems. They have threatened us and predicted our immanent downfall. They are at this very moment preparing our graves. Besides the basic unfairness of the two-tier class distinction all this implies, there are also practical aspects to consider. Did Kaddafi continue to give us much trouble after his tent was hit?

We know precisely where each one of these troublemakers lives. We knew exactly where Saddam Hussein spent his nights. Yet, we mobilized an invasion at great expense, killed a lot of people (including our own) and eventually arrived at the same result. Why go through all this?

All we’ve succeeded in doing is to ignite (perhaps) a million fuses, each singularly fixated on our death by a thousand cuts, when a single 'stitch in time' would have more than sufficed.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Vision Fails

Karzai calls for peace. But it’s not his call to make. Suing for peace is a call for surrender. Karzai is not a leader. Just like the American president, he stands at the mercy of events. War is a constant condition. From birth we learn to fight. We fight for our place at the trough; we fight for attention; we fight for a mate; we fight for resources, for market share; we fight for sympathy. The Left has it right: Competition, the essence of capitalism, produces inequity: For someone to win, somebody must lose. The difference is that on the parlor game battlefield of capitalism, the same players can begin another round right after one side declares checkmate.

Afghanistan is not so advanced. Whereas we use the abstraction of a ‘ball’ in all our various national pastimes, Buzkashi (the Afghan national sport) still uses the headless carcass of a calf or goat to define the action. They determine victory by the measure of blood spilled. And they will not stop until we have either gone or bled dry. And even then it’s unlikely to end as the terms of surrender will never be agreed to by all.

Wars are the milestones of human history. Wars mark beginnings. They also signal ends. As such, they chart our progress from one upheaval to the next. On a concept circle, war and peace are represented by a single point; they are two sides of the same coin. War is not the opposite of peace just as peace is not the opposite of war. Each is merely the (temporary) absence of the other. That is why war and peace can exist simultaneously – in different places; at different times; and within separate chambers of the human heart - each failing to appreciate the other in what essentially amounts to a charade of willful delusion.

It might even be said that peace is a precondition for war; that peace itself foments the poisons that eventually force men into battle; that the simmering chaos underlying outward tranquility allows for inequities to build unseen, until these then must topple under their own weight. The laws of survival during war are far less forgiving, after all.

Some have sought to break the cycle of history by (the) diplomacy (of delay) or by outright appeasement. This has only lead to even greater disasters as evidenced by past horrors. Success or failure in diplomacy eludes objective measurement (such as body counts) and can be manufactured by effective propaganda campaigns. The latest effort centers on a strategy termed containment; allowing conflicts to fester in the hope that they will simply go away. Clearly, so much discontent is currently being stoked the world over – such dearth of leadership; so many hearts aflame - it’s hard to know exactly where the firebreaks we’ve attempted to enforce will be breached first.

In human history one third is given over to war, while two thirds is given to peace (or the absence of war). War continues to be the domain of the young; the virile; the idealists. It is a tool meant to be grasped by those with the courage to pursue (or protect) a vision. Once one’s own vision has failed, the challenge is never far. One must either fight blind or yield. In the Hindu trinity, war is represented by Shiva (the destroyer) who is by far the most popular in the trinity of Hindu gods.

War is a wound that never heals. We are forever tempted to scratch it open for the fascination of watching it bleed. Even in peace, the memory of past wars continues to haunt us. Even in peace, the prospect of the next war is just over the horizon. That’s why we urge our populations to support armies that stand idle two-thirds of the time.

Infinite Buzz Saws

The first thing to note is that this was a political CYA (cover your ass) speech. Any war continues to be deeply unpopular with Obama's base. Hence, he needed to make the point that an escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan must be seen as an exit strategy. It's actually a tactical mistake (and I am not the first to say this) to tell the enemy when we’ll be leaving. That's much is obvious. The WH spin will be that it will force Karzai's hand into cooperating more fully with us. This should have been discussed with Karzai privately.

Now, all this is sure to signal the Taliban that they have already won; that our sole concern is that they hold off their murderous celebrations till after we've had our next presidential elections. It also ensures that, from now on, no one in Afghanistan will cooperate with us, knowing full well that after we're gone, they will be murdered if they’ve had anything to do with us.

Back in Pol Pot's day (in Cambodia), all those found wearing glasses and all those found with books in their houses were summarily shot. In our inner cities, all those with good school grades are bullied and ostracized by their peers. In the Palestinian Territories, everyone knows that anyone harboring ideas of peace with Israel and being vocal about it or having in any way participated in any U.S. or Israeli attempt to bring peace to the region will result in their families being threatened with extreme violence. In our Universities, anyone not viewing the world through a leftist prism automatically fails. The same principle applies to Afghanistan: all those who are found as having had anything at all to do with U.S. sponsored 'nation building' are guaranteed to meet their end.

Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistan strongman, actually wrote a good editorial in this morning’s WSJ. He said that for a nation to change, it must do so from within. This notion opened my eyes to some extent. Too often, we equate strategic advantage on the battlefield – winning, if you wish – with ancillary matters such as human or women’s rights. We abhor Sharia law; we abhor their proclivity to slaughter animals in the most brutal ways. We swoon at their beheading and disemboweling their enemies. Often we tend to define victory also in terms of their changing their ways to conform to our own sensibilities. Yet this is the precisely the part that they can’t stomach about us. It is why they will fight to the death against us.

The last war we fought for all the right reasons was for Kuwait. One country had invaded another in a blatant display of aggression. We drove the aggressor back and left the aggrieved parties to clean up the mess, each in its own way. Since then, we’ve become involved in nation-building and we’ve failed miserably on all counts. Unless we accept the concept that Paul Harvey repeated so often and so eloquently, that "it is not one world”, we will run into infinite buzz saws of never ending trouble. …the very same trouble, by the way, that Obama and his ilk are likely to face in trying to re-make America into something it is not.

Accepting Thugocracy

What amazes me is how easily we accept and submit to thugocracy and outright corruption. Here in NJ, for instance, it is routinely reported that ACORN and the unions are engaging in massive (absentee ballot) voter fraud. At the same time, it is said that that the gubernatorial election here is too close to call. I have yet to hear a rendering of what we might expect if there were no fraud.

For better and for worse, fraud seems to have become incorporated into NJ’s election process. The subtext reads that Republicans, in order to win in this very blue state, simply have to be able to overcome their (somehow) divinely-ordained handicap and recognize fraud as a fixed reality (always giving the advantage to the Dem side of the ledger) that is now so entrenched as to have become, for all intents and purposes, sanctified.

And the people unquestioningly accept the premise and dutifully go to the polls in the vacant performance of their civic duty that guarantees only the continued flight of those who can afford to get out, and the continued rape of those who cannot.

The elections in Afghanistan were not much different. As I understand it, Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew from the process, branding a runoff as superfluous. Everyone agrees that the first election was fraudulant and seems to be okay with it. It is not inconceivable that the U.S. itself persuaded Karzai’s opponent to quit the field with bribes and/or threats.

Meanwhile, here at home there’s been a run on the treasury – the people’s money – that can only be described as theft. Meanwhile, as taxpayers dig ever deeper into their pockets, it never occurs to them to ask is it legal, is it fair, is it constitutional? What is the down-side of bankrupting a nation? – I’m talking to you Soros!