Hillary for President in 2012!

By Alan Caruba
No, I haven’t lost my mind. I just want to offer some unsolicited advice to the Democrat Party that I am sure will result in their complete rout and defeat in the 2012 elections. I am doing so because I cannot imagine the Democrats being so suicidal that they would re-nominate Barack Hussein Obama. That said, they probably will!

There are the usual rumors that Hillary is carefully distancing herself from Obama in anticipation of mounting another campaign, but it doesn’t really matter because, as his Secretary of State she is indelibly marked by her association with him and his failed foreign policies. Assuming, of course, he has any policy other than bowing low to Iran, China, Russia and other nations that hold the U.S. in contempt.

In Hillary’s case, the question is what has she done as Secretary of State? I doubt anyone can cite any initiative or action that rises above the level of boring speeches and photo ops.

The Israel-Palestinian peace discussions are doomed to failure. Hamas, in control of Gaza (the PLO resides in the West Bank) murdered an Israeli family just before the talks began and has been rocketing Israel since then. Though Israelis fear that PM Netanyahu might go “wobbly” in the words of Margaret Thatcher, it is doubtful he will sign off on another land-for-peace initiative.

I have not been a fan of Hillary for a very long time, but most specifically since the launch of Hillarycare in 1992. It was a massive healthcare entitlement that ultimately died in 1994, setting in motion the transfer of power in Congress to Republicans after forty years in the political desert.

In her book, “The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton”, Bay Buchanan noted that Hillarycare was “a 1,342-page plan that would have cut the number of doctors in the country by 25 percent and the number of specialists in half.” Everything about the plan was kept secret, something that was illegal. No doubt she learned from that debacle.

At this point, Republicans—and mainly independents—have begun to clean house of the RINOs and are set to recapture Congress once again in November. Given the low approval ratings of the Democrat-controlled Congress and of President Obama, it seems obvious Republicans will capture the House and might even pull off the miracle of taking the Senate as well.

I am not saying this to be unkind, but the job of Secretary of State seems to be taking a real physical toll on Hillary. Increasingly she looks haggard with dark circles under her eyes. I recall a similar look as she campaigned in 2008 to become the first woman president.

In the end, it would was Obama's campaign that defeated her. She is, domestically, Obama-light, flogging all the bad socialist ideas that he has come to embody.

Hillary’s nomination would come with a lot of baggage, not the least of which would be Bill. Aside from that, he has been increasingly flat-footed about picking winners in the primaries. A classic insider, he has lost his mojo.

Then there’s the way the Clinton’s departed the White House after Bill’s last term. Together, “they transferred $360,000 worth of White House property, including art objects, books, furniture, china, and more clothes for herself. The public outcry was deafening and the Clintons were forced to return some of the spoils.”

More damning in the eyes of stalwart Democrats was her vote on the invasion of Iraq while serving in the Senate. She voted for it. Two years later, she felt just as George W. Bush did, saying that the U.S. must “stay the course.”

Like any good Democrat, Hillary never met an illegal alien to whom she wouldn’t grant U.S. citizenship. In 2004, she co-sponsored legislation introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy to that effect.

No less a believer in “redistributing” people’s personal wealth, in June 2004 she was at a Democrat fund-raiser in San Francisco, but could not resist telling the high-rollers that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Like Barack Obama, Hillary is a big spender. Bay Buchanan noted that “During her first two years in office (as a Senator), she sponsored or cosponsored 169 bills that would have increased spending by $124 billion, and not a one that would have reduced it.”

I knew an editor at an Arkansas newspaper who, writing of Bill Clinton, said “His word is dirt.” Bay Buchanan wrote that “The most frightening aspect of this woman is that she lies. She lies about everything and she lies about anything. There is no other way to say it. Her word means nothing.”

So, hell yes! If the Democrats don’t re-nominate Obama, the nomination of Hillary would be a disaster. I’m all for it!

© Alan Caruba, 2010

No Peace for the Israelis

By Alan Caruba

Writing in the Jerusalem Post recently, Daniel Gordis wrote “Life in our region has taught us that the first necessary step to defending yourself is acknowledging that someone else is out to destroy you.”

The peace talks the White House is sponsoring, much as previous administrations going back to Jimmy Carter have done, are doomed to failure. Just prior to the talks, four Israelis, one of whom was pregnant, were murdered and Hamas took credit for it. In Gaza, 3,000 turned out to celebrate the killings.

The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, is a fiction. It exists so that Israel can maintain to the world that it is willing to negotiate a settlement to the issue of territorial issues, but those issues have been settled by a series of wars against Israel going back to the day it was founded in 1948.

For Muslims, there can never been a settlement because Islam maintains that any land it formerly conquered remains theirs even if they no longer control it. That is why the proposed Ground Zero mosque was named Cardoba after the occupation of Spain from the eighth to the fifteenth century.

Ted Belman, writing on the topic of “the occupation”, cited international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention, regarding the West Bank and Gaza. Described as the occupied Palestinian territories, Belman pointed out that “Not only are they not occupied in a legal sense, but also they are not ‘Palestinian’ lands in a sovereign sense.”

“Prior to 1967, Jordon was in occupation of these territories, just as Israel is currently in occupation. It must be clearly understood that Israel’s occupation is not illegal and the UN has never claimed it to be. In fact, Resolution 242 permits Israel to remain inoccupation until they have an agreement on ‘secure and recognized borders.’” Thus, authority over the disputed territories was transferred as the result of the 1967 war against Israel.

Much of the United States today is the direct result of having won territory, largely from Mexico, in wars. A large swath was purchased from France in the Louisiana Purchase and a small section on the southern border was actually purchased from Mexico. We bought Alaska from the Russians.

As Belman pointed out, “The U.S. has traditionally, with the Carter administration being the only exception, refrained from describing the settlements as illegal and instead called them obstacles to peace. In September 2009, Obama went before the United Nations and declared ‘American does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.’ This is closer to Carter’s position, but falls short of declaring them illegal.”

Former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said at the time, “This is the most radical anti-Israel speech I can recall any president making.”

After insulting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first trip to Washington, backing a UN investigation of the “humanitarian” effort to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza from the sea, and sending mixed signals regarding the debate over a mosque near Ground Zero, there are no doubts which side he’s on in this latest charade.

For this reason alone, neither the President’s, nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, can be seen as mediating the present meetings between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority in good faith. Neither is neutral about Israel or Jews.

Just as Jews cite the Torah and Christians cite the New Testament, Muslims look to their holy book, the Koran, to justify their current actions. To understand today’s turmoil wherever Muslims assert their claims, one must understand that the Koran and the Hadith, prophetic traditions based on it and Muhammad’s life, are filled with hatred for Jews and Christians.

Even with the attacks of 9/11 and others since then, Americans have been slow to grasp that they are locked into a religious war with Islam. A society where religious tolerance is part of its most prized documents cannot understand a religion whose holy book calls for the conquest of all other religions and global political dominance.

There will be no peace for Israel, for the United States, and for the world so long as a religion that celebrates murder and death continues to pursue its mission based on the myths of Muhammad and his followers.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

USA Becoming Leading Apologist for Everything

By Alan Caruba

If some found fault in George W. Bush’s muscular approach to foreign affairs which included the belief that the entire West had a stake in fighting al Qaeda and the general threat of resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, the policy pendulum has now swung to the view that the United States of America is to blame for everything that is wrong in the world.

Those who think the USA is to blame for 9/11 need read no further. Blaming America now includes “global warming.”

Unfortunately, the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper deliberately distorted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement at a UN climate change conference to make it sound like the USA was taking responsibility in its words, as the leader “of the world’s polluters.” What Secretary Clinton actually said was that the United States "wants you to grow" and is intent on finding solutions that will allow countries to combat climate change without stunting development."

"Of course, each economy here is different. Some, like mine, are responsible for past emissions; others for fast-growing current emissions," she said. "We may be at different stages of development ... but we all have to do our part."

The "pollution" cited is carbon dioxide, a gas that plays no role whatever in so-called “climate change”, the other name for “global warming.” It is a gas that is vital to all life on planet Earth.

Ever since the Supreme Court, in one of the most idiotic decisions it has rendered in modern times, concluded that CO2 is a “pollutant” and therefore subject to regulation and control by the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA has engaged in a full-bore effort to extend its clammy grasp on CO2 and, by extension, control of all energy use in the nation.

We know that energy use is bad because President Obama, for example, has openly stated he wants to “bankrupt” the coal industry and one of former President Bush’s final acts in office, the opening of our offshore continental shelf to exploration for energy reserves, has been since rescinded.

How this fits into Obama’s call for “energy independence” remains a mystery unless he intends to blanket the nation with wind and solar farms. Who needs food crops or livestock anyway?

At a United Nations meeting in Copenhagen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “issued a mea culpa (on Monday) on America’s role in causing climate change,” said the Guardian article. That’s right; the USA now “causes” climate change. We are responsible for the average temperature of the planet, all hurricanes, floods, droughts, and, well, everything.

Let us all pause for a moment to ignore the role of the Sun, the oceans, clouds and other natural factors beyond humanity’s control.

The object of the UN meeting was to continue the fraud known as the Kyoto Protocols that imposed emissions restrictions on those nations foolish enough to sign onto them. They are the UN’s solution to something that is not happening. They also place great economic burdens on the signatory nations that must pay for the privilege of using coal, natural gas and oil or drastically cut back on their use.

The UN Protocols exempt nations like China and India, along with most Third World developing nations. Okay, so a third of the Earth’s population is off the hook, but, if you believe Hillary and Barack, the U.S. is still to blame for something that has nothing to do with the Earth's climate.

When the Protocols were first proposed, the then-US Senate voted unanimously in 1997 against participating in this lying power grab by the UN.

Not so for the Obama administration. Having completed his global “apology tour”, the new mantra of the United States government is that we are to blame for having taken the lead against the Islamic terrorists, the effort to protect Afghanistan against the Taliban, and the freeing of Iraq from a psychopathic dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Please ignore the fact that jihad is a sacred duty of all Muslims dating back to the seventh century.

We now live in a nation whose President bows to Saudi royalty while being rebuffed by its alleged allies on requests to help resolve the global financial crisis or to participate in a military response to a rampaging jihad that, among other things, appears close to taking over Pakistan.

If you think that things have gotten worse since President Obama took the oath of office on January 20, you’re right.

If you think they will continue to get worse, you’re right.

Editor's note: Within an hour or so after the initial posting of this commentary, it was revealed that the Guardian report of Secretary Clinton's statement at the climate conference was a deliberate distortion. The original text of this post was revised to reflect this.

Improbable Events

By Alan Caruba

On December 1, President-elect Barack Obama will announce his diplomatic and national security team.

I doubt there is anyone in Washington, D.C. or, indeed, this galaxy, who would have predicted that Sen. Hillary Clinton would be his choice for Secretary of State.

In the relatively brief history of the nation, Presidents often found their choice for this position among members of the U.S. Senate. Foreign affairs is one of the most difficult portfolios anyone can undertake, subject as it is to unforeseeable events that can transform policy overnight.

By the mid-point of the last century the job began to be filled by men (and later women) who devoted themselves to diplomacy. One exception who turned out to be ideal was George C. Marshall, a general during World War II who served in the Truman administration. Those that followed, however, were drawn from the intelligentsia and an example would be Condoleezza Rice who will be returning to academia.

By almost any standard, Hillary Clinton seems a very odd choice at best. She has no real credentials as regards international diplomacy. Other than her stint as a Senator, an obvious launching pad for her presidential ambitions, she was a former First Lady.

It is likely she would want to tend to any unfinished work of her husband’s two terms in office and they were eight years in which he and his advisors largely ignored the rising levels of Islamic terrorism directed against the United States, setting the stage for 9/11.

President Clinton devoted a great deal of time to solving the unsolvable conflict between Israel, a sovereign nation, and the so-called Palestinians, led by the father of all modern day terrorists, Yassir Arafat. Nothing good came of it. Or will.

President Clinton did try to focus attention on Africa to some extent, but Africa was and is a continent-sized mental case, replete with some of the vilest despots to trod the Earth. Western nations have thrown billions in charity at African nations to no avail.

The Middle East has understandably held the attention of recent administrations. Earlier administrations, from Lyndon Johnson’s blundering to Richard Nixon’s efforts to extricate us from Vietnam, reflected the long Cold War that ended with the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991. That was brought about by U.S. covert support of the Afghani tribes and the drop in the cost of oil which left Russia without enough hard currency to carry on.

At the top of the list of problems with which to contend when the new administration takes office is Iran. When it announces it has acquired nuclear weapons, the entire balance of power in the Middle East will shift. Arab nations will rediscover how much they really love the United States, though the Gulf nations already know who their real friend is.

President-elect Obama appears to be under the impression that diplomacy will solve most of the problems he is likely to encounter. History teaches another lesson and it is all about a strong military with which to back up our interests. The U.S. has, however, weakened its military over the past five years in Iraq and will need time to rebuild it. The problem is compounded by Obama’s antipathy to the military.

Finally, there is the problem that Secretary Clinton will be obliged to carry out Obama’s view of the world and his foreign policies. They are naïve at best, dangerous at worst.

Will foreign governments take Secretary Clinton seriously? She had minimal control over Bill when he was President and he was a dilettante when it came to foreign affairs. She has never run a huge bureaucracy like the State Department and she arrives in the office with no experience as a diplomat.

History is filled with improbable events. The election of Barack Obama, the first black President, is surely one of them. What follows is anyone’s guess.

The More He Talks, the Worse it Gets for Him

By Alan Caruba

Does it strike anyone as ironic that the more Barack Obama talks, the worse it gets for him?

Here’s a guy who can deliver a teleprompter speech with great power, but who has trouble answering simple questions.

Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church charitably called his responses, “nuanced.”

Others characterize them as lies.

Barack Obama has a very big problem. He is trying to explain away his radical positions on some issues that are very important to various sectors of the voting public. He won’t say he’s pro-choice on the abortion issue. He dances around favoring gay marriages. He calls for “change” but the change he wants is higher taxes for everyone and as Mr. Straight Talk, John McCain, so bluntly puts it, he’s for “defeat” in Iraq.

We have all met the Barack Obama’s of the world. They are smooth. From the moment they meet you they’re your best friend. If you’re doing business with them and you read the small print, you’re likely to decide you really don’t want the deal.

The small print so far in Obama’s life has been his wife’s hardcore racism when it comes to white people. The small print, with a few exceptions like the revelations concerning Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ex-Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers, and financial supporter, convicted real estate developer, Tony Rezko, does not include his very Muslim family relatives in Kenya and who-knows-who else will crawl out to bite him.

Bill Clinton survived longtime girlfriend and lover, Jennifer Flowers, but Obama is not likely to be so lucky.

Barack Obama’s real problem, however, is that the more people hear him speak, the less inclined they are to buy his “audacity of hope” because, like most of us, there are some serious problems like the cost of filling the car’s gas tank. Blaming “Big Oil” is nowhere near an answer when the obvious one is to drill here in America for our own abundant oil reserves.

“Clean energy” is another one of those catch phrases that no longer resonates with people who have figured out that wind and solar won’t keep the lights on. If "global warming" is mentioned, you will be able to hear the snickers resonate from coast to coast.

Hope does not stop illegal aliens at the border. Hope will not save Social Security or Medicare. Hope will not change Vladimir Putin's ambitions nor those of Mamoud Amadinejad and Hugo Chavez.

As far as the economy is concerned, simply taxing everyone and redistributing the money is not a popular notion these days. Hope is a fine thing, but it doesn't generate jobs.

I, for one, am looking forward to the Democrat Party convention in Denver next week. I want to hear what Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and a roll call of fervent liberals have to say about the future. If these Democrats talk a lot of environmental nonsense or badmouth America, the Republicans hardly need even hold a convention. They will be able to phone it in.

I want to hear what Barack Obama has to say. If it’s more of the same grandiose rhetoric about hope and change, he’s on his way to being a footnote in some future history book. My guess is that Obama thinks he’s smart and that the rest of us are just so stupid that he can talk his way into the White House.

He’s wrong.

A Battle Between the Left and the Far Left

By Alan Caruba

Watching the Democrat Party Committee decide to let Florida and Michigan delegates attend the convention in Denver, albeit with just a half-vote each, was greatly enlivened by those raucous folks who insisted on shouting their disapproval of the entire proceedings. The partisanship in the room between the Obama supporters and those demanding equal rights for poor Hillary was almost comical.

This was, however, a very serious event, brought on by what must be the most convoluted and idiotic set of rules on how and when to run a primary election. I thought Michigan’s Carl Levin encapsulated the essence of the problem when he asked why two all-white States like New Hampshire and Iowa always had to go first. I suspect that a lot of people have been wondering why primary elections have to begin in the middle of a corn field or amidst the bone-chilling snows of a New England state.

The fact that both Florida and Michigan essentially gave the party elders the finger and decided to hold their primaries when they wanted to was, in retrospect, refreshing. The Founding Fathers intended for most of the power to reside in the states, each of which is an independent republic, and all of whom have ceded certain powers, limited by the Constitution, to the federal government which is itself a republic. After George Washington's presidency political parties emerged and have been a part of the nation's life ever since.

As the committee conducted its affairs, lingering offstage was Hillary, desperate to scoop up a few more delegates to the convention to put an end to the upstart Illinois Senator who was in the process of crushing her dream of becoming the first woman President.

What we witnessed was a battle between supporters of the Left, Hillary Clinton, and of the Far Left, Barack Obama. The problem for the Democrat Party is that it hasn’t had a new idea since the days of the New Deal. It has no solutions for the problems of the nation beyond throwing money at them and to do that it must take that money from the taxpayers; it must bleed corporations of the funds they need for research and innovation.

The result is that we all now live in a nation that is technically bankrupt. We have entitlement programs from the 1940s that eat everyone’s income in order to provide for old age and illness, responsibilities that used to be an individual’s personal responsibility. The demographics of America work against this system as fewer young workers enter the system to pay for those who most benefit from it. Importing half the population of Mexico is not going to help matters.

The voters have been tilting to the Right since the days of Ronald Reagan even though they have also tended toward a more centrist approach to government, taking the best from both political ideologies. This explains why our elections are so closely divided with often just a handful of votes, usually from independents, determining the outcome.

Now we are at a tipping point in our history. If Sen. Obama wins, the ideology of the Far Left will win. If Sen. McCain wins, we will have bought ourselves some time to fix a broken system.

An Empty Suit

By Alan Caruba

Day after day and hour after hour the pundits on the cable news channels and elsewhere keep telling me that Sen. Obama has the nomination sewed up and should be printing new business cards that say, “President of the United States.” Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton keeps digging herself a deeper hole in a seemingly hopeless effort to seize the nomination from this Illinois upstart.

The whole purpose of a campaign is to let the voters take the measure of the candidates and get to know them. They are grueling affairs that test the physical and mental ability of the candidates to meet the great challenge of the presidency. They should be. It’s a job of such immense responsibility that only someone with a grasp of history and an iron will should occupy the Oval Office.

Despite all the hours of analysis, the speeches, the campaign strategists, the fund raising, the instant responses back and forth, I have concluded that (1) Obama will ultimately be the Democrat Party candidate and (2) he will lose to the utter amazement of those who think they know more about politics than the American people.

I was reminded of Harry Truman who ran for the presidency after having had to take over when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. When he ran on his own, no one thought he had a chance against Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate. No one except the voters who gave him a resounding victory. By the time he left office, Truman’s popularity rating was as low as that of the current holder of the job, but history would be his vindication.

Truman had set in motion the machinery to wage the Cold War against the Soviets, had saved Europe from their domination with the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift. He fought the Korean War to a stalemate that saved South Korea without setting off a third world war. He desegregated the armed forces.

No one would have guessed Truman would have been capable of turning in such an excellent job, even if it often was not appreciated at the time. Somehow, though, the American people had the collective wisdom to take his measure and elect him.

I don’t think either of the Democrat candidates can even stand in Truman’s shadow.

Sen. Obama is an empty suit. He’s too slick, too packaged, and far too vague when it comes to offering a vision of the future that does not contain the seeds of appeasement, defeat, and withdrawal from the big stage of history. Sen. Clinton is just too obsessed with power to be trusted with it.

That leaves the Republican candidate, John McCain. I can guarantee you one thing. In November 2008 Republicans will not stay home on Election Day. They may not love John McCain, but they love their nation too much to take any chances about the future.

What will Hillary Do?

By Alan Caruba

There’s an old saying that, if you owe the bank $10,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $10,000,000, you own the bank. Reportedly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in debt to the tune of $31 million dollars.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. What it means is that a lot of people who took part in her campaign are going to get stiffed whether they catered an event or provided music, made campaign buttons, or any one of the many things people get hired to do. My guess is that the radio and television stations that ran her ads got paid up front.

So the question, “What will Hillary do?” is easily answered. Anything she wants to. She can take her quest for the nomination straight on through to the Denver convention. She can concede at some point before then, but that seems rather pointless, so I believe her when she says she will stay in the race.

I recently saw a photo of Hillary speaking with husband Bill behind her and he did not look like a happy camper. If she wins, he will be even unhappier because the spotlight will not be on him.

There is already speculation that Hillary wants to be on the Supreme Court, but the real action is in the Senate or the White House. There are no lobbyists around to fatten a campaign chest for Supreme Court justices. And Hillary is going to need all the money she can get to clear some of that campaign debt.

So the answer to me is obvious. She says she will stay in the primary race and she will.

In Denver, the most craven breed of homo sapiens, politicians, will have to decide whether to kiss off the election with a black candidate or have any chance at all with a woman.

Me? I’m still betting on the skirt.

Just Saying NO!

By Alan Caruba

Don Young, (R-Alaska) ranking member of the Committee on Natural Resources sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to members of both parties of the House to remind them that, as energy prices rise steadily, “Congress is doing nothing to ease the pain at the pump.”

As Rep. Young put it, up to now the policy has been to:

Say NO to ANWR’s 30-year, one million barrels a day supply of American oil.

So NO to an estimated two trillion barrels of American shale oil.

Say NO to clean-burning natural gas.

Say NO to clean coal.

So NO to energy exploration in the 85% of the United States’ outer continental shelf.

Say NO to more energy exploration in the Intermountain West.

Say NO to more hydropower energy.

Say NO to more nuclear energy.

Say NO to any form of energy that will provide meaningful relief from record high energy prices.

Say NO to 90% of the energy that fuels America’s economy.

In truth, Congress has done nothing for four decades and that’s how far behind we are if they were to actually do something tomorrow.

You can’t drill for oil, lay pipelines, refine and transport crude oil overnight. The whole process takes years to build the infrastructure.

For reasons beyond my understanding, both Democrat and Republican Congresses have utterly failed and/or refused to either understand or do anything.

That makes Americans their victims. That means everyone who drives a car or truck is being penalized for stupidity, incompetence, and a situation that has put us at the mercy of nations, some of whom do not like us very much.

Worse, if one just looked at the Alaskan National Wilderness Refuge, the one that environmentalists want to keep in its “pristine” purity for the sake of some caribou and other critters, what is really at stake is 2,000 acres out of 19.6 million!

What’s more, Democrats and environmentalists want to lock up an additional 27.8 billion barrels in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea! That’s why the Bush administration’s Department of Interior is being pressured to declare polar bears “endangered” when every expert on that population says they’re not.

At $120.00 a barrel, we will send $500 billion to foreign governments and hostile dictators in 2008 alone.

At $120.00 a barrel, opening up ANWR would generate $183.5 billion in income tax and royalty revenue that would flow to the federal government over the 30-year lifetime of the field.

If I could tell you why the Democrats oppose this, I would. I do know that Hillary Clinton is talking about confiscating “windfall” profits from the oil companies. Never mind that, for several years, they weren't make that much and what they're making now helps them gear up to meet our energy needs. I can't think of a worse way to discourage them from building new refineries and doing the hugely expensive exploration we need.

This is, in so many ways, so sinister one might reasonably conclude that the Democrat Party—that hasn’t had a new idea since the 1940s—is deliberately acting to harm us all.
That’s something to think about when you step into the voting booth in November.

Reverend Who?

By Alan Caruba

Until Sen. Barack Obama began his run for the presidency who, other than some folks in Chicago, ever heard of Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

The pastor who Obama called his spiritual mentor, who married him and Michelle, who baptized their children, has emerged as one of the most extraordinary characters in the passion play that is the American political drama.

Others around the world look at us and think we’re nuts. This primary season is now into its fourteenth month and has involved what sometimes seems like a cast of thousands, all wanting to be President.

Frankly, I would go nuts having to listen to “Hail to the Chief” every time I entered a room. I suspect the bathroom just off the Oval Office is equipped to play the tune when the toilet seat is raised or lowered.

Let's quickly review some of the candidates and what people focused upon with each. Mitt Romney’s Mormanism. Mike Huckabee’s evangelism—he’s an ordained minister. Obama’s pastor. The most consistent theme has been religion, religion, religion.

This has been leavened by Hillary's Bosnia b00-boo and Dennis Kusinich's admission that he's seen a UFO.

For pure entertainment it doesn’t get much better, but then Rev. Wright comes along with an ego that so dwarfs the candidates that they all end up looking like those circus clowns that spill out of a tiny car while the audience applauds at the sheer wonder of how they all got in there.

As a preacher he is so over the top that you just watch in amazement at the sheer audacity of the man. I have a friend who is a black Baptist minister and, let me tell you, she has two master’s degrees, a wonderful, sweet personality, and is in no way anything like Rev. Wright. She’s about theology, not theatrics.

As for Rev. Wright’s claim that anything negative said about him is an attack on "the black church", well, that’s just sophistry. He’s not fooling anyone.

I loved it most of all when, during his appearance with Bill Moyers, and in his talk at the National Press Club Monday morning, he said that he speaks "as a pastor" and Sen. Obama speaks “as a politician.”

If anyone could make it any more clear that he is calling his most famous communicant a boldfaced liar, doing what politicians are famed for doing, I have not heard it expressed more clearly beyond the accepted acknowledgement—old by now—that both Hillary and Bill Clinton are “accomplished liars.”

All of which brings us to a very big problem for Democrats. They just don’t seem to care! Which liar do you prefer? Rev. Wright’s? Or those who find the Clintons the answer to all their problems?

As improbable as it is that a black man and a white woman are running for the Democrat nomination to be the next president of the United States, no Hollywood screenwriter could have possibly dreamed up a character as self-absorbed and creepy as Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I personally hope the Democrat race goes down to the wire in Denver. I am having too much fun to want it to end.

Useless "Leaders"

By Alan Caruba

In a democracy you have to try to elect leaders who will not lie to you. Unfortunately, that eliminates most of the members of Congress and a succession of recent Presidents. I find it nothing less than astonishing that “everyone knows” that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are accomplished liars, but that she is actually running to be the next president.

If you can just stand back a moment from that total absurdity, knowing that millions of dollars are being sent to her and that voters have actually chosen her over her opponent, and that her chief qualification for the job is that she is the wife of a former president, you can begin to grasp that too many Americans are horribly removed from reality, common sense or anything that passes for serious judgment.

The other absurdity, of course, is a young, Black Senator who hasn’t even made it through half of his first six-year term in office running for the highest office in the land. It’s fascinating to watch all the “Obamamania” fade away as people discover what a raving Leftist he is. All that blather about change may dazzle younger voters, but they don’t show up at the polls in the numbers older ones do. By the time the Republicans get through slicing and dicing this lad, he’s going to wish he’d stayed in Chicago.

It is no surprise to see Bush’s popularity numbers plunge lower and lower these days. He has been such an incredible disappointment to Republicans and everyone else that historians are already writing him off based on his performance in office.

He will leave a nation in desperate financial straits and I get the feeling he just doesn’t care. If he did, why would he have signed that bill mandating billions of gallons of ethanol, the effect of which has been food riots around the world and skyrocketing costs here at home? For the first four years of his time in office, he signed every spending bill that crossed his desk. Not one single veto. In nearly eight year’s time, he hasn’t been able to find one very tall Saudi in the mountains of Waziristan or anywhere else. We have satellites that can read a license plate in Red Square, but we can't find Osama bin Laden.

If the two Democrat candidates weren’t so pathetic, John McCain wouldn’t have a chance following an unpopular President into office during bad economic times, and with an unpopular war still in progress. That has never happened in the history of the presidency, but McCain has proven to be so dumb lucky that he might pull it off.

When you look around at the rest of the world, you see the same horrid collection of despots, dictators, and kleptomaniacs running nations as existed in former times. Then add in the farce of the United Nations and you have the latest loser, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who, on the first world Malaria Day said that what Africans need is 500 million bed nets. That’s right, bed nets!

This assumes that mosquitoes don’t bite Africans during the day and kill a million of them every year from Malaria. What Africa and the rest of the world needs is DDT. But the United States banned it some years back because of the usual stinking pile of environmental lies about it.

I’ll finish up this rant noting that, back when its use was permitted, the same DDT had virtually eliminated the problem of bed bugs in America. Can you name the number one pest problem in the nation today? Bed bugs!

Editor's Note: It has been suggested that DDT was not effective against bed bugs when it was used during the 1950s, but this is not true.

This is what Michael F. Potter, Extension Entomologist, University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, has written:

"Most householders of this generation have never seen a bed bug. Until recently, they also were a rarity among pest control professionals. Bed bug infestations were common in the United States before World War II. But with improvements in hygiene, and especially the widespread use of DDT during the 1940s and '50s, the bugs all but vanished."

I have worked closely with the pest management industry since the 1980s. My sources tell me that DDT was an effective pesticide against bed bugs.

Harsh Realities

By Alan Caruba

Sooner or later reality catches up with all kinds of really bad ideas.

I was thinking about this in the midst of the breathless news coverage of Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania. The Democrats have managed to paint themselves into a corner with two candidates, neither of whom has a hope in hell of winning the White House in November. Since the 1960s Americans have rid themselves of the uglier aspects of racism and have opened doors for women who want careers. The result is a Black candidate and a woman candidate.

Here’s where reality steps in. Raising children is a fulltime job if you want to do it right. There’s much to be said for utilizing the talents of half the population, but life in America has become so expensive that now both parents must work just to have the basics and a few extras. To put it another way, we consume a lot because we have to. Two cars for starters, child care, and the list just gets longer after that.

Being Black is turning out to be a greater liability than Sen. Obama or any other Democrat has wanted to admit. Being Black and belonging to a church with a pastor who says bad things about America is a bigger liability, but being Black and being a crazed liberal for whom government is the answer to all our problems and needs is popular only with a younger generation.

Young voters buy that nonsense because they don’t know any better. Most don’t even know why America fought a Cold War from 1945 until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, followed not long after by the collapse of the Soviet Union from its own dead weight. Today Russia is making a comeback, due almost entirely to oil and natural gas, but has essentially opted for a new form of czarist government.

Another harsh reality is that America has been going down the Socialist path now since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. All manner of “safety net” programs were put in place and added to, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These “entitlement” programs are just flat running out of money and the flood of illegal aliens, many with “anchor babies” born here, are going to suck them dry even faster than anticipated. America is aging.

Worse to come will be the complete collapse of our public and private pension funds. The government is obligated to make up any losses and there isn’t enough money to do that. What money that’s still in circulation is rapidly losing its value against the Euro and other currencies. I wonder why? Could profligate spending and a huge deficit have anything to do with it?

More reality intrudes as a worldwide food shortage is occurring thanks to the bonehead notion that America should turn corn and soy into fuel instead of eating it, feeding it to livestock, or exporting it to help the economy. What do you expect from a nation that pays farmers not to plant crops?

Our wheat stocks are at the lowest ebb in years, so a loaf of bread or a pizza is going to become a luxury item pretty soon. Don’t look to the rest of the world because it’s suffering shortages of rice and other grains too. It’s not that there isn’t arable land in places like Africa, but when it’s too costly to buy seeds, fertilizer and the pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, farming is a losing proposition in such places.

The population die-off is going to be horrendous. A billion people live on $1.00 a day or less. The level of corruption worldwide will insure that the warehouses will run out of food. Remember, even if the wealthy nations send money, you can’t eat money.

You can thank the environmentalists for trying to get every pesticide and herbicide banned from use. They have also fought genetically modified seeds whose crops are protected against insect predation, the use of herbicides to rid the field of weeds, and even drought. This accounts for why the Earth has been able to feed over six billion human beings.

The whole world runs on oil in case you haven’t noticed. Aside from the obvious use as fuel, oil is the basis for all plastics and we all use lots of plastic. The uses of oil are too vast to number, but suffice it to say that all machinery requires it in some fashion or other. The speculators have bid up the “oil futures” out of pure human greed and now the price of a barrel is going to the moon.

Meanwhile, the world is not running out of oil. It’s not a supply problem. There are enormous amounts of known reserves and more to be discovered. Part of the problem is that there are not enough refineries worldwide. None have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s. They cost over a billion and, in the meantime, environmental groups and the EPA will amuse themselves suing to protect the environment.

A nation that requires 45 different blends of gasoline in the name of clean air increases the cost of each gallon. Then it requires that the laws of thermodynamics be ignored as it demands more mileage from each gallon while requiring an ethanol additive that reduces mileage.

Meanwhile Congress is contemplating implementing a “cap and trade” program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight a global warming that isn’t happening. The sun’s radiation has decreased now for several years. The oceans that normally retain 80% to 90% of the Earth’s heat are cooling too. Bundle up!

These are a few harsh realities that all coming due in unpleasant ways. You can thank to a lot of liberal policies and beliefs that just don’t work in the real world or, when implemented, make life in the real world very expensive and even dangerous.

None of The Above in 2008

By Alan Caruba

“I don’t want to vote for any one of them,” is something I keep hearing over and over again from friends and acquaintances. In my memory, I frankly cannot recall when people seemed so indifferent to the outcome of a national election.

Usually elections are viewed as critical turning points and moments on which the entire future depends, but this year people (and I am speaking in a broad generalization here) seem to have concluded that no matter who gets elected, they will screw up a bad situation and make it worse.

Pennsylvania will, by the time you have read this, likely have decided the outcome of that party’s convention in Denver. For my part, I would love to watch the party tear itself apart in August, but my guess is that, if Obama is the choice, it will be McGovern, Dukakis, and Kerry all over again, a political déjà vu.

Even then, it doesn’t matter. In November, those who do vote will not likely do so with a happy heart. Many of the current Clinton supporters may stay home having rightly concluded they were robbed of yet another glorious Clintonian term with Hillary at the helm this time.

Anyone who thinks Obama has a chance is dreaming. Few WHITE MEN will pull the level for a candidate who is as racist as any dues-paying member of the KKK.

That leaves John McCain and, yes, it is Bush 2.0 because he has no intention of slowing down any of the Mexicans and “others” coming across the southern border and, since he is likely to be dealing with a Democrat Congress, he will be signing off on a host of horrid “environmental” laws to save us all from a global warming that is not happening and which, in fact, stopped around 1998. The Earth has been cooling since then.

As for the war, McCain will leave enough troops in Iraq to keep that debacle from looking like another Vietnam. If he tries to put more troops in, he will be impeached. We have members of state National Guards that haven’t seen their families in months, if not years.

And what the hell is the National Guard doing in Iraq anyway? Aren’t they supposed to guard the homeland? Just asking. Now that the volunteer military is accepting convicted felons, you get the creepy feeling that the Draft wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Back then it was considered a patriotic duty. It still is.

The voters don’t have much to vote for this year. None of the nation’s real problems are about to go away and most are going to get worse. The financial sector is in deep, deep trouble. When Americans begin to discover the horrid mess involving public and private pensions, it will make today’s mortgage and credit crunch seem like a picnic.

The only good news I can think of is that America has survived more bad presidents than the few good ones we’ve had. I like to be hopeful. It helps.

Running Out of Food and Time

By Alan Caruba

In my weekly commentary on The National Anxiety Center’s website, “Global Food Fights”, I take a look at the reasons why U.S. prices of food are rising and why there are food riots breaking out around the world. The world’s news media are taking notice as well.

Articles are flooding news outlets such as The New York Times “news analysis” that “Fuel Choices, Food Crises and Finger-Pointing” and the Associated Press report that “Food Costs Rising Fastest in 17 Years.”

Meanwhile, over at Canada Free Press, Dr. Tim Ball, a noted meteorologist, had the temerity of saying that, “Commitment of 40% of U.S. agriculture to biofuels has created a crisis in world food supplies and increasing costs for poor people everywhere”, adding that, “Environmental extremists and alarmists have exploited people’s fears and lack of knowledge about climate and climate change.” Simply stated, the Earth is cooling, not warming.

We are living in an era defined by an avalanche of lies by environmentalists whose agenda has always been a reduction of the world’s population and a crippling of the economies of industrialized nations in order to rid the world of capitalism and its benefits.

The food shortages, other than those resulting from drought or other weather conditions, are wholly man-made and deliberate. They are the result of ignorant politicians passing laws based on the lies the Greens have been telling for decades.

Ironically, the very same nexus for these lies, the United Nations, whose Environmental Program includes the duplicitous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and which has been responsible for the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change demanding a reduction in “greenhouse gas” (carbon dioxide) reductions, as well as bans on Freon, a refrigerant, and on DDT, a pesticide that used to protection millions from Malarial death, is calling for $500 million in aid to feed the hungry.

The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, urged immediate action, calling on governments to provide the U.N. World Food Program with emergency aid for places like Haiti where recent food riots forced its prime minister out of his job.

Those of us derided as “skeptics”, “deniers”, or paid lackeys of energy or chemical industries whose products provide electricity, fuel for transportation, and other life-enhancing benefits, have had to struggle to get our message before the public that the Greens are their enemies and not, as one group calls itself, “Friends of the Earth.”

Next week the entire world will be assaulted by messages about Earth Day and the need to conserve, to change our driving habits, to save endangered species, to switch to solar and wind energy, and all because of “global warming” when there is NO global warming.

There is, however, plenty of oil. A huge new reserve of oil was found off the coast of San Paulo, Brazil, as much as 33 billion barrels. Another oil pool in North Dakota, the Bakken Formation, is estimated to have up 4 billion barrels of light, sweet crude. In Alaska, ANWR has millions of untapped barrels of oil.

So who shall we blame for the food shortages and the high price of oil? The politicians who have banned access to our own national resources. The politicians who keep introducing legislation based on a global warming that is not happening. The politicians who have banned the purchase of incandescent light bulbs by 2014. The politicians who mandated that thousands of bushels of corn be turned into ethanol.

All three of the candidates in the running for the U.S. presidency believe the global warming lies and are ready to impose still more idiotic legislation, including an utterly bogus “cap-and-trade” scheme for the sale of “carbon credits” based wholly on the lies about greenhouse gas emissions.

We are running out of time before the politicians bring about utter ruin.

We need to yell loudly at Congress and the candidates to stop this madness before more Americans go broke trying to feed their families and still more around the world die of starvation because of the Greens.

Obama is Toast

By Alan Caruba

We already know that only a Democrat Party suicide pact to give the nomination to Hillary will keep Barack Hussein Obama from heading the ticket.

The great thing about this agonizingly long primary season is that it has provided plenty of time to identify, once again, Hillary’s (and Bill’s) penchant for lying. They lie, I think, in the belief that no one will actually remember their lies. They have lied so often and with such success, they may not even be able to discern between the truth and a lie any more.

Short of a huge victory in Pennsylvania (and even then) Hillary can only get the nomination if the super-delegates form a circle around Obama and become a firing squad, thereby eliminating him and themselves at the same time.

What impresses me at this point, however, is how, despite the fawning and prostration of the mainstream media, people are already well aware that the young Senator from Illinois, barely even halfway through his first term and the product of what is widely perceived as the most corrupt political machine in America, has some serious problems with the truth. He is beginning to make the Clintons look like amateurs.

The obvious example is his inability to remember anything anti-American or anti-Semitic after having belonged to an Afro-Centric church for twenty years. The pastor is a man Obama has declared a mentor and family friend, someone who’s tight with Minister Farrakhan of the Black Muslims.

Then there’s his association with a Chicago real estate magnate that allowed him to buy a million-dollar home some regard as well beyond his and his wife’s means at the time. It probably helped that his wife received a whopping big raise from the non-profit hospital that had benefited from some Obama earmarks in Congress.

Indeed, I have seen long lists of his purported lies and there is even a website, http://slickbarry.com/ that offers more fodder, but I don’t need such things to convince me that Obama is a stranger to the truth.

He has the con man’s charm, a master manipulator of all with whom he came in contact.

His message is vague. His actual positions are few except to say he has voted consistently as a Liberal, offering little evidence of bipartisanship. He talks of change and hope, but what politician does not? He is, in Joe Biden’s words, “articulate and clean.” And he has a terrible memory for anything he needs to explain away, coupled with a skill for deflecting criticism.

In the end, I don’t think he likes white people very much. Not even his grandmother.

If he is his party’s nominee, I think we will see Democrats melt away from giving him the support he needs from them. I think Republicans will go to the polls in droves to vote for John McCain. I think he’s toast.

Democrat Party Questions

By Alan Caruba

Did the Democrats actually think they could field a black man and a white woman competing to be their party’s candidate for president and not run into a whirlwind of race and gender issues?

Were they really that naïve that these factors would not determine the outcome of the primary race and, depending on who wins, the elections in November?

Did they think they could tell their Florida and Michigan state committees that their delegates would not, could not be seated for holding their elections earlier than the party rules decreed?

Just how much control can be exerted over the super-delegates, all professional politicians very much concerned for their own careers, each dependent to some degree for Democrat success at the polls?

A political party must pay close attention to public opinion and to trends. Didn’t anyone notice that the Iraq war, i.e., occupation, had slipped to the inside pages of the daily newspaper? Did they notice that the economy was heading for the dumper and, with it, the rapt attention of every voter?

So why are both their candidates offering up yet another expensive government bureaucracy in the form of universal health coverage? Is the Democrat Party unaware that Social Security and Medicare are in deep financial trouble?

Since the 2006 elections gave the Democrat Party the majority in Congress, what has been accomplished? Nothing. The Senate’s Harry Reid has publicly said the war in Iraq has been “lost” and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi hasn’t been able to get any legislation of consequence passed, having squandered months trying to pass legislation to bring all the troops home by last Wednesday or so.

Disorganized, out of step with events, unable to make sense of the daily newspaper, inattentive to the nation’s financial woes except to throw $150 billion at them in the vain hope people will be pacified with a few hundred dollars each, and offering up the same pathetic agenda of the 1940s, one begins to think someone should put this sad old donkey out of its misery.

Predictions for the Hell of It

By Alan Caruba

Everybody makes predictions. They’re fun. Or they’re scary. They are based on fact or fantasy. I usually avoid making them, but every so often I just can’t resist. Here are a few.

1. John McCain will be elected to be the next President. It won’t even be close.

2. The Democrat Party convention will take the nomination from Barack Obama and hand it to Hillary Clinton via the super-delegates, almost all of whom will have concluded that a Black man cannot win and that Hillary is the “brand” in which the party is too heavily invested at this point to abandon. (Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to have been elected President since Jimmy Carter.)

3. By this time next year experts on solar radiation and the continued global cooling trend will bury the global warming hoax under a lot of snow. More people will learn that solar activity, i.e., radiation, has stayed flat for yet another year.

4. At least one major daily newspaper will fold as a print operation and try to continue exclusively on the Internet.

5. A major shortfall in domestic wheat and flour, due primarily to increased exports, will send prices of all bakery products soaring by this time next year. The cost of meat and poultry will continue to rise as well due to a growing ethanol debacle.

6. Oil will reach $120.00 per barrel and the price of an ounce of gold will reach $1,250.00 by the end of the year.

7. American cities and towns will begin to experience rolling brownouts and blackouts due to insufficient electricity generation capacity in five years or less. The problem will first occur in the summer months.

8. The current Recession will be a slow process (thanks to the strength of exports) and take a longer time than usual for a turnaround and recovery. Expect it to continue through 2009.

9. The Al Qaeda of 2001 will, by 2010, have been for all intents and purposes destroyed, existing only as spin-off, self-declared terror cells using the name.

10. It will be revealed that Osama bin Laden was given sanctuary in Iran and has been there for several years.

Electing Generals

By Alan Caruba

There was a time in U.S. history when being a general was a big help in being elected President.

It started, of course, with General George Washington, our first President. A number of men skilled in the development of government followed, but by 1828 Andrew Jackson, famed for his victory in the Battle of New Orleans, was elected. William Henry Harrison who put down a Shawnee uprising at Tippecanoe was elected, only to be succeeded by John Tyler when he died barely a month after taking office. Zachary Taylor fought in the war of 1812.

Although Lincoln was never a general and had opposed the annexation of Mexico, he would forever find a place in our history for winning the Civil War after he found the right general to lead it. That general, Ulysses S. Grant would become the 18th President. James Garfield, best recalled for having been assassinated, had been a general in the Civil War. Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President, had also been a Civil War general.

Theodore Roosevelt owed his presidency in part to his famed charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War and to the assassination of William McKinley whom he replaced.

A long period ensued when America elected a number of fairly colorless Presidents, such as Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived at the presidency having been Secretary of the Navy as part of his portfolio and is honored for having guided the nation through World War II. On his death, a former artillary major in World War I, Harry Truman, assumed the office. He is famed for the decision to drop two atom bombs on Japan to end the conflict in the Pacific. He was also in office during the Korean conflict which ended in a stalemate.

The most famous former general in the modern era was Dwight David Eisenhower, our 34th President. He was succeeded by John F. Kennedy who gained fame from having commanded a patrol torpedo boat in WWII. Lyndon Baines Johnson also had served in the Navy, but is best remembered now for having misled the nation into the Vietnam War which is generally regarded as a disastrous defeat. It forced him to forego a second term in office.

We can probably credit LBJ for the way the nation changed its attitude toward the waging of war. Americans became increasingly disenchanted with military adventures. By contrast, however, Jimmy Carter, an Annapolis graduate, lost reelection for, among his many failures, not taking or even threatening serious action after our diplomats were taken hostage when the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979.

Ronald Reagan served in the Air Force making training films during World War II and, though not a military hero of great rank, he is largely credited with bringing down the Soviet Union, a process than began with the Truman administration and the long Cold War. His Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush had been a fighter pilot in World War II and would become our 41st President. He oversaw the first invasion of Iraq after it had invaded Kuwait, but once the thrill of that victory was over, a man who openly detested the military, William Jefferson Clinton, defeated him.

Clinton reflected the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 70s. A noted draft-dodger, his aversion to the use of the military except in the most desultory way is widely seen as the trigger for 9/11. The Islamist fanatics had concluded America no longer had the will to engage in war. They were wrong.

It was 9/11 that thrust George Walker Bush, the 43rd President, in the role of a wartime Commander-in-Chief. His only military experience was as a pilot in the Texas National Guard, but he did not see combat. He responded to 9/11 with an attack on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He then convinced the nation that Iraq represented a threat that required a renewed conflict. That war continues and is generally unpopular, as much for the fact that there is no end in sight, as for the way it differs from all previous wars when armies in uniform faced one another. It does not fit the template of previous wars.

This brings us to the candidates from whom Americans must choose to take office on January 20, 2009. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate is a genuine war hero, having been a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict where he served as a Navy pilot. That is a strong credential for many veterans of the wars of the modern era.

Conversely, Sen. Barack Obama’s Democrat Party candidacy rests almost entirely on his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has never served in the military. He is the liberal’s liberal. Struggling against his lead is Sen. Hillary Clinton whose primary claim to office is that she was the wife of the 42nd President, perhaps one of the most absurd credentials for that high office ever offered to the voters!

There are no former generals on the political horizon to lead the nation and Americans have soured on war as what Clauswitz called an extension of diplomacy “by other means.”

War bad, surrender good, seems to be the prevailing philosophy. It is a very dangerous one.

Goodbye, Fidel, and Good Riddance

By Alan Caruba

In 1959, six months before I graduated from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fidel Castro came to power in a coup that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. It was big news on campus though I must confess that I knew next-to-nothing about Castro.

The New York Times reporting had failed to mention Castro was a Communist and, in fact, I doubt that anyone, including those high up in our government, knew that essential piece of information. The Times had also famously neglected to mention the horrors of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. In essence, you could have read Pravda or the Times and gotten the same party line. You still can.

Castro set about executing the Batista cabal and, as we know from “The Godfather”, the mafia lost their investment in Havana’s hotels and casinos. It could be argued that the Cuban people lost their freedom, but an estimated 20,000 Cubans had died under Batista’s rule. Now, some fifty years later, they still haven’t enjoyed any real freedom.

I can still recall the images of Castro and his ragged little band of revolutionaries coming into Havana on New Year’s Day in 1959. I can also remember that, shortly thereafter, any Cuban who could, fled the island. They flooded into Miami where many remain.

This is the same Cuba that threatened the United States with Soviet long-range missiles, precipitating the 1962 missile crisis that forced the Soviets to back off. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had spent time in the Soviet Union and had supported the “Fair Play for Cuba” committee, assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Fidel and his brother, Raul, have ruled Cuba with an iron fist. Disagree with him? Go to jail. Face the firing squad. There is something obscene that this is happening 90 miles from the coast of Florida. There is something odd that this nation went halfway around the world to liberate the Iraqis, but have done little other than the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to free the Cubans.

These days, the Chinese are drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba, but the Congress of the United States still prohibits drilling in 85% of the nation’s continental shelf.

Here’s where history coincides with the future. In April 2000, while running for Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton opposed granting Elian Gonzalez residency, asylum, in the United Nations with members of his family. His mother had drowned trying to give him a new life in America. The Clinton Administration seized him at gunpoint and forcibly returned him to Cuba.

Fidel lives, retains power, though now officially retired, and Hillary Clinton wants to be the next President of the United States.

Energy Morons

By Alan Caruba

The ugly little secret of Election 2008 is that it does not matter which candidate becomes your next President because all of them, Democrat and Republican, have energy policies that will keep America moving down the road to an inevitable lack of electrical energy and the oil, i.e., gasoline and diesel, needed to keep cars and trucks on the road. Throw in the need to heat homes and other structures in the winter and cool them in the summer, and you have a bad choice no matter who your choice may be.

In a recent Washington Times editorial, the energy proposals of the candidates were compared. All subscribe to the hoax of global warming and, with it, the notion that carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, has to be reduced or sequestered. Given that CO2 constitutes 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere, this might seem strange to anyone with any sense, but we are talking about politicians here.

John McCain is the biggest believer in global warming among those still running. He has co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman that would impose an economy-killer in the form of a “cap-and-trade” arrangement on American business and industry that would have them wasting money on emissions “credits” they could use, trade or sell. This plan has been a total failure in Europe and, of course, ignores all the emissions being produced in places like China, India, Russia, the continents of Africa, South America, etc. It is idiotic.

Hillary Clinton hates “Big Oil”, possibly because they may not be among her biggest contributors. She is calling for increased fuel-efficiency standards, but I keep telling people there is just so much energy that can be squeezed out of a gallon of gasoline. It's called the Law of Thermodynamics. Much of the current energy is wasted in the form of heat and the rest keeps your pistons providing power to the wheels. This isn’t rocket science, but there are limits to efficiency, even if there are no limits on stupidity.

Barack Obama, when he isn’t peddling “hope” and “change” like the Pied Piper, claims to be ready to introduce a “green economy.” He, too, wants a cap-and-trade system. Apparently green economy means an economy in a permanent Recession or worse. And it does get worse, because he wants to require that 25% of the nation’s electricity come from wind and solar generation. The problem with this airhead solution is that wind and solar currently represent less than 1% of the electricity the nation uses and can never produce anywhere near 25%. It is the most inefficient form of energy on Earth, no pun intended.

Mike Huckabee has energy plans, too, but who really cares what this hayseed has to say about anything? He’s promising “energy independence by my second term.” That kind of talk comes right out of a bottle of good ole Arkansas moonshine. No nation on Earth can or will be energy independent. You may have noticed that the U.S. imports a lot of its oil and gas from other places. You may have noticed we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in thirty years?

Put them all together or rearrange them any way you want, this group of morons are going to send your energy bills soaring. No matter which one gets to the Oval Office, when it comes to energy, they don't have solutions. They haven't even got a sixth grader's grasp of the issues.