Saturday, October 20, 2012

Downsizing American Expectations (5)~~Benghazi Tragedy, Redux



Kucinich: Do you know how many shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles which can shot down commercial airlines are unaccounted for in Libya?

 
Nordstrom: The number is extremely fluid.  We understand it is between 10 and 20,000.

~~Congressional Hearings on Benghazi
 

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: . . .

~~Shakespeare (Duke Solinus), The Comedy of Errors


Except for the fact that fluidity and numbers don’t properly belong to the same sentence, Nordstrom’s reply to Kucinich represents the most honest assessment of the Libya debacle, particularly as applies to the tragedy in Benghazi.  Numbers were invented as tools to facilitate counting discreet entities.  Fluidity is the traditional semaphore for a continuum, ordinarily impervious to counting.

Just like the water drop that is lost amongst the uncountable non-drops in the ocean, the false narrative of an obscure YouTube video deemed offensive to the tender sensibilities of Islam to have caused the sacking of the Benghazi consulate and the deaths of four Americans almost became indistinct from the tsunami of lies that the Obama Regime has perpetrated on the American people for more than forty-five months.


“Almost” is the operative modifier.  As Victor Davis Hanson most astutely and succinctly emphasized, [http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101012.html]


In the past, hostage-taking, sniper shootings, or plane crashes accounted for the deaths of our ambassadors. The notion of an American ambassador trapped nearly alone for hours before succumbing to smoke inhalation, while helpless under sustained armed assault, cries out for explanation.

Unfortunately, events have a stubborn habit of defying precedents. Their unfolding inconveniently did not conform to the calculatingly planned and architected political propaganda template.  The Obama re-election campaign which has become synonymous with the Obama Administration, scrambled to retrofit the narrative into the template.  To wit, Victor Hanson continues,

An election-mode administration apparently was deeply invested in the post-convention narrative of Middle East calm — brought about by the end of bin Laden, the new reset diplomacy of a popular and cool-headed Barack Obama, the dismantling of al Qaeda by Predator-drone assassinations, and a US-shepherded Arab Spring.

It is obvious to everyone other than the most ardent of Pres. Obama’s acolytes that the Benghazi debacle was the tragic result of the Obama regime’s clumsy and incompetent attempt to sustain the delusional narrative that peace and harmony are at hand between the West and the Muslim world simply as a direct consequence to Pres. Obama’s being in the Oval Office.  Worse than that, the ensuing cover up violated every protocol of decency and due diligence expected in public service.

There is evidence aplenty that the White House deliberately misled the public in an attempt to maintain a semblance of consistency in its narrative.  No amount of feigned indignation and rehearsed affected petulance on the part of the President should mitigate the public outrage that he so richly deserves, unbridled by the constraints of civility.

It has become most urgently incumbent on Gov. Romney to bring up, front and center, the Libya debacle on Monday night’s debate.  Undoubtedly the subterfuge that Bob Schieffer may bring into the mix to continue the non-Fox-Media’s protective cocoon around the Obama campaign may prove formidable.  But it should be a measure of Gov. Romney’s bona fides for the Oval Office to expose the Benghazi tragedy in all its naked grotesqueness.

President Obama needs to lose his job over this.  Else the country is not fit to survive in a world when astute leadership is in dire demand.

As I warned earlier elsewhere [c.f., p.230 or see the entire chapter 14 with live hyperlinks sourcing at http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2010/11222010.htm],

The Barbarians are not just at the gates. They are already at the helms of power and wrecking havoc on our patrimony, flushing our posterity down the drain of indebtedness, and bankruptcy of the fiscal, moral, and intellectual genre.

In any political campaign impeccable timing is a premium commodity.  The tragedy in Benghazi, replete with treasonous intrigues and chicanery, has presented Gov. Romney with a perfect opportunity in the next debate to dismantle, piece by piece, the moral bankruptcy of the Obama doctrine of appeasement in the face of a relentless and dangerous enemy.

Given this promise of a political campaign bonanza, President Obama’s reelection can only mean one thing.  Namely, an American populace overwhelmed and vanquished by a deluge of mendacity.  For such stupidity, we should all go down in history as a veritable disgrace to the human race.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Downsizing American Expectations (4)~~Debating the Campaign Debates



The debate Wednesday was a “reset” of the presidential campaign.

~~ Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R,N.H.), Fox News Sunday


Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

~~ Seneca

Luck is not always the residue of design, and Romney was lucky that the first debate concerned the economy . . . America can be . . . a society in which markets — the voluntary collaboration of creative individuals — allocate opportunity.


 

If the debate can become an inflection point, a launching pad for the rest of the race, it won't be merely the end of the beginning of the general election campaign. It could become the beginning of the end of the failed Obama presidency. 

~~William Kristol, The Beginning of the End?

It is common knowledge that a politician would promise anything and everything just to secure the electorates’ votes.  A joke very popular in Philippine college campuses in the sixties I deem most appropriate to illustrate this popular belief.
 

The narrative goes: a politician in the campaign stomp pompously promised, “if I’m elected I’ll build you the most magnificent bridge you have ever seen in your lifetime.”  To which a heckler interjected: “but we don’t have any river hereabouts.”  Whereat the politician retorted, “I’ll build you an equally splendid river to go with it, you impertinent dolt.”


Unfortunately, “we the people” are more often than not taken in by every two-bit politician’s subterfuge and machinations.  Else, if such were not the case, no career politician would ever prosper on the taxpayers’ dime and retire from politics far wealthier than when he/she first entered the arena.  And there would have been far more politicians who would manage to earn the grade into being recognized and remembered as honorable statesmen, and/or stateswomen as the case may be.


Dictionary.com suggests that the labels politician and statesman may be deemed synonymous and interchangeable.  I strongly beg to disagree.  The simplest difference between the two is the statesman happens to be a politician with a conscience.  The statesman approaches governance and policy formulation with principled moorings.  On the other hand, the politician’s reckonings don’t go beyond expedience and leverage for future and more lucrative political gains.

 

Secondly, a statesman has the ability and intellectual fortitude to reach out for that much needed honorable compromise with the opposition to get one’s agenda implemented.  Pres. Obama bullied, bribed, and squandered the people’s money to get ObamaCare passed in Congress without a single vote from the opposition.

 

Colby Hall of mediaite.com, showcasing Pres. Obama’s statesmanship  skills, chronicled thus:

 
Mr. Obama had this to say about the GOP joining Democratic efforts for reform: “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” One can only imagine the imagery this comment will conjure for all parties involved.


 
The one factoid that was missed, nay, deliberately avoided noticing by everybody in pundit-land with the notable exceptions of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump was that Pres. Obama is a fraud.  He was built up by the media in 2008 as the “Manchurian Candidate,” and the nation had swallowed the goodies hook, line and sinker.

 
Contrary to the media narrative, I assert, contend and maintain that Barack Hussein Obama has been the dumbest individual to have disgraced the Oval Office.  Here is the compelling bill of circumstantial particulars:

 

1.           He is reduced to an incoherent blob when deprived of his teleprompter as demonstrated in last Wednesday’s debate;

2.           He spent reported $millions on a horde of lawyers to keep his college records~~transcripts, theses, term papers, etc. sealed off from the public;

3.           He is unique in being the President of Harvard Law Review without a single article, scholarly or otherwise, attributed to his by-line;

4.           He has never passed a budget in his first term because he could not persuade a single vote in Congress to support his agenda.


These are not hallmarks of leadership.  These are hallmarks of a loafer and a dolt.  He fiddled and hob-nobbed with celebrities in Las Vegas and Hollywood on campaign fund raising stomps while our sovereign territories were crushed and burnt in the four corners of the globe throughout the Islamic world.  How low can a President get before you recognize the symptoms and come forth with the proper diagnosis of the disease?

 
Contrary to liberal media spin, the debater who showed up last Wednesday night was the real unadulterated Barack Hussein Obama, a.k.a. Barry Soetoro, liberated from the protective cocoon of the Kool-Aid drinkers in the non-Fox media.  Sans the teleprompter, the Lord of the Realm proved to be indisputably as bare as the instant he was born, regardless of whether or not it was on United States territory.

 
The ultimate measure of a politician’s potential to evolve into a statesman is the way he handles the fallout of any debacle.  So far Pres. Obama has failed miserably this putrescence test, respecting last Wednesday’s debate.  Not only has he indulged ad nauseam in Argumentum ad hominem, as behooves a Chicago rabble rouser, he also had deployed the entire Democratic Party machine to foment at its basest abyss the politics of personal destruction.


Undoubtedly, this demeans the dignity of the Presidency as an institution.  Above and beyond that, it diminishes the pride and glory of history that has been the Idea of the United States of America. 

 
Considering that there are still two debates scheduled, for the sake of civility and to recalibrate his bearings, I beseech the President to heed the counsel of William Shakespeare in, Henry IV, Part II, to wit:

“Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Recalibration is absolutely necessary for the President shall be circumscribed by Agatha Reed’s standards for fairness in the movie “Goodbye, My Fancy” to “never play fair unless you respect the person you are dealing with.”  Ergo, as he continues to scornfully demonstrate his contempt for Gov. Romney in the campaign trail, his endless pontification on fairness would be reduced to an hideous exhibition of hypocrisy, putridly repugnant to a populace hungry for leadership.

 [Next~~ Downsizing American Expectations (5):

The Campaign Debates Part 2]

 

{Below catalogues remarks some in Pundit-Land has recorded for posterity on the first Presidential Debate as reflected in my short reading list}

 

 “. . . Political operatives say they hate oppo because they hate to lower the tone of the national discourse. The truth is, oppo is bad for business. The press goes into full Lascivious Puritan mode, spreads the dirt and then tries to nail the provider. When everyone knows a strategist won dirty, he becomes controversial . . .”


 

“. . . Mr. Obama has skated by with platitudes, lies, misrepresentations and "cool," while the nation we love, still "the last best hope of earth," seemed to be sliding toward the drain.

“. . . Obama seems to be identifying a problem, except that his description is false. And if it were true, why did Obama do nothing about it when his party controlled both houses of Congress?”


 

“America is not prospering economically. No matter what Obama says he's done, the facts are that personal income is down, good jobs are hard to get, the debt is north of $16 trillion, and everybody who has health insurance is paying higher premiums. And don't even ask about gas prices.”

~~Bill O’Reilly, The Debate Report Card

 

“It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. . . . With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.

“Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled against him — with a three-point rebuttal.”

~~Charles Krauthammer, Romney by two touchdowns

 

“As the president makes his case for four more years, he does so without emphasizing what he has accomplished or what he intends to do. Instead, he concentrates on the culture of personal celebrity.

 

“When backed into a corner, as in Wednesday’s debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney, he defaults to class warfare.

 

“If Obama wins re-election, he may claim a mandate to advance a class-based, redistributionist agenda — because that is exactly what he has run on.”


 

“The problem for Obama is not that his performance was disastrous, but rather that it was his normal workmanlike coasting. But this time, and for the first time, he was pitted against a skilled debater who had both the better argument and the better intellectual artillery to deliver it. . . . For Obama to win the next debate, Romney will have to be uncharacteristically bad, Obama will have to be uncharacteristically good, and the moderator will not only have to be engaged but also unashamedly hyper-partisan. All of the above can happen, but it is unlikely.”

~~Victor Davis Hanson,

The Problem Last Night Was Not Just Obama

 

“Sans teleprompter, he repeated the talking points of his television ads and, when Romney responded sharply, he had nothing to fall back on.

We saw the president who found it fitting to jet off to campaign in Las Vegas the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

. . .

Obama will surely perform better in his next two debates. Romney may not perform as well. But the first numbers suggest the firewall may be crumbling. We'll see if it holds.”

~~Michael Barone, Romney's Debate

Win Opens Cracks in Obama Firewall

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Downsizing American Expectations (3): The Fallacy of Exit Strategy


 

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. . . . if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

~~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

~~Sir Winston Churchill,


 

Back when one of the most urgent national questions was whether to surge or not to surge our troop commitment in Afghanistan, President Obama publicly agonized over the issue of how to fulfill a campaign promise.  To wit, the “bad war” that was Iraq must end; the “good war” that was Afghanistan must be sustained.

 

Like the good Nobel Peace Prize Laureate that he is, he summarily withdrew from Iraq without leaving any vestiges of our investment in blood, lives and material resources that we could subsequently leverage to influence the next unfolding of events.  To add injury to insult, he deployed to Afghanistan a troop surge that was 33% the size of what the field commanders requested.  Simultaneously, he made the announcement to withdraw not only for the “surge” on a date-certain timetable, but also for the entire contingent.

 

In so doing, our deployment in Afghanistan was deprived of the element of surprise so valued by Sun Tzu for winning wars (emphasis added):
 

In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory. . . . Those who are skilled in producing surprises will win.

Above and beyond that, he ceded an undue advantage to the enemy who got the luxury of waiting out the announced schedule for withdrawal.  As Clint Eastwood astutely observed,

I think you've mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, "Why are you giving the date out now?  Why don't you just bring them home tomorrow morning?"

Recognizing the folly of the exercise, back then I commented in passing [c.f., p. 264 in chapter 20],

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

What was not sufficiently emphasized then was the basic fallacy integral to the template of war engagement adopted by the American policy-making establishment.  The conventional wisdom which evolved from the Vietnam debacle mandated that any commitment of forces abroad must be governed by a well-defined strategic objective, supported by some definite tactical missions necessary to attain the objectives, and an even more obsessively streamlined exit strategy.

Purged from the template was the notion of victory.  So we effectively went to war more obsessed with how to disengage from, than with how to prevail over the enemy.  With any kind of enemy, the mindset is faulty at best.  But when and where we are at war with the soldiers of the Quran, as we now are, Sir Winston Churchill had it on the money: “without victory there is no survival.”  The only acceptable exit strategy is total and complete victory.
 

That President Barack Hussein Obama has effectively vanished “victory” from the national lexicon except as pertains to his re-election campaign is yet an incontrovertible evidence of his immeasurable contempt for the intelligence and good sense of the American people.  Can the country really survive four more years of his medicine?   

In the movie, The Edge, Charles Morse, the character played by Anthony Hopkins, volunteered the statistics that a majority of people stranded in the wilds die of embarrassment.  They are embarrassed that they have put themselves into such a predicament that their very survival is at stake.  As a result, they forget to use the only faculty, viz., thinking, that could ensure their survival.   

Similarly, should President Obama get re-elected, the nation shall die of embarrassment that they can be so gullible.  In their reluctance to admit that they made a fool of themselves by electing him four years ago, they double down on their mistake and ignore the wise admonition of Clint Eastwood, to wit:

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you're libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let him go.



So beware America, the sanity you save shall definitely be your own.  It behooves to find a viable Exit Strategy from your own cognitive dissonance.

 
{Next: Downsizing American Expectations (4):
Debating the Campaign Debates}