Election Post-Mortem

By Alan Caruba

Every time a political party loses an election, someone pronounces its death. The Democrats and Republicans, under one name or another, have been around from the beginning of the nation whether they were called Whigs, Federalists, or Dixiecrats. The once solidly Democrat South became Republican after the Civil Rights movement succeeded.

Those of a certain political philosophy will always find a home in one party or the other.
This may also explain why the Green Party, the Constitution Party and the Libertarians never seem to gain any ground. Their agendas are far too narrow or extreme to attract people who, from both sides of the political spectrum, simply want America to prosper.

There’s a pretty good explanation why the GOP lost the White House and his name is George W. Bush. This is why it frequently appeared that Barack Obama was campaigning against him and not John McCain. This wasn’t just a political ploy, this was a political reality.

Bush will leave the White House as unpopular as former President Truman. In Truman’s case, historians have since concluded he was one of the best presidents we’ve had for his role in containing the spread of Soviet communism and saving Europe via the Marshall Plan. If in fifty years or so the Middle East looks different in terms of more democratic forms of government and exporting something other than terrorism and oil, Bush may be judged less harshly.

Obituaries for the Republican Party are premature. Its loss, however, was entirely predictable. Washington, D.C., no matter which party attains the reins of power, corrupts them by virtue of the enormous scale of money at stake. Politics is about money because the game in the nation’s capital is predicated on who gets to control—dare I say it—its redistribution.

This explains, for example, why my home state of New Jersey only gets 61 cents back on every dollar it sends to Washington. Life is unfair said John F. Kennedy and this is quite true when it comes to the way money is spent by the federal government. The worst of it is the mind-boggling waste of millions on programs that, once in place, never seem to end.

The Republicans, traditionally thought to be more prudent and sophisticated regarding the nation’s economy, proved to be as profligate as the widely-perceived “tax and spend” Democrats. That’s because power is a drug and an addictive one at that.

This brings us to a fundamental truth about our President-elect and the new Congress. There is going to be a lot less money available to do the many things they want. The economy has, for the near term, been ruined by the very people we sent to Washington to protect, preserve, and increase it.

The only way that the Democrat majority and White House can acquire money for their agenda or just to keep the wheels of government turning is to borrow it. This nation, however, is so deeply in debt that it needs, as much as possible, to stop borrowing. This is not going to happen. Just watch the returning Congress for a taste of what is yet to come.

Democrat policies dating back to the days of Jimmy Carter are responsible for the credit crunch and mortgage meltdown. Even the pro-Democrat Wall Street went into a slump on news of Obama’s victory. Republicans, when in power, expanded an already troubled entitlement program, Medicare, by adding a prescription program. At the behest of the President, they have engaged in a dubious war in Iraq with the Democrat votes needed to maintain it. It wasn’t until the height of the Vietnam War protests that Congress finally summoned the courage to cut off funds for it.

What America needs most is a period of rest and recuperation.

It needs to get its fiscal house in order.

It needs to reduce its military involvement in places that do not directly affect our national security.

It needs to abandon programs based on a global warming that is not happening.

It needs to tap its own extensive oil, natural gas, and coal reserves, along with building more nuclear plants for the increased electricity it will soon require and to keep its fleet of cars and trucks on its roads.

None of this will happen. An empire doesn’t work that way. It grows until it implodes. That is the history of Rome, Great Britain, France, the Russians and every other nation that exhausted itself in the quest for global hegemony.

The Arab Reaction to Obama

By Alan Caruba

On November 5, Amr Moussa the head of the Arab League called upon President-elect Barack Obama to act swiftly to try to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

According to an Associated Press report, Moussa welcomed the result of the U.S. election and said it marked a watershed for the United States and for efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Moussa said Obama's call for change is needed in the Middle East to ease tensions between Arabs and Israelis, and to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran.

What this primarily reveals is that Israel’s existance remains the Arab obsession, second only to their belief that non-Arab Iran plans to take over the Middle East by using a nuclear threat and the Palestinians as their proxy army. Apparently Arabs think that America, not the Arab league, is expected to solve the problem. Americans who believe this are deluding themselves.

Americans might expect that the initial response from the Arab world of the Middle East would be to greet the election of Barack Obama with enthusiasm, but that is because most Americans haven’t a clue as to how Arabs perceive the world and how wedded they are to their victimization and belief that (a) America exists only to rule them and (b) America’s foreign and other policies are determined by “Zionists” and, of course, “capitalists.”

The think tank that specializes in review and analysis of the media in the Middle East, MEMRI, provides a look into their very strange and illogical world.

I begin, however, by taking notice that the very first announcement out of Iraq after the election was one by its foreign minister who expressed the hope that American troops would not be leaving too soon. It’s one thing to hate the occupier and it’s quite another to fear one’s neighbors and domestic insurgents. This is and has been the rule in the Middle East since the days when camel power was the only way to get around. In other words, “America, please don’t go!”

The response by Hamas, one of the Palestinian factions, was to lob 35 rockets into Israel the day after the election. If one is seeking peace in the Middle East, he is likely to wander in the desert much longer than the Jews and they at least had Moses to lead them.

So, one need hardly be surprised that Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawl issued a fatwa to the effect that “Whoever thinks that the Democrats are less hostile to [the Arabs] than the Republicans should know that the number of Iraqis killed during the siege [of Iraq] by the Democrat Bill Clinton is twice as high as the number of [Iraqis] killed by the Republican [George] Bush.” The problem with this, as with most such fatwa nonsense, is that Bill Clinton did not engage the U.S. in any military action against Iraq. Clinton did manage to get a bunch of our boys killed in Somalia, however, before beating a hasty retreat.

According to Al-Qaeradhawl, “The Democrats kill you slowly without you noticing it—and therein lies the danger. They are like a snake whose touch is not felt until its poison enters your body.” Tell me about it!

An Iranian daily, Jomhouri-ye Eslami, opined that, “The most that black man can do in the White House is to replace some of the staff and change some ceremonial procedures. He will never manage to change the structure of the American regime, which was established by capitalists, Zionists, and racists.” Since Iranian newspapers publish only what their government deems acceptable, one can extrapolate that Obama will not receive any warmer welcome than previous presidents going back to Jimmy Carter.

In Syria, currently deploying troops around Lebanon, the Syrian daily, Al-Watan, was far more gracious. Indeed, they hastened to declare Obama the winner before the final results were in. “We wanted to declare Obama president…as a show of solidarity with millions of Americans, Arabs, and colleagues in the world media who [all] yearn for ‘change’ in U.S. foreign policy.” So much for optimism and good will, but it was quickly followed by the view that, “Some claim that if Obama wins he will be no better than Bush, if not worse…They may be right, since it is well known that no American president has ever stood on the side of the Arabs—rather they have all stood on the side of Israel.”

It takes a special brand of crazy to both welcome the President-elect and then declare that he is a crypto-Zionist. How can anyone say that a man named Barack Hussein Obama does not feel just a little connection to Arabs?

In Saudi Arabia, they were equally pessimistic. The Saudi daily, Al-Watan, said in an editorial that “There is no difference between Obama and McCain. They disagree only on the means to achieve America’s chief goal, which is to rule for another hundred years.”

The Middle East will continue to believe that Jews in general and Israelis in particular determine U.S. foreign policy. Despite, for example, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, they think the U.S. had no interest, nor reason to repulse that U.N. sanctioned war against a Gulf state ally. Despite having taken U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979, the Iranians see no reason for U.S. hostility. And, despite having been defeated repeatedly in their efforts to destroy Israel, Arab nations still resent and deplore its right to exist.

Expecting this state of delusion and dementia to see things “our way” is a fool’s game. What they understand, in between recovering from their latest defeat, is the determined application of power to repulse or deter their next misstep. They never learn. Never.

Jesse Wept

By Alan Caruba

As Barack Obama gave his speech to acknowledge winning the presidency, Jesse Jackson was among the throng in Chicago’s Grant Park and appeared to be weeping. I assume most people thought they were tears of joy that a black man had been elected, but this is America and black candidates have been elected to high office for many years now.

I have another theory though. I was wondering if Jesse wasn’t weeping because he knew that Obama’s election put an end to his ability to blackmail corporations to support his Operation PUSH while claiming that blacks in America needed special treatment and extra help to get ahead and succeed.

This suspicion was confirmed as I talked to an assistant to a high ranking Wall Street financial consultant. She is black and an immigrant from Haiti who came to America believing that “hard work” was all it would take to achieve the American dream. She was disdainful of American blacks “who used the excuse of racism.” As far as she was concerned, her skin color had been neither an obstacle nor a limitation.

I recall the Civil Rights movement and reported on it when I was a young journalist. At one point I met Dr. Martin Luther King. I recall that the movement was driven by hope that, for blacks, the American dream could and would be achieved. Then, within a week after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed by President Johnson, riots broke out in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Why, asked white America.

Why did blacks cheer when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his former wife and her friend when virtually everyone knew or believed he was guilty? And why was no one, black or white, surprised when he was found guilty of the latest charges against him?

This writer is not arguing that blacks in America did not suffer centuries of slavery and, following the Civil War, another century of segregation before their full rights as citizens were written into laws like the Voting Rights Act. What Jesse Jackson knows is that Americans, particularly white Americans, have now made it manifestly clear that being black is no longer an excuse for failure and a host of other social ills that beset the black community.

Blacks have not lacked these years since the Civil Rights movement for role models. Now they have Barack Obama, the ultimate role model, the President-elect of the United States of America.

No doubt Jesse Jackson, a former candidate for President, a civil rights leader, and a decidedly flawed role model, was weeping from the emotion that seeing Barack Obama would have naturally evoked. No doubt American blacks have cause for joy today.

They have, however, an enormous task ahead of them. They are too often poor, drop out from school too much, have crime rates that are too high, give birth to too many single parent babies, and have been too dependent on government welfare programs.

Socially, they are still at the bottom of the barrel long after other racial groups such Asians have risen to the top. Hispanics who also came in search of the American dream now out-number them.

Lastly, there is something blacks have to fear. It is the backlash that is sure to come when President Obama does not make good on his promises. He is, after all, a politician no matter the color of his skin.

Worse for blacks will be an economy in free-fall where jobs disappear, investment dries up, and other troubles are laid at the feet of The One who says he intends to change America and the world. When that happens, they will have cause to think something has gone terribly wrong.

Obama Victory Puts Israel in the Crosshairs

By Alan Caruba

While Americans have been fixated on the drama of our national elections, the Syrian army has reportedly taken up battle positions in four villages around Hasbaya opposite Mt. Hermon and northern Israel.

Elements of the Syrian 10th, 12th and 14th Divisions and the Third Army are now poised opposite Israeli positions holding the disputed Shebaa Farms enclave on Mt. Harmon. At this point, too, all of Lebanon is encircled by Syrian troop emplacements.

Reportedly, too, Syria has established a military presence inside Lebanon. During the past summer, they set up radar stations on the Lebanese peaks of Mt. Sannine and Barukh in the central mountain range. Such radar provides a look at every move on Lebanese territory, in northern Israel, and on the eastern Mediterranean.

Lebanon is where the next big, Middle East war will begin and Lebanon will be the platform for a massed attack on Israel. Meanwhile, in Gaza, tons of explosives and weapons have been smuggled into this enclave of Hamas. A coordinated attack from the north and south cannot be ruled out.

In Israel, the politics of the nation has slowed progress toward selecting a new prime minister and putting together a ruling coalition. Israelis have pinned their hopes on a deal with Fatah, formerly the more powerful of the two Palestinian factions, but it has a weak leader and is largely an impotent partner for peace even if it wanted it. There is no proof of that despite U.S. efforts to facilitate an agreement.

To understand the timing of the next war it is important to know that the Israeli congress, the Knesset, will dissolve itself on November 11th and, for the next four or five months, there will be a major power vacuum; a nation essentially without a government that would be vital in the event of an attack. That is why an attack is imminent.

President-elect Obama has surrounded himself with foreign affairs advisors that are uniformly anti-Israel. Despite his protestations, he is likely to be the first U.S. President who would not take steps to assist an Israel under attack.

Indeed, even the Bush administration in its waning days has essentially signaled Syria that, if it keeps its promises to control Hezbollah within Lebanon, it would not oppose its return to control that nation.

All this suggests that a massive attack on Israel will be mounted.

In the sixty years of Israeli sovereignty, it has essentially been at war every day. This, too, is why Palestinians have been never been allowed to migrate and integrate into the other nations of the Middle East. At least two generations of Palestinians have been deliberately kept as refugees without a state.

If Israel were defeated, it would be seen as a signal that the Islamic Revolution is succeeding. It will put American and allied European troops in the region at significant risk. The British have already withdrawn theirs from southern Iraq and it explains in part why British and French generals are recommending that Afghanistan be abandoned.

More to the point, it does not matter what America and Europe do with regard to the Middle East. In the end, wise heads may conclude that it needs to be “contained” much as the former Soviet Union was for four decades. The fever of the Islamic revolution must be allowed to run its course until the people of the Middle East reject it.

In the meantime, with a President-elect who spent his formative years in Indonesia as the adopted son of a Muslim and who has Muslim relatives in Kenya, an attack on Israel is virtually guaranteed.

America at the Tipping Point

By Alan Caruba

By Wednesday morning it is quite possible that the United States turns dramatically towards socialism in the conduct of its economy, its politics, and its culture. If Barack Obama is elected President a collectivist, failed system will be expanded. I anticipate a very ugly struggle to regain the gift the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us.

If John McCain can somehow squeak through to secure enough Electoral College votes it will prove very surprising. History is always about “if”, but it is mostly about that handful of men and the occasional woman like Elizabeth I who brought the full force of their personality to bear on events of their times.

I recall being surprised to learn that the Revolutionary war dragged on for seven years and to learn that it was the sheer force of personality, the unbelievable tenaciousness, endurance, and faith of George Washington that overcame the greatest military power of his time. One man can make a difference.

The power of the presidency has grown over the last two hundred and twenty years since the Constitution became effective when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it. The Bill of Rights was introduced by James Madison on June 8, 1789 in the House of Representatives. It would not be until Virginia ratified the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791 that it was incorporated as the law of the land.

America has been the single most astonishing experiment in self government by any people in the history of mankind. All power is posited in the people. In an imperial age when monarchs ruled Europe and the rest of the world was controlled by tribal leaders, warlords, and various degrees of dictatorship, Americans decided that they would be bound together by the Constitution; a nation of laws. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (10th Amendment)

Even so, self-government has its perils. Aside from enemies outside our borders, there are always the ancient demons of mankind; pride, hubris, avarice, the addiction to power. Here again, it was George Washington that set the pace. After his second term, he stepped aside.

The nation has only had 43 Presidents to date. Some families, the Adam’s, the Roosevelt’s, and the Bush’s, provided two generations of Presidents. Some came to the job by route of an assassination or the passing of a President due to illness. The ones we remember best were the generation of the Revolution and those who prospered in war. Those who extended the nation from the East to the West Coast are barely remembered, but they created the map we shall watch on election night.

Here’s what we forget at our peril or, in the case of the thousands of young people inspired by Obama, they simply do not know.

The White House has not been immune to corruption. In my lifetime, there was the Watergate scandal that reached all the way to the President and included two of the highest law enforcement officers in the land, the Attorney General. Even Reagan’s administration was not immune, engaging in “Irangate” to secure funds to fight communism in Nicaragua. The Bush administration has been notorious for its secrecy, particularly as regards the billions wasted in the occupation of Iraq.

Americans expect their elected and appointed leaders to be bound by the Constitution. A respect for it is essential to the presidency. Raised on an intellectual diet of socialism, Barack Obama has long been critical of America, resentful of its long, hard road to equality for Afro-Americans, and determined to change America by challenging the role of its corporations—the great engines of its economy.

Obama will increase the taxation of its wealthy and its middle class at the worst possible time for such an action. Small business owners will suffer. Under the guise of the “environmental”, he will seek to control our use of energy, the resource that literally fuels our economy and our lives.

For all of his easy charm, the rhetoric that sounds good, but says nothing, Obama does not like America as it is. He wants “change” and, holding the reins of power, he will be able to impose change through an eager, power-besotted Congress controlled by his party. Failed programs like the Great Society will be tried again. And will fail again.

He wants to “redistribute the wealth.” That’s what they do in Europe where the native population is dying because they lacked the will to even reproduce in sufficient numbers to pass their culture and heritage to a new generation. Here in America the “greatest generation” is passing from the scene, replaced by their children and grandchildren who grew up addicted to cheap and easy credit.

It was government under the control of Democrat presidents and congresses that is responsible for the financial failure centered around the housing market because it required banks and mortgage firms to lend money to people who could not pay it back. That’s socialism, not capitalism. That’s spreading the wealth around to those who may not have had a job, nor wanted one.

Now the government has an ownership stake in some banks and insurance companies. A capitalist system would have let them fail, but we live in a semi-socialist nation that wants to take over the entire health industry and whose Social Security and Medicare programs are unsustainable.

America began to lose its soul to socialism in the Great Depression that was brought about by bad economic policies instituted by Congress. Now the federal and state governments employ millions to administer programs that earlier generations would have deemed an offense to personal responsibility, to hard work, to the American dream.

By Wednesday Barack Obama may be President-elect, although the prospect of a hotly contested election result may drag out the determination of who will lead the nation. If, however, he wins decisively, he will both demonstrate that an Afro-American can be President and, at the same time, that Americans have reached a tipping point that rejects the fundamental values of self-reliance, risk taking, and empowerment on which the nation was founded and became a super power.

Americans, at this writing, still enjoy their Constitutional freedoms. They are free to reject Barack Obama, just as they rejected all but two of the last 16 Presidents. They are free to put their “country first” and elect John McCain. If they don’t, all bets are off.

There will be no one left to protect you

By Alan Caruba

Barack Obama wants to institute a Civilian National Security Force, a vast militia not unlike Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a personal army. He knows he would need such a force to protect him and to enforce his will on Americans.

Americans will have not seen such arbitrary power used against them since the days of the Civil War when Lincoln put the Constitution in the bottom drawer of his desk and set about arresting anyone who opposed his policies to enforce the Union on southern States seeking secession. The moral issue was slavery. The Constitutional issue was states rights.

If you want to see another civil war, just wait for this new security force to come into being. Obama would need it because the concept of posse comitatus forbids the use of the U.S. military to enforce laws within the nation. An army of domestic followers of “the One” would fill that need, assuming that all other law enforcement agencies failed to resist such a horrendous plan.

There is absolutely NO need for a homeland security force. We have the Federal Bureau of Investigation that has a long and distinguished history of obedience to the U.S. Constitution and respect for the rule of law. We have a huge law enforcement community that is likewise pledged to the rule of law. We have a Central Intelligence Agency and a National Security Agency, both defending against foreign enemies. Nothing Obama proposes is more dangerous to the comity of the nation than a National Civilian Security Force.

A friend recently suggested that the KKK is probably hoping Obama will win because they anticipate their numbers will gain in response. That would be unfortunate, but not surprising. These days the KKK, if you visit their website, are all about “white, Christian Americans.” They still hate Blacks and Jews, and one supposes everyone who is not a white Christian by their definition.

What this ignores is that America was founded by Christians for the free practice of Protestantism. Even the Declaration of Independence makes reference to the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…” While the Bill of Rights forbids the “establishment” of a state religion, it does not forbid the practice of religion, any religion. America has been mostly free of overt religious bigotry, despite attacks on the early Mormons, a rampant distrust of Catholics, and evidence of anti-Semitism that virtually disappeared after the Holocaust in the last century.

So the question is not who the KKK is voting for, but what the unwitting and ignorant followers of Obama voting for? And do they know what awaits them in an Obama administration backed up by a Congress in the total control of the Democrat Party? I doubt that most do.

Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a German Lutheran pastor who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 wrote, “In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.”

The liberties that thousands of Americans have fought and died for hang in the balance.

All the conditions are in place for a huge Democrat blowout this election. That much power concentrated in a single political party is not a good thing. It is, in so many ways, not democratic and not American.

Who's Terrorized?

By Alan Caruba

I’ve been thinking of late about “the war on terror” that was initiated by the Bush administration after 9/11.

One of the places where terrorist attacks have taken place with greater intensity than anywhere else has been Iraq. After five or more years of these attacks, the Iraqis found ways to identify and eliminate those making them. A lot came, not from Iraqis, but by wannabe jihadists from neighboring nations. So, one assumes, the terror levels are down in Iraq.

Granted, living under Saddam Hussein’s pathological regime must have be cause for serious nervousness, but it is useful to keep in mind he was and is still not the only such despot operating then or now. A lot of the world operates under such people, most of whom seem to thrive in the Middle East and Africa. Cuba and Venezuela come to mind in our part of the world.

This is why we are not surprised that bombings continue in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are presumably the work of al Qaeda, the Taliban, or other interests with various agendas. Overall, the primary agenda throughout the Middle East is to get the United States to leave.

Most notably, however, there have been no bombings in America since 9/11.

A partial answer for this is the fact that American military power was brought to bear in the heart of the Middle East, but the question remains, if there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Saddam Hussein regime was not working with al Qaeda, and it was not likely to attack any of its neighbors because of no-fly zones and other restrictions, why the Bush administration made the invasion of Iraq a priority?

There is, however, another question that nearly eight years into the Bush administration and seven since 9/11, continues to be asked without a satisfying answer. Why hasn’t Osama bin Laden been captured?

If we can put military units in Afghanistan and fly lethal drones over that nation and Pakistan, why hasn’t there been any indication that bin Laden exists anywhere in the area we have been told he is hiding?

Ultimately, the question for all of us is whether you or anyone you know is “terrorized” at this point?

Do you believe that the Department of Homeland Security has made you any more secure today than the previous, separate agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, did prior to 9/11? And, to be fair, if you're an intelligence analyst or roomful of analysts drowning in a flood of reports of possible terror attacks, how do you pick the real one from all the rest?

I have a great personal regard for those who devote themselves to protecting the nation, but isn't it a legitimate questions to ask, if the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States cannot find one terrorist leader after seven years of looking for him, just how effective is it?

Or maybe, for reasons concerning the exercise of political power, they really aren't looking?

And do you actually feel any safer standing barefoot in line in the airport as some supposed security person checks your carry-on luggage for nail clippers or aftershave? After all, the likelihood is that the rest of the baggage in the belly of the plane has not been checked at all.

If more than a million illegal aliens can enter America every year just by walking or driving in, why should any of us feel “secure” from “terrorists”? What do we really know about any of those businessmen, tourists or students from foreign nations that fly into America every single day?

In short, we are all operating on the general belief that, somehow, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA, the State Department, and the entire military intelligence apparatus of the United States is getting the job done.

Other than the absence of any terrorist attacks, we are mostly operating on faith. In the end, we have no choice.

I keep hearing that we live in a dangerous world. So did our parents and our grandparents. The world is by definition a dangerous place.

More to the point, I am increasingly skeptical of any government official, from the President on down, that tells me to “be afraid, be very afraid.” You should be, too.