Time to Leave Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Only the dead know the end of war.” I doubt that in the five thousand years of what we call civilization there has ever been a day when war has not been taking place somewhere on the planet. All wars, in one fashion or another, however, have to come to an end.

The war in Afghanistan has degraded into a distraction from the nation’s desperately deteriorating financial situation. Even worse, it is part of that problem. On January 30, 2009, Bill Bonnor, best known for his newsletter, Dead Reckoning, wrote the following:

“’Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, was what he (Osama bin laden) was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. ‘Every dollar spent by al-Qaeda in attacking the United States has cost Washington $1 million in economic fallout and military spending’, said the report.

“’We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russian for ten years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt…So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’”

Can anyone deny that bin Laden was right? Can anyone deny that the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama has now expended billions in the name of bringing democracy to people who should be responsible for overthrowing their own despots? There was, after all, a time when the U.S. was an ally of bin Laden and even of Saddam Hussein!

On May 9, Rasmussen Reports noted that 56% of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan within a year. What do the people know that all the genius strategists in the State Department and Pentagon do not? They know these wars, Iraq included, are a distraction from our real problems.

I do not know how many times over the years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq I have written that we should withdraw our troops. I have noted how extended military occupations and expeditions have historically always drained and destroyed empires from the Roman to the British and now the present day Pax Americana.

America is now over $14 trillion in debt and yet we keep sending billions to nations like Pakistan and to the United Nations, most of whom must think us stupid beyond belief.

The exception to this was the long Cold War that America fought against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventual collapse of that Communist nation in 1991. That collapse, however, was facilitated by the decision of the former Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan!

Over the course of the forty-six years the Cold War ground on, the U.S. fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. We spent what we had to for a powerful military deterrent. From Truman to Bush41 Presidents remained firm in their determination to resist the Soviet Union.

The war with Islam is different. The asymmetrical war waged against America, Israel, and the West began in earnest after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and continued through a succession of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Marines in Beirut, U.S. embassies, the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11. Israel has had to wage a war of self defense since its first day 63 years ago. Most recently, it resisted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Islam has been around since the seventh century A.D. Its initial success saw it sweep across vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, India, up into Spain and to the gates of Europe. The inherent failure of Islam has been its resistance to all Western values that confirm the dignity of the individual, representative government, and the advances of science, literature, and the arts.

Our global opponents, Russia and China among others, are pleased that America must drain its treasury and expend the blood of its children to hold the line against Islam, but it is a short-sighted strategic error because they will find themselves on the frontlines of the war that we have been waging with massive troop deployments. Consider how much more effective drones and special operations have been.

Europe has reluctantly discovered the enemy in their midst. The flood of Muslims it invited as workers because of its failure to ensure a sufficient native population is causing Europeans to grasp at measures to either placate the Muslim population or outlaw some of its practices. The fear is palpable and is why some now refer to it as Eurabia.

NATO nations, rarely credited, have been by our side throughout the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now charged with determining the outcome of the insurgency in Libya, but Britain is making plans for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan for the same reasons outlined above.

It is a very old war. In 732 A.D., Muslims were defeated at Poitiers, France, halting their expansion. In 1492, Christians recaptured Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. In 1683 A.D. Muslims were defeated near Vienna. Europe was safe, but that was then and this is now.

It is reason enough for America and European nations to put their financial houses to avoid a collapse that will leave us vulnerable to the most terrible scourge of mankind.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Bin Laden's Cat

Top Secret Obama Drawing from White House

Obama will not release bin Laden photos

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

President Barack Obama said in a taped interview with “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft that he has decided not to release photos of Osama bin Laden taken after he was killed, CBS News reports.
-- Politico.com

Of course he won't do that. He WANTS the speculation to continue regarding whether bin Laden was "really" killed or not. He does NOT WANT to give Americans any closure, to know that the perpetrator of 9/11 is truly dead.

Though unconfirmed, Special Operations insiders believe that the mission was already under way before Obama was informed of it in order to ensure that this "high value target" was not permitted to get away. True or not, why would Obama, as asserted, have to "sleep on it" to make the decision to proceed? The truth of what occurred will not be known until Obama is long gone out of office and surely not while he is campaigning to be reelected.

OBL Burial at Sea

There is a possibility this is a Photoshopped picture of OBL just before he hits the waves.

The Swirl of Conspiracy Theories

By Alan Caruba

It is testimony to how little Barack Hussein Obama and the government he heads is trusted when one considers the swirl of conspiracy theories that filled the forums on the Internet, the comments attached to articles analyzing the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the general discourse of the chatteratti on radio and television.

Soon enough, photographic evidence will be offered as proof and, even then, the conspiracy theories will question them.

This occurred to me as I searched foreign news websites for information that was not directly generated by the White House. To my surprise, Al Jazeera had a remarkably comprehensive round-up of statements and quotes by leaders from around the world, all welcoming news of Osama’s death.

It also struck me that many commentators took note of the fact that Obama had actually fulfilled former President G.W. Bush’s promise to find Osama and bring him to justice “dead or alive.” The fact that Obama has been, willingly or not, pursuing the objectives of his predecessor did not go unnoticed. In the end, Obama may not get all the credit he craves from the event.

The same Internet that invented and elevated Obama to the Oval Office has been dissecting and disputing virtually everything he has had to say, officially or not, over the past two years or so. He has not come off well.

While all presidents have had to circumvent the truth from time to time, Obama quickly earned a reputation as a serial liar, a 24/7 dissembler, and a thoroughly unreliable source for information about everything from his birth certificate, his two memoirs, and other pronouncements.

Little wonder that spinners of conspiracy theories immediately seized on the news of Osama’s death to wonder out loud about its timing. Was that intended to disrupt the airing of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice”? Why was Osama buried at sea? Why was he living in a private compound just outside of Islamabad, Pakistan near a military facility? Et cetera!

I was reminded of Occam’s Razor. “The 14th century philosopher William of Occam had a keen eye for plausibility. We know his approach to problem solving by the label "Occam's Razor," an axiom often stated in shorthand as, "The simplest explanation is usually the best."


And then I thought of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theory. The more closely you study the subject, the less clearly defined it becomes.

There are useful lessons to be drawn from both. The first is that the basic facts that have been released by the White House and reported widely are probably true. A Navy Seal Team, acting on intelligence gathered by the CIA, Pentagon, and other U.S. sources, identified where Osama was staying and killed him. This is the simplest explanation.

Beyond that, the speculation regarding the event only serves to obscure it.

Writing at the Middle East Forum, Raymond Ibrahim offered a very useful reminder.

“Years ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda's undisputed leader, placed it all in context. After he was asked about the status of bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Omar, he confidently replied:

‘Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until Allah Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden—may Allah protect them from all evil—are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of jihad, while the struggle between Truth [Islam] and Falsehood [non-Islam] transcends time.’”

Jihad does transcend time. In a dispatch published in The New York Times on May 20, 1876, “The Disturbances in Constantinople”, the reporter noted that “Our readers, not familiar with Oriental countries can hardly appreciate the passion of fanaticism which at times burns in the breast of the lower classes among the Mohammedans. The majority of these have no idea of the progress made by the Western races, or of the inferiority of their country to other modern states.”

Given 9/11 and modern communications, those in the West do better understand the fanaticism of Islam. Constantinople is now called Istanbul. And Turkey, a bridge between the East and West, has been sliding back into the fantasies and fanaticism of the past.

America, the apotheosis of the modern world, reached out to kill its avowed enemy. That is what great powers have always done and must always do.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Jihad is Forever

By Alan Caruba

Americans greeted news of Osama bin Laden's death with a celebration of the payback it represents for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

As former Vice President Dick Cheney said on hearing the news, “Today, the message our forces have sent is clear—if you attack the United States, we will find you and bring you to justice.”

This is part of the American psyche. A great power cannot allow itself to be attacked and harmed without rendering retribution. Every day bin Laden drew breath after 9/11 was a rebuke to America.

The 9/11 attack, however, grew out of a larger context, the Islamic central concept of jihad. Far from being “a religion of peace”, the Koran is a battle plan for the conquest of the world by Islam and jihad is regarded as a sacred duty for all Muslims.

This is why political correctness regarding how we deal with Muslim demands in the United States is a danger to the nation. Islam is one big hate crime directed at all other religious faiths. Failure to understand that is to sign the nation’s and the world’s death warrant.

The irony of al Qaeda’s legacy has been the vast numbers of Muslims that have died as a result of its efforts to overthrow the governments of nations whose wrath it invoked. In the bizarre illogic of the Arab world, even as many Saudis allegedly contributed to al Qaeda, one of its aims was to overthrow the Saudi royal family who bin Laden had condemned for allowing American troops to encamp on its “sacred sands” in the first war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Al Qaeda was and remains a threat to the existing governments throughout the Middle East and, of course, anywhere in the world it wants to target. The U.S. has cut off the snake’s head, but must now remain even more vigilant against retaliation. That said, there is no doubt the organization has been significantly weakened with the loss of its symbolic leader.

Osama bin Laden has become to many Arabs what the Cuban butcher, Che Guevera, became to Communists and their dupes.

My suspicion is that al Qaeda will break into more isolated, individual units in nations throughout the Middle East and become even more vulnerable to being dismembered and destroyed. It is, however, northern African and Middle Eastern nations that are being restructured from within by millions of Muslims who have grown tired of the century’s old oppression that has been Islam’s hallmark.

Americans should not expect democracy to break out in the Maghreb or the Middle East, but it can expect governments there to become more responsive to the expectations and demands of their people. Even those in the Middle East know they are far behind those in the West in terms of any true freedom and justice. They have seen it and they want it.

We are told bin Laden’s body is in American hands. My suggestion—a fanciful one—is that it be embalmed and put on display in the Smithsonian as a reminder of the threat the nation will continue to face for decades to come.

Lastly, at a time when there are discussions of cutting the defense budget, we need to take heed of the courage and skill of those military who attacked the bin Laden compound in Pakistan and rendered the ultimate justice.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” is a quote attributed to George Orwell, the author of “1984”, a novel warning against all forms of totalitarian government.

Americans, despite our present economic distress, have to keep in mind that our nation has real enemies in the world and they aren’t exclusively Muslim. They are the reincarnated version of the former Soviet Union, Chinese Communists, North Korea, and others that wish us ill.

Their greatest allies will be those who preach isolationism and passivity.

Thus, the role of our military, the wars we choose to fight and where we choose to fight them has never been more critical. Jihad is forever.

For that, we must put our financial house in order and soon---or we shall witness our enemies celebrating, just as we celebrate today.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

U.S. Finds and Kills Osama bin Laden

What next?

Osama bin Laden, Climate Expert

By Alan Caruba

To the world’s experts on climate change, let us now add the name of Osama bin Laden to those of Al Gore; UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon; the Chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri; numerous heads of state over the years; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; members of Congress still trying to pass Cap-and-Trade legislation; and the odious IPCC scientists who apparently colluded to foist false data on the public in order to further the fraud of global warming.

This is, of course, a short list given the vast number of people who attended the recent UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. It reportedly cost the taxpayers over a million dollars for the U.S. delegation and that does not include the cost of the President’s attendance. In his State of the Union speech, Obama received a chorus of laughter when he spoke of the “overwhelming evidence” of climate change.

Bin Laden is getting increasingly desperate in his appeals to the world’s Muslims and, in a recent audiotape, “he blamed the Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification, and floods across the globe,” according to a report by the Associated Press.

Bin Laden’s real complaint, however, has always been that he cannot replace the Saudi royal family and control that nation’s oil and the revenues that flow from it. One of the many sons of a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden went off to aid the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet Union and, ironically, it was covert American weapons aid that made their victory possible.

He could have settled for being a hero of that conflict, but like so many egomaniacs, he decided to fight the crusades over again and all subsequent Western influence in the Middle East in the name of Islam.

A succession of terrorist attacks flowed from that decision. U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed, an American warship was attacked in Yemen, and the most spectacular attack was, of course, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth plane was brought down by its passengers.

Americans seem to have forgotten that George W. Bush responded forcefully to 9/11 and to the threat of Saddam Hussein to the entire Middle East. This is in contrast to President Obama’s futile efforts to get the Iranian ayatollahs to cooperate. Dictators are not famous for being nice.

As the AP report noted, bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warming in past messages, but his latest on January 29 was the first to focus on it as a major theme along with the need to destroy the American economy. With regard to the latter, he seems to be getting a lot of help from President Obama who has tripled U.S. debt during the past year.

The significance of his latest audiotape seems to be a belated effort to piggyback the global warming issue at the same time it is crashing and burning worldwide due to revelations that the data on which it was based was deliberately falsified.

Claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting were false and this was made known to the IPCC Chairman Pachauri two months before the Copenhagen conference, but he managed to wait until after the conference to publicly correct the IPCC report.

Bin Laden’s bad timing suggests that his campaign is losing support. It is almost comical that he would try to enlist the support of global warming diehards in his quest to overthrow the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, but there is nothing comical about his continued threat to the nation and the world.

The silence of Al Gore as the planet has cooled since 1998 suggests that even he knows that his self-enrichment plan is coming to an end. Only President Obama seems or pretends to be oblivious to the idiocy of cutting “greenhouse gas emissions” in the name of a planet that is not warming.

In this quest, Obama has now been joined by Osama.

Goodbye, George W.

By Alan Caruba

After eight years as President, we would probably be thinking unkind thoughts even if it was the Dalai Llama who held the job. In the case of George W. Bush, saying goodbye comes as a distinct relief. As with all modern day Presidents, we just have seen too much of him over the course of eight years.

I felt the same about Bill Clinton when his second term mercifully came to an end, but that feeling was also tinged with the disgust I felt then and now for disgracing the office with his White House intern antics. How and why he has found forgiveness with Democrats or anyone else still eludes me.

Reporters and others keep saying that what you see is what you get when it comes to George W. If so, he is surely one of the goofiest Presidents we have had, afflicted with a variety of mannerisms and ticks that have made him easy fodder for impersonators and comics.

I cannot shake the feeling that the man lacked seriousness or at least the intellectual depth to grasp the events and issues that came to his attention daily. There really seemed to be a “frat boy” at the core of his personality. It often seemed that, as the oldest son, he was just engaged in the family business of running the country.

Even so, I thought Bush’s response to 9/11 was right on target. Learning that Osama bin Laden was headquartered in Afghanistan, he sent the CIA and the military there to chase out the Taliban. Failing to capture bin Laden, he could have stuck to covert efforts, but he went beyond the initial action, invading Iraq for what I am sure he saw as the greater needed to draw in al Qaeda to destroy it. Simply said, he succeeded. Al Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of what it was when it attacked the U.S. in 2001. Bin Laden issues weak messages from hiding.

So, perhaps history will be more kind to him than present opinions. The rest of his eight years, though, hardly merit hosannas. He spent and he spent and he spent. He introduced legislation that only a liberal would consider; the No Child Left Behind Act, the Prescription Medicine benefits on top of a Medicare program that was already running out of money, the failure to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

George W. could just as well have been a Democrat. He leaves with a popularity rating so low that it rivals Harry S. Truman who was a Democrat. Here again, though, history has proven that many of Truman’s decisions were the right ones.

His farewell address was dignified, but not without the fumbling over simple words and phrases now so familiar to his inability to deliver a speech without these stumbles. It is not his speeches, however, by which he will be remembered, but by his enduring faith in the spread of freedom and democracy.

The result of his tenure is, after three decades of despotic control, an Iraq as a young democracy. It is an Afghanistan struggling to throw off the oppression of the Taliban, the spawn of a duplicitous Pakistan, itself struggling to be something, anything more than just another junta-run excuse for a nation. Bush has strengthened ties to India and to China. Burned by his initial confidence in Vladimir Putin, he has kept Russia bottled up to some degree.

His humanitarian instincts are seen in programs to deal with AIDS and Malaria in Africa, but his reputation will rest ultimately on his role as Commander-in-Chief. Here again, history may speak well of him in hindsight.

We may look back on the Bush43 years with some nostalgia, if not for the man, then for the fact that we did not suffer another attack like 9/11 and that you knew he would not let that happen on his watch.

People I Don't Want to Hear About in 2009

By Alan Caruba

If I had the power, there are any number of people from whom or about whom I would not want to hear, see, or read anything in 2009. Here’s a short list!

Al Gore. This pusillanimous fraud, a leftover from the Clinton administration who was defeated for president in 2000, has devoted his time to issuing warnings against global warming, the greatest hoax of the modern era. He tends to be most vocal during blizzards.

Dr. James Hansen. Right behind, with his nose deeply buried in Al Gore’s posterior, is the man who started the global warming hoax when, in the 1980s, he testified to Congress that the whole world is doomed. To his name I add the hundreds of other alarmists.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is quite possibly the most stupid person to have ever held that post.

Sen. Harry Reid. The Senate Majority Leader, like his counterpart in the House, holds a lot of idiotic ideas and beliefs. He continues to oppose the opening of Yucca Mountain, a multi-billion dollar repository for spent, but radioactive nuclear fuel.

Bill Clinton. Having cost Hillary a shot at the presidency and failed in so many ways during his own two terms in office, one fervently hopes he will busy himself giving million dollar speeches in Abu Dhabi and other venues far from the U.S. This is the man who once said, “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.” Well, he got his wish; the economy is slowing to a crawl. Happy now?

Jimmy Carter. This friend to every dictator on Earth was once elected President of the United States. Mistakes happen.

Barney Frank. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this House of Representatives’ Elmer Fudd impersonator to take responsibility for the nation’s financial crisis. He spent the last few years defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while both purchased billions in sub-prime mortgage loans.

George W. Bush. I have had to listen to President Bush for eight years and that is quite enough.

John McCain. America has voted, but less than half for you and most of them held their nose when they did.

Keith Olbermann & Chris Matthews. These two alleged political pundits so thoroughly embarrassed themselves and MSNBC during the campaigns that their co-workers refuse to sit at their table in the company cafeteria.

Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson. The next President of the United States of America is an Afro-American. Millions of white people voted for him. Now go away.

Mahmoud Amadinejad. This loony is convinced that millions must die so that a mythical Twelfth Imam can return to bring Islam to all mankind. Meanwhile, Mahmoud and the ayatollahs have been busy destroying Iran when not taking hostages.

Hugo Chavez. This Fidel Castro wannabe has managed to destroy Venezuela’s economy with his communist ranting. I miss the good old days when the CIA was encouraged to rid us of such pests.

Osama bin Laden. With any luck, this sucker is dead.

The United Nations. Anything that comes out of this institution should be treated like toxic waste.

So many annoying, deranged, and stupid people; we can be assured that the mainstream media will hang on their every word.

Let Omar bin Laden Live in America

By Alan Caruba

Poor Omar bin Laden. He is the fourth of eleven children Osama bin Laden fathered with his first wife and one of a total of nineteen children.

After seeking political asylum, Spain recently told him he cannot live there. Even though he had nothing to do with it, the likelihood is that the train bombings that killed more than 190 people commuting into Madrid on March 11, 2004 is still as fresh in the minds of Spaniards as 9/11 is for Americans.

Before Spain turned him down, England made it clear to Omar that he was not welcome to settle down in the village of Moulton in Cheshire. A former scrap-metal merchant, Omar was seeking a settlement visa, but no luck. It didn’t help that jihad bombings in London and an airport in Scotland made for a chilly reception.

Despite 9/11, I would still suggest that America give Omar and his wife, Zaina Alsabah, refuge here. There is precedent for it.

Svetlana, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, the dictator who shaped Soviet Russia, lived out her final years in America. The last president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, lived out his final years in Miami after the takeover by Fidel Castro in 1959. Today, the son of the former Shah of Iran, Reza Pallavi, lives in the Washington, DC area and is an outspoken critic of Iran’s current regime.

It didn’t help Omar much when he initially said he could not be certain that Osama, his father, was behind 9/11, but Osama made it clear to the entire world that he was. Omar, however, has made a number of statements in interviews condemning violent acts. Because of Arab culture, he is unable and unwilling to criticize his father by name. It’s just not done.

For me, providing refuge for Omar and his wife would be a kind of poetic justice. It would probably make Osama bin Laden even crazier than he already is. Imagine Osama waking up every day knowing that one of his sons is enjoying life in America?

Bin Laden Morphs into Che Guevera

By Alan Caruba

It’s become so commonplace as to receive only a minor mention in the news. Predator drones under the command presumably of the CIA or the Air Force find and kill some ranking member of al Qaeda in far-off Waziristan.

Silently traversing the skies above the otherwise impenetrable region, death must come as a surprise to the masters of Islamic hatred and terror.

Recently a senior Saudi cleric, Sheikh Saleh bin Muhammad Al-Luhaidan, the head of the Saudi Supreme Judicial Council, had some harsh words for al Qaeda and its founder. The scion of one of Saudi Arabia’s most distinguished families outside of the royal one, Osama bin Laden has been a pariah there for years. The Saudis were among the earliest to recognize the danger he posed.

“His actions speak for him,” said the Sheikh of bin Laden. “He is not the one to direct a person onto the right path. Indeed, he is a promoter of evil and depravity, and whoever follows him, pursues depravity.”

The Sheikh said of his followers, “These deviants, who were not tolerated in their (own) countries, went to Iraq and to other countries with the purpose of destroying of (Saudi) kingdom.” He called them criminals.

I don’t know what he thought of the 15 Saudis who participated in 9/11, but presumably he thinks they’re criminals as well. The fact is that Saudi Arabia has been a major center for al Qaeda recruitment for years. The Sheikh’s comments reflect this unpleasant truth.

It is a great irony that a nation that has spent billions for the propagation of Islam around the world has spawned this terrorist response as an outgrowth of its efforts. Worse yet for them, the jihadists want to overthrow the Royal family.

While the U.S. predator drones circle lazily above the frontier areas of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is morphing slowly into the Che Guevera of the Islamist movement; more symbol than active participant.

Bin Laden is frequently said to be dead, but when one of our drones finds him, he will join the growing list of others who have been delivered to paradise with an assist from a guided missile or two.

We can take comfort in knowing that terrorists tend to rapidly wear out their welcome. Iraq is a perfect example of that. Those who continue to insist it was a mistake to go there and kill jihadists have been proven wrong. Unfortunately, one of them is running for President.

The fact is, we have neither heard, nor seen much from Bin Laden. As Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”

Obama the Intellectual

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has ever studied history knows that intellectuals have been the cause of more misery in the modern world than any other group.

It was an intellectual, Karl Marx, who decided he could cure the ills of society by coming up with an economic system designed to redistribute a nation’s worth by destroying every pillar of human society and assigning all power to the “state” which is, of course, composed of very imperfect humans.

The result, Communism, has killed more people than all the wars in modern times and been the source of such misery as to defy description. Other forms have included Fascism and the watered-down version, Socialism. None of them work. All of them make people into beggars, forever trying to manipulate the system for their advantage.

The latest version is the charade of sending economic “stimulus” checks to taxpayers instead of letting them keep they own money and decide how to spend it.

Did you know that Harry S. Truman was the first U.S. President who did not attend college? Compare the remarkable legacy he left behind to that of Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton University and Governor of New Jersey. Undoubtedly a man of intellect, he also managed to lay waste to every institution he led. The wreckage he left behind at the Treaty of Versailles following WWI led inevitably to WWII.

By comparison, Truman and the men he selected to serve the nation rescued Europe from Soviet domination after WWII, began the transformation of Japan and Germany into democracies and thriving economies, saved South Korea from communist domination, and are remembered for the Berlin Airlift that defied the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

So now the nation is being asked to elect a classic intellectual, Barack Hussein Obama, to lead us and, typically, he has no idea about the lives of ordinary Americans holding jobs, raising families, and trying to survive the idiocy of several previous administrations that have left the nation hostage to foreign oil and locked in battle with the worst elements of resurgent Islam.

I personally take some comfort that John McCain finished far down in the bottom half of his class at Annapolis. Smart enough to graduate, smart enough to fly fighter jets, smart enough to rise in the Navy’s command structure and tough enough to survive five years of torture by his North Vietnamese captors. Despite his differences with his own political party and inclined toward the element that greases any government action, compromise, McCain offers the capabilities and character that suggests an understanding of human nature.

Compare this with Barack Obama whose interpretation of the 9/11 attack on America was due to “a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers.” If Obama took the time to learn why Osama led the attack, he would have discovered that in 1998 he was a leader in the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders. Since the Koran repeatedly commands attacking unbelievers and killing apostates to Islam, Obama has demonstrated extraordinary ignorance and foolishness.

Indeed, Obama attributed the attack and its lack of empathy to feelings that grow “out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Bin Laden is a university graduate with a degree in engineering. He comes from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. His close associate, Ayman El Zawahiri is a doctor of medicine. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who planned the attack is a graduate of the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University with a degree in engineering. Mohammed Atta who flew one of the airliners into the World Trade Center was a graduate of Cairo University, an architect. They were neither poverty-stricken, nor ignorant.

They are or were intellectuals who took great pleasure in destroying the lives of 3,000 Americans and bringing down two great skyscrapers in New York and destroying a big chunk of the Pentagon.

In a similar fashion, Obama expressed the view that Americans in “small towns in Pennsylvania and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest” are guided by feelings of bitterness. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In short, Obama hasn’t a clue about ordinary Americans who go to church, may enjoy hunting or the concept of self-defense, and are angry with a government that has done nothing to stem the flow of illegal immigrants who will deny jobs to Americans and drive down their wages in the process. Americans are not anti-trade. They buy stuff from China and everywhere else in the world if the price is right.

Obama’s stint as a community organizer managed mostly to make a number of Chicago developers wealthy without improving the lives of those he was supposedly trying to help. He got himself elected to the Illinois legislature where he was reluctant to vote much of the time and then to the U.S. Senate where he has served less than half of his first term in office, having devoted himself solely to getting elected the next President of the United States. His attendance record in the Senate is worse than a joke. It is an offense to those who elected him.

He is, in a word, clueless.

This is a common characteristic of intellectuals who are convinced they know how everyone else should live their lives and convinced that only an all-powerful central government can and should determine the content of those lives.

Going Nuts in Waziristan

By Alan Caruba

Okay, so let’s pretend you were one of the sons of one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. You were guaranteed a good job. You had a couple of wives. The problem was that you just didn’t feel fulfilled. You weren’t a member of the royal family of Saud, so you could never be king. You probably would not become president of the family business no matter how hard you worked or prayed. So, there you are, stuck with a couple of million, a family, and a lot of time on your hands.

What would you do? You’d leave all that behind and go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army! You would show everyone how brilliant you were and create an organization called al Qaeda. Then, after the war was successful, having nothing better to do, you would organize and fund a plan to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

You almost pulled it off, too, except for those Americans that fought your hand-picked terrorists…er, jihadists and brought down the fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field. No one was more surprised than you when both towers fell. The Pentagon suffered damage, but was repaired. A lot of people died, but they were mostly infidels.

What followed was the failed uprising in Iraq because your guy there managed to kill enough Iraqis to piss them off and turn them against al Qaeda. Someone snitched on him and he got blown to hell. Your other efforts to demonstrate your piety and love of Islam only seemed to turn more people against you.

So, here you are, going slowly nuts in some god forsaken wilderness in Waziristan on the northwest border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. No high definition television. No air conditioning. Everything is just one damned mountain after another. The nearest pizza parlor is a couple of hundred miles away.

Worse yet, none of the leaders of the Arab nations like you and the Iranians don’t either.

What is there left to do? You can send audio messages via al Jazeera. Your best buddy, Ayman al-Zawahri has been doing the same, but who cares what he says, eh? You’re Osama bin Laden, Mr. Islam Big Shot.

So that’s what Osama has been doing. First to denounce the 60th anniversary of Israel and again, last Sunday, to denounce Arab leaders for doing nothing to help the poor Palestinians who haven’t gotten the message that the Israelis have won every war waged against them and maybe peace is not such a bad idea.

“They have decided that peace with the Zionists is their strategic option, so damn their decision.”

Not satisfied with just getting the Arab leaders angry with him, Osama also found time to denounce the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, who is busy trying to take over Lebanon instead of attacking Israel. No word yet on his opinion of Hamas, but we can be pretty sure he thinks they haven’t had enough casualties to prove their bona fides.

It’s a sure sign that the end of the Palestinian resistance is near when Osama bin Laden picks up the cause. He’s the kind of guy that wants to run to the front of the parade.

So far Osama bin Laden has been run out of Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and everywhere else in the region other than Waziristan, a place where starting a fire involves rubbing two sticks together and bathroom facilities are a hole in the ground behind a big rock.

You’ve got your face on T-shirts and you can get media coverage any time you open your yap and talk about anything on your mind, but your mind is slowly waving bye-bye to you.