Not long after ousted wannabe Marxist dictator Manuel Zelaya issued a bizarre rant about Israelis attacking him with high frequency radiation and toxic gases, his chief propagandist, David Romero Ellner, who heads up Honduras' Radio Globo went on the air to suggest that Hitler had been right and that it was unfortunate that he had not gotten the chance to finish off the Holocaust.

David Romero Ellner and Radio Globo are significant because the media aims to make them into the newest martyrs of the Honduran government's "crackdown" on civil rights. Reuters and other media outlets are already carrying touching narratives of the police raid on Radio Globo and David Romero Ellner continuing to carry on broadcasting over the web.

And this was what the tragic martyr, David Romero Ellner said on Radio Globo;

“There are times when I ask myself if Hitler was or not correct in finishing with that race with the famous Holocaust. If there are people that do damage in this country, they are Jewish, the Israelis. I want to name, this afternoon here in Radio Globo, by name and last name, who are the two officers of the Jewish army who are working with the Armed Forces of our country and who are in charge of carrying out all these conspiracy activities and undercover actions and everything else that is happening to the President of the Republic.

“After what I have learned, I ask myself why, why didn’t we let Hitler carry out his historic mission. Forgive me for the grotesque expression. But I ask myself after I have realized this and many other things. I believe it should have been fair and valid to let Hitler finish his historic vision…”

The original audio recording is embedded with the video below



David Romero Ellner, currently being praised as a hero of the free press by the liberal media, began his career as an activist with the Communist party. He co-founded the People’s Revolutionary Union, better known for its Cinchoneros armed wing which carried out numerous terrorist attacks. In 1981 they hijacked Flight 414 to New Orleans and took its crew and passengers hostage, demanding the release of other Honduran leftists.

In 1988 they carried out an attack on US servicemen in Honduras wounding four outside a disco. Their overall attacks on US troops claimed 28 casualties. They also kidnapped the Vice President of Texaco and seized an OAS office and took hostages. And ironically, considering David Romero-Ellner's outrage over the raid on Radio Globo, seized radio stations to broadcast leftist propaganda.

Rising from his days in the PRU, David Romero-Ellner became a key figure in Honduras' Liberal Party, the party of Manuel Zelaya. In the process he functioned as both an elected official of the Liberal Party and the "official" journalist of the Liberal Party. All that fell apart in 2002 when his own daughter filed sexual abuse charges against him. David Romero Ellner had begun sexually abusing his daughter when she was only 10 years old and continued doing it for over a decade, including raping her at his own birthday party.

"From an early age I’ve identified him as a powerful person, because of his influence, his violence, his firearm, his friends and his ability to dominate us. His domineering power meant that my relationship with him was one of fear. He always frightened me. I never understood why he was touching me. I never wanted it, but I put up with it out of fear, out of subjection, until it became intolerable. When he penetrated me, my whole life collapsed around me. I decided to leave. I was frightened, but I left."

That is the voice of the daughter of the chief propagandist of the Zelaya regime, whom the media has done its best to try and turn into a hero. The same man who suggested that Hitler should have been allowed to finish off the Jews. The man whose patron the Obama Administration is trying to move back into power.

Anti-Semitism is nothing new for Zelaya's Marxist thugs. The anti-government riots have been accompanied by anti-semitic graffiti and suggestions that the Jews control Honduras. And Zelaya and his men are nothing more than a finger of the arm of Venezuelan ruling thug Hugo Chavez. The "ideas" put forward by Zelaya and Romero-Ellner come straight from Venezuela.

Once in power, Chavez ushered in the largest modern day government persecution of a Jewish community outside the Middle East. Anti-semitic graffiti signed by Chavez's supporters has become ubiquitous. Synagogues and Jewish schools have been raided by Chavez's police, both officially and unofficially. In one infamous speech, Chavez clumsily tried to marry classical anti-semitism with Marxist dogma, proclaiming that all the fault lies with "the descendants of those who crucified Christ...(and) took possession of the riches of the world."

Manuel Zelaya and David Romero Ellner's rants about the Jews, are a reflection of a Communist sponsored ideology coming out of Venezuela, promoted and spread by Soviet agent Norberto Ceresole. Ceresole, Chavez's mentor and a member of the Soviet Union's Institute of Latin American Studies, a KGB front for controlling Latin American politics, is responsible for much of the current Marxist anti-semitic ideology in Latin America.

That ideology however is about more than just domestic anti-semitism. While the rise to power by Marxists in Latin America tends to be associated with the destruction of the local Jewish community, as in Cuba whose Jewish community went from 15,000 in 1959 to less than a thousand today, or Nicaragua, where the rise of the Sandanistas wiped out the local Jewish community altogether... but it has a larger and darker agenda.

The original goal of the Soviet Union was to fuse together two of its terrorist arms, Marxist guerrillas in Latin America and Arab terrorist in the Middle East, into a larger entity. Under KGB thug Vladimir Putin, modern day Russia is once again moving full steam ahead with that same agenda. The growing alliance between Chavez and Ahmadinejad is meant to create worldwide terror, bringing together Marxist and Islamist terrorists, and their host countries, to work together to seize power regionally, and destroy those free nations such as Columbia, Honduras and Israel that stand in their way.

Nearly a month ago many prominent figures in Hollywood and the international world of film signed the Toronto Declaration pushing for the boycott of a film festival that dared to showcase Israeli films. At the end of this month, many prominent figures in Hollywood and the world of film signed a petition calling for the immediate release of the rapist of a 13 year old girl, who also happens to be a major figure in Hollywood and the international world of film, namely one Roman Polanski.

It is instructive to watch the same people who lecture Americans on morals and ethics in movie after movie, rush to the defense of a pedophile rapist, whose chief merit is that he is one of their own. Harvey Weinstein, the executive producer of Michael Moore's new left wing agitprop movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, has been described as leading the charge on Polanski's behalf. In a "The Independent" op-ed, the same paper that has provided an extensive forum for bashing the War on Terror as well as calls to boycott Israel, he described Polanski's drugging and rape of a 13 year old as, "the so-called crime" and vowed that he was prepared to go all the way up to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another Hollywood figure with a history of sexual assault charges, to fight for Polanski's freedom.

The petition list of course includes no shortage of the shining lights of Hollywood's Obama supporters, including Martin Scorsese, who donated over 3000 dollars to Obama , Darren Aaronfosky, who donated 2300, John Landis, who donated 500 dollars and is best known for his role in the death of two children and actor Vic Morrow on the set of the Twilight Zone movie, Julian Schnabel, who is listed as donating 28,000 dollars, and former Clinton buddy Mike Nichols, who donated 2300 dollars. Then there's Steven Soderbergh, who recently directed a movie glorifying Che. Or Woody Allen, who left America for France, where the local government is much more tolerant of pedophilia, and has been bashing the United States ever since.

It is of course possible to dive further down into the muck or to rebut the talking points that have been trotted out, which in order of importance seem to be that Polanski is a great artist, that his life was hard and that the case had irregularities within it... none of which do anything but obscure the hard fact that Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 year old girl. But it is more interesting to take a look at the values of the people who presume to dictate American values and culture.

The Polanski case demonstrates the radical differences between absolute and relativist morality. Either rape is always wrong, or it's only wrong when it's "rape-rape", as Whoopi Goldberg put it on the View. Either child abuse is always wrong, or it's only wrong when you don't have warm feelings toward the perpetrator. There are either absolute rights and wrongs. Or only things that are right or wrong depending on how you feel about those doing them. And that is the key point, without absolute morality, subjective morality in which there is one law for your allies and another for everyone else takes hold. We saw that same dual morality in action in the waning days of the Clinton Administration when formerly people who claimed to have no tolerance for sexual harassment, treated Bill Clinton as the victim, and his accusers as the criminals. Today those same people are at it again with Roman Polanski.

But this is more than a "behind the scenes" attitude, instead it part of the cultural narrative that is transmitted over and over again. Think about how often the "personal narrative" of a criminal in a movie or TV show mattered more than whether he committed the actual crime or not. It's rarely about the act and more often about the man, not a nation of laws, but a nation of men. Relativist morality is defined not by laws but by men, by our willingness or ability to empathize with the actions of the perpetrator. This is why liberals so often castigate Americans for a lack of empathy with murders or with terrorists.

Liberal morality is based on a politically motivated empathy. It is not based on any actual morals, or sense of right and wrong that does not derive from their political worldview. If you asked one of Polanski's defenders who is the worse person, Sarah Palin or Roman Polanski, their response would be as unambiguous as it is irrational. That response would not be morally based, but based on who they politically and culturally identify with, and who they find politically and culturally repulsive. Now back up that same irrationality with a great deal of cultural influence and front men who can make the facts fit even the most irrational interpretation of reality, and you have the true ugly face of Obama's backers.

As a moral code in which the morals are defined by a political worldview, liberal morality is not one law, but two laws. One law for Obama and another law for Bush. One law for Polanski and another law for someone outside their circle of politically motivated empathy. And it is never consistent with any objective moral value or legal code. The same people who demanded that the terrorists be given every protection of the law, argue that the law should be disregarded when it comes to Polanski. The law is only the law so long as it's a tool for getting what you want done. The moment it becomes an obstacle, it's a force of injustice that must be fought.

That same relativist morality construct sheds light on how it is possible to decry the right of the United States and Israel to defend themselves against terrorists or detain said terrorists, while championing the rights of the terrorists themselves to wage war against innocent people. Relativist morality recognizes no objective rights or laws, only "empathy" with those they sympathize with for political reasons. And that sympathy routinely extends to "transgressives", to those pushing the boundaries for what they view as great or progressive, to create a more open and permissive world. By contrast their enmity is most attracted to those they view as reactionary or regressive, who are closing doors and creating a more restrictive and and orderly environment. To the moral relativist, restrictive people represent true evil, and progressive people true goodness. And as with Polanski, they are willing to make the facts fit the label, if necessary, by treating Islamic terrorists as progressive and the US government as reactionary.

As repulsive as the entire Polanski case is, the rule of relativist morality has far more ominous connotations. The United States was built as a nation of laws, one law for all, great or small. Run that through the relativist filter, and the United States becomes a nation where the law only applies if the elites think it should, where the favor of the powerful and the famous counts for more than justice. We know what such countries look like. We have no shortage of examples of them in the world around us and in times past. A country of men not laws, is a tyranny.

Government is essentially a national management system, taking on those tasks that it would be unwise or unworkable to turn over to the free market. Good government functions as intended. Bad government takes over the nation and becomes an absolute force, looting and raiding public resources, suppressing individual freedoms in order to keep itself in power. In olden days this sort of government was considered a tyranny.

Since government exists at public expense and distributes the money for itself, there is plenty of temptation for government to abuse its prerogatives by taking too much. Democracy is meant to force government to justify its actions to the public, and to give the public a veto over government power. For government in a democratic country to abuse its power and draw excessive funds from the public, it must first co-opt a sizable portion of the public by arguing that the funds will be used for their benefit. This is called power sharing.

Government shares its revenues with whoever holds power within a political system. In a non-democratic system, the number of people who receive their share is smaller. For example a king may share a portion of revenues obtained from the peasants with his nobility for the simple and practical reasons, that they can rise up against him and remove him, and that they function as local governments over the peasantry. Similarly a mob boss collects a share of the money stolen and seized by his soldiers, and then passes it back down to them. Nazi Germany implemented much the same system within the Nazi party, as did the Soviet Union within the Communist party and now in Putin's Russia, through a system of bribes.

Such non-democratic systems form a pyramid in which a large number of money goes up the chain to a small number of people. Those at the top live very well. Those at the bottom live very poorly. As a result the system itself is impoverished. It can only thrive when it is parasitic on the free market. That is why the mob had to focus on America. It is why Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had to continually expand and find new countries to loot. It is why Putin's Russia, having burned through a lot of the resources seized from its businessmen, is pushing forward on the military front. It is why King George III began pressing America, resulting in the American Revolution.

The situation in a democratic system is more complicated, but the end result is the same. In the United States, Tammany Hall set a model by harnessing the New York bureaucracy as their own revenue mill, expecting every municipal employee to pay to receive a job, and then pay for a promotion. The employees themselves would have to find ways to make money "on the job." So for example an appointment as a New York Police Sergeant would cost 200 dollars. The Sergeant would have to "make money" either through bribes or shakedowns to pay the officers above him, while receiving a cut from the officers below him. If he did well, he could pay 500 dollars to become a New York Police Captain, moving up the ladder for greater rewards. This was the disastrous situation that Teddy Roosevelt would try to remedy as New York's Police Commissioner in 1895.

Tammany Hall leaders, better known as the New York State Democratic Party, lived lavish lifestyles. Corruption was everywhere. No one trusted the police. The fire department was the province of gangs. Organized crime was inseparable from the political system. Ward leaders ran gambling and prostitution rings. Rival police forces beat each other bloody on the steps of City Hall over a political dispute between the Mayor and the Governor over who had the right to a lucrative appointment of the sanitation commissioner.

What made all this interesting, was that the system that we today associate with places like Russia or Nigeria, was taking place under a facade of democracy. Tammany Hall understood that it had to succeed at both corruption and populism. Corruption without public support meant that sooner or later, the people would rise up and bring them down. Despite rigged elections, voter intimidation and gangs that beat Republican or rival Democratic voters-- Tammany Hall understood that it could not hold absolute power in a democracy. It still had to answer to the voters. Sooner or later.

What happened was that the pyramid got bigger, by sharing more of the money with the people. Tammany Hall cultivated populism through ward leaders who traded votes by offering favors for their constituents. The Democratic party leadership focused on cultivating and controlling immigrant groups, who were newcomers and often ignorant, as a counterbalance to the old New York Republican WASP reformers. The immigrant groups were kept impoverished in low paying slum jobs, while being given free turkeys and the occasional medical clinic, as Democratic leaders played patron to them in exchange for their votes. Meanwhile whatever they gave, they took back tenfold through bribes and government corruption, such as rigging the price of ice, via the Ice Trust.

Tammany Hall is dead today, but the system is still alive and well in the Democratic Party. Tammany Hall claimed to help immigrants, but what it actually did was oppress them. Behind the holiday gift baskets, the politicians who spoke German, Italian, Yiddish, Polish-- and all the talk about "sticking it to the rich", was a political system that was nothing more than organized crime. Those same politicians played "divide and conquer" pitting the Irish against the Jews, the Germans against the Blacks, and promising to fight for whatever ethnic group they were speaking to at the time. All the while they were robbing everyone blind.

The money they spent on their constituents was a small share of the taxes they collected. Most of the money instead went to the municipal bureaucracy and the Tammany Hall leaders at the top. As corruption crackdowns came, the Democratic party began to eschew open bribery in favor of "Honest Graft". This moved the party up and away from street level crime and low level paid appointments. Instead the focus became on appropriating government revenues for their own benefit. Municipal appointments no longer depended on direct payments, but on party loyalty. Taxes had to be raised to offer more services administered by that same ever growing bureaucracy. Organized crime had become socialism.

LBJ's Southern Strategy applied the same principles that had been used for new immigrants, whose number was dying down, to blacks in the South. Just as in its Tammany Hall days, the New York Democratic party had quickly gone from being anti-Irish to the best friends of the Irish. A process they repeated with Jews, Italians and Puerto Ricans, among many others. So too the Party of Segregation, became the Civil Rights Party.

The change was not moral, it was political calculation. FDR had implemented socialism by exploiting the economic emergency of the Depression, and then wartime necessity in WW2, as justifications. The old immigrant groups were moving up out of the urban ghettos, and their transition to solid secure middle-classdom, combined with the rising threat of the USSR, seriously endangered the Democratic party and the future of liberalism.

The 50's saw a Republican President for the first time since the rise of FDR who was moderate enough to maintain the political center. Post-war prosperity and the Cold War meant the focus would no longer be on domestic social reform programs, but on national defense. The average American was well off and drifting toward conservatism. No wonder the decade continues to be embodied in literature and movies as a horrifying period of mindless conformity by liberal authors and filmmakers, for whom there is nothing more horrifying than living in a comfortable system.

The Democratic party took back the initiative by focusing on the youth vote, because when no one really needs change, it's still a safe bet that the youth would. By the 1960 Presidential election, a generation that had not fought in WW2 and had been raised on post-war prosperity became the newest set of voters. And many of them proved quite eager to hear a message of change, even if no real change was actually needed. Kennedy's status as a transgressive candidate because of his youth and catholicism made voting for him seem a progressive act alone.

And the Southern Strategy meanwhile saw the Democrats focusing increasingly on the black vote. The black vote was meant to replace the ethnic working class vote that had steadily become more conservative, and the Democratic strategy would be to promise reforms but to make sure that the black community would be unable to do what the immigrant communities had done, which is to leave their control. That section of the strategy was to become Tammany Hall writ large on a national scale, with regular commemorations and celebrations of black heritage, combined with policies that created dependency and fostered exploitation. The real face of the Democratic party's Southern Strategy was a Socialist Strategy, creating an infrastructure of patronage and propaganda to maintain a core constituency that would be under their absolute control. (European socialist parties, themselves coping with the lack of an aggrieved working class constituency, would attempt to replicate the same strategy with disastrous results using Muslim immigrants.)

When combined with the massive Chicago voter fraud, the result was victory. That combination of youth appeal, minority orientation and a transgressive candidate would fuel future Democratic Presidential victories, most notably Clinton and Obama. The Kennedy vs Nixon template of a youthful liberal against a stodgy conservative would become a fundamental bit of branding. Defeats would be regularly accredited to a failure of charisma, rather than policy. The key words were to be reform and change, both of which when translated from Newspeak meant building up a bureaucratic infrastructure composed primarily of their own loyalists ever higher, creating a state within a state, and a government within a government, that would in reality govern everything.

As government bureaucracy became an ideological tool, constant government expansion became a way of life. Government became bigger and bigger and as it did the cost of government went completely out of control. Under FDR the national debt zoomed up by 1600 percent. By the time Truman left office, the National Debt had passed 250 billion dollars. Under Carter it shot up to 900 billion dollars. Under Obama it is set to hit 12 trillion dollars. And that's just for starters. The last time the national debt approached 100 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, it was WW2. Under Obama it is expected to pass 100 percent of the GDP by the end of his first term. And that is a "friendly" projection from an administration that has shown no facility with accurate projections or spending controls whatsoever.

When that happens individual production will match individual debt, and as social spending exceeds even defense spending, and is projected to pass actual tax receipts, the economy of the United States becomes unsustainable and is headed for a major disaster. That disaster however is likely to only lead to further socialist consolidation and the expansion of government. Which is why invoking the ghost of FDR, Obama's policies have focused on nationalization and running up an even bigger debt to expand government programs to an even greater extent.

Meanwhile the US continues to follow Europe's footsteps by trying to compensate for the generational worker gap caused by baby boomer retirements with immigration, which only further expands demands for social services spending. One unsustainable policy piggybacking on another is how tyrannies are built.

The socialist strategy has been draining the American economy. Within a decade it will lead to a major crisis and a climactic showdown between the last remains of a free market economy and the expanding wave of government. The outcome is likely to determine whether or not America has a future as an independent nation, or will be reduced to a failed nation, a faint shadow of its former self that will resemble a Latin American nation, more than the former United States of America.

This America will distribute its bottom of the barrel culture around the world, its political culture will be histrionic and irresponsible, its bureaucracy will be widely hated, incompetent and omnipresent, it will be largely multicultural but divided between a small envied upper class and a large lower class, it will have widespread criminality and government corruption. Its rural areas will be irretrievably impoverished, its urban areas will have a few slices of culture and prosperity amid the ghettos. It will be loud and colorful, brazen and constantly celebrating increasingly meaningless holidays based around commercialism. It will also have very little freedom for anyone in the middle class. It may be a one party state entirely. The bulk of its economy will be black market and gray market. It will constantly be on the receiving end of short term and high interest international loans. Its taxes will be high and widely avoided. Governments will regularly fall over economic crisis. It will not be the America we have known, it will be an alien land, the kind of place that the ancestors of so many Americans did their best to escape. And their descendants too will look for a way out, constantly looking for a place to emigrate to and a way to take their money with them.

To the modern citizen of the West, peace is an ideal and war is a tragedy. Depending on his or her political orientation, war may even be considered inexcusable under any circumstances. At the heart of this dogma is the idea that war is a disruption of a state of peace, brought on by greedy warmongers, the military industrial complex or some modern day variation on the old 19th century labels. But what if rather than being a disruptive force, war is actually the father of peace.

To pretend that peace is a more natural state for humanity than war is to exercise a great deal of denial regarding human nature. We are no more creatures of peace, than any member of the animal kingdom. The difference is that we have a greater capacity for choice, to be moral protectors and defenders, rather than predators. But that is a choice that some may make, and others will not. And for as long as men will remain men, there will be men who pray on others, and men who must study the arts of war and killing in order to resist them.

Peace is not a higher moral state, or even the absence of war-- it is the product of wars and conflicts that have been successfully won. Or it is the product of the threat of violence and war. Whether it is the police station a few blocks over, where well armed men sit guarding other more dangerous men, the army base a few miles over or a few countries over-- the peace we have is the product of violence and force. And anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to himself and to us.

To perpetuate peace requires more than mutual understanding, tolerance and a willingness to join hands and dance in a circle with a rainbow of colors. Those things can only come about after a great deal of violence, and also often represent a society that is no longer in touch with the realities of the world and its own need for survival. Because as long as violence remains within human nature, and as long as it represents an effective tool for conquest, dominance and acquisition-- we must not only know war, but be the best at it that we can be.

There cannot be peace without war, because war is a necessary prerequisite to peace. To have peace, one must created a society, a nation and a political space in which domestic and foreign violence is checked. Otherwise the society becomes nothing more than the Eloi of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, charming children laughing and playing, until the Morlocks come for them. The children of the modern West are well on the way to becoming the Eloi, and when they are beaten, robbed and raped by the Morlocks imported into the hearths and homelands of the West. And uncomprehending they let it happen, because the Eloi allowed themselves to become sheep, and where there are sheep without sheepdogs, there will soon be shepherds to rule them or wolves to prey on them. With the EU and growing centralization in America on one side, and rising immigrant related violence on the other-- the West looks to be gaining both.

The delegitimization of war in the West came about for one primary reason, because war no longer seemed like a useful tool for obtaining peace. As the weapons of war became more destructive, war came to seem less like a protective force, and more like an apocalyptic force. With WW1's generations lost, gas masks and battlefield trenches-- war appeared to have become a senseless thing. A revolted youth proceeded to embrace decadence, chaos and anarchy, best exemplified by Dadaism. WW2 appeared to restore something of a moral order, but the rise of nuclear war and MAD, took the apocalyptic warfare of WW1 to an entirely new level, with weapons of mass destruction that threatened to destroy everything in sight.

This sort of bleakness caused even otherwise sensible men to put their faith in international orders and organizations, such as the UN, and the growing enlightenment of humanity, believing that with enough education, a form of reciprocal pacifism could be achieved in which no one would find any purpose in harming anyone, thus ending any need for violence or war. As absurd as such a premise may be, variants of it continue to command the philosophies of foreign affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. Diplomacy is considered supreme, tolerance is the watchword, and national defense takes a back seat to both. Even war itself has been transformed into "Nation Building", becoming a tool for this global educational project of reciprocal pacifism, the thinking being that if we can remove dictatorships, we will give their peoples a chance to assert that just like us they don't want to fight anymore.

Having learned nothing from WW2 about the causes of war, the illusion of a world of reciprocal pacifism dominates the dialogue and educational processes of four generations of children-- with the result that the children of the West become Eloi-like, more and more so in every generation. And the Morlocks are sharpening their teeth and becoming more plentiful.

Over a decade and a half after the collapse of the USSR, the average Russian hates America and England about as much as he did in the days of the Iron Curtain, and the Russian government is even more eager for conflict. The two wars that the United States and Europe fought on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War and the Bosnian War, came back to the United States in the form of four planes piloted by Muslims and aimed at dealing a devastating blow to America. There are no happy endings anywhere in sight, because as it turns out the reasons underlying many wars are not as simple as the proverbial evil tyrant living in his castle and oppressing his people. Yes many of our enemies do have an evil tyrant over them, but the dirty little secret of human nature is that few tyrants would endure if the majority of their people did not support them on at least some level.

Today, Stalin, who murdered more Russians than Hitler, is one of Russia's most popular historical leaders. Yeltsin who brought democracy to Russia is one of its least popular leaders. Given democracy at American insistence, the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank, chose Hamas. Polls suggest that if given democracy, the Egyptian would choose the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfathers of Islamofascism, who helped birth Al Queda. That is because democracy creates a forum for making choices. And people are as likely to make violent choices, as non-violent ones.

And until that changes, war is not going anywhere. The ancient Roman dictum, "If you would have peace, prepare for war", yet applies. The task of the West is to make war meaningful again. The bleakness of modern war, whether it is gazing at counters that will launch ICBM missiles that will turn the world into a single great sheet of glass, or maintaining endless patrols against insurgents, has a way of making it seem meaningless, a useless tool of stalemate, an endless waiting game without conclusion or greater meaning.

The fundamental meaning of war is that it is a tool that protects, defends and enables peace. To enable that peace, war must have a definitive purpose and a definitive conclusion. Endless watches on the sand dunes waiting for a possible insurgent attack, negotiating with tribal warlords whose loyalties switch every season and adapting to the local culture-- is not war, but colonialism or nation building. Such conflicts have conclusions and goals that cannot be achieved by military means, only enabled or protected by the military, and only serve to render armed force into a bodyguarding role.

To make war meaningful, it must have a true target and goal that can be achieved by military means. "Bring me the head of Osama bin Laden", is a military goal. "Teach administrative management to four nephews of the local warlord so he can reform local government", is not. You can use the military to try and reach such a goal, but you can also try to use a gun to turn a screw. It just isn't the best match of the tool for the job. Turning the military into the Peace Corps is a mismatch of institutions that drains strength and purpose from the military, into a project inspired by neo-pacifist ideals.

There can be no peace without war, but peace is not a military project. Only clean wars that settle conflicts in enduring wars can bring peace. To try and blend the two, is to create neverending wars. Policymakers who fear to use the military to destroy the enemy, instead draw out war into an endless exercise in bloodletting with no end in sight. And such wars quickly make the public lose faith in the whole idea of military solutions. They transform war into a meaningless hopeless farce, thus making pacifism and appeasement seem moral and plausible by comparison. And so the children of the West turn Eloi, and the Morlocks grin and gain strength as they sense that a victory is not too far away.

The moral way of war is to serve as a protective force for a vigorous and healthy society, to deter and destroy enemies, to protect, defend and maintain the conditions in which peace is possible. When war ceases to become a useful tool, the survival of the society itself becomes endangered. Just as the collapse of the human immune system foreshadows a serious infection, the collapse of faith in military solutions and the growth of anti-war sentiment, foreshadows a major conflict to come. There can be no true peace without war, only the peace of temporary appeasement, to be followed by subjugation and slavery.

The media is praising Obama for chairing a UN National Security Council summit at which everyone agreed that the world would be better off without nuclear weapons... someday. This groundbreaking achievement parallels similar UN conclusions that the world would be better off without poverty, hunger, war and other ills... someday. In the present day however, the UN has once again sidetracked a specific problem with a general prescription. That is par for the course for pushing general disarmament, when the problem is that specific nations which could not be named at the UN are working to create nuclear weapons with the intention of distributing them and using them.

While it would be very nice indeed to have a world without nuclear weapons, the door to that Utopian nuclear free realm closed on August 5th, 1945. It has not and will not reopen since, short of the coming of a new technological dark age. Once something can be done, it will be done by others. It is not possible to remove nuclear bombs, nerve gas, mines, dynamite, revolvers, swords and stone clubs from the arsenal of humanity's technological know-how. And while some of these are uglier than others, all weapons are ugly, some are only ugly in intent. Nuclear weapons remain at the far end of the spectrum because they have few legitimate military purposes, they are all-encompassing weapons of mass destruction to be used with catastrophic results. They are weapons of mass death or mass genocide.

But at the same time diplomatic disarmament approach is worse than folly, because if the United States and even Russia may want to put the weapons back in the box as toys for the homicidally insane, that only makes them more appealing to homicidally insane states. The Western fear of nuclear weapons paradoxically makes them extremely appealing to brutal totalitarian regimes like Iran or North Korea, giving them an inflated sense of power vastly beyond their actual military capabilities. The premise behind diplomatic disarmament is that fallacious chestnut about people everywhere wanting the same things we do. The problem is that isn't true.

Some people don't at all want the same things we do. Some of them want entirely different things altogether. WWII demonstrated the truth of that in all its abiding horror, but those lessons continue to go unlearned by Western leaders who still seem to believe that all it takes is getting the world to sing together, which would work better if the tune they didn't insist on is "Give Peace a Chance" while their enemies picked the "Horst Wessel Lied".

Nuclear disarmament, like most forms of disarmament, remains a pacifist vision. Most countries who have weapons are willing to endorse it, but only fools would actually practice it. That is because every weapon is also a deterrent, and we live in a world in which deterrents remain necessary. While nuclear weapons are horrifying, they are only horrifying when they are used. Which means disarmament is primarily an issue for those who would use them, or pass them along to those who would.

Nuclear weapons, like any other weapons, are not universally bad. They are however quite bad in the hands of a homicidal maniac. Not even the most passionate Second Amendment defender would suggest that a serial killer has the right to own a machine gun. Serial killer states in turn have no right to own nuclear weapons, because only in their hands are nuclear weapons a true threat. Such states who develop nuclear weapons are like a serial killer stockpiling weapons in his attic. It's only a matter of time before those weapons will be used.

The world's inability to do anything about Kim Jong Il's nuclear ambitions helped create a pipeline through which nuclear technology passed on down the line to Islamic states, where it's only a single degree of separation before they end up in the hands of terrorists. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal makes that likely for Sunni terrorists. Iran's own nuclear development will be the final step for Shiite terrorists. When that link is finally closed, terrorists will have the ability to kill millions, not thousands. And whether those weapons are used against Israel, the United States, Australia, France or all of the above... is only a question of circumstances and timing.

During the Cold War, it was understood that we could not turn back the clock on the USSR's nuclear arsenal. Instead we implemented a policy of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction for either side in a nuclear exchange. We placed our bets on global destruction to serve as a deterrent to nuclear war. It was an awful bet to take, but after two generations, the bet was won, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Our luck had held.

But will it always hold? Living under MAD often had a negative effect on the American psyche, and it provided fodder for the anti-war movement, and for pacifists to characterize the US military posture as insane. And they were not entirely wrong. MAD was a defensive response that gambled daily with the lives of every American in the hopes of outwaiting the USSR. But there is no outwaiting all of Islam.

MAD was premised on an enemy that understood the consequences of a nuclear war and controlled enough territory to not wish to face them. The next generation of MAD would take place against terrorist groups that do not control any actual territory we can strike, and against regimes that think of themselves as invulnerable thanks to Allah's guiding hand. MAD was useful against nations that were evil, but sane, and determined to survive. The nuclear threats of tomorrow will come from nations and factions that are evil, but not sane, and do not necessarily care whether they live or die.

21st Century Islam has made the suicide bomber its statement of choice. Whether exploding in a crowd or flying a plane into a skyscraper, martyrdom has given Islamic homicidal and genocidal mania the facade of religious nobility. And no one has yet tested how far that mania may stretch. During the closing days of WW2, before the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, its leaders were seriously considering using their non-productive women and children as either human shields or culling them altogether to preserve wartime productivity. Such plans are a disturbing reminder that our enemies do not think the way we do, and that we cannot presume their moral limits to be anywhere within our own.

So then what can we do? Universal disarmament remains a pacifist's pipe dream. MAD is insufficient at best, and highly dangerous at worst. Furthermore it presumes that the enemy is unwilling to die, and that he believes that we are willing to kill his people by the millions. American foreign policy if anything gives the opposite impression. That leaves us with few options. We can try to develop a system that will make nuclear weapons irrelevant, but no such system exists. Missile shields may prevent large scale nuclear war, should they be successfully implemented, but no such shield will stop a suitcase nuke going off in Downtown D.C.

All that remains is to stop a nuclear weapons program before it produces its deadly results. The only successful form of disarmament, is disarmament by force. Had we applied that to North Korea in a timely manner, the world wouldn't be facing the current shocking wave of nuclear proliferation. If we don't begin taking action now, nuclear weapons will be sold and traded on the black markets of the Third World tomorrow, the way Stinger missiles are today. And then the death toll will make 9/11 seem utterly insignificant,

The ultimate question is do we let a serial killer stockpile weapons in his attic, and wait until he actually walks into a shopping mall and opens fire, before we do something about him. The current mindset is to wait and see. And so we've been waiting and seeing. We waited while North Korea developed nuclear weapons. We waited while Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. We're waiting while Iran develops nuclear weapons. What we're really waiting for, is for the day when those weapons are actually used. A day that our waiting is bringing ever closer, day by day.

First up is the Binyamin Netanyahu speech at the UN. In sharp contrast to Kaddafi's rambling lunacy or Obama's generic "Insert Talking Points and Hopeful Slogans" speech-- Netanyahu distinguished himself by speaking well and to the point. He challenged the UN directly to be better than it is and to live up to its own values.







Netanyahu is well aware that the UN is not about to jump into action. The last time the UN jumped into action was when it was essentially run by NATO members. And that's no coincidence. Instead Netanyahu has attempted to provide cover for future Israeli action by demonstrating the UN's uselessness, much as Bush and Powell went through the motions at the UN before launching Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The UN is a forum, not a force. Netanyahu understands that, and his speech set up the moral high ground for Israel to take unilateral action against Iran.

While I'm not pleased with some of the concessions Netanyahu made in his speech, it was an essentially strong showing that demonstrated once again that Israel is open to peace, and by contrast that its enemies are not.

Shirat Devorah has the full text of Netanyahu's speech for those who would rather not watch the video

Various commentators have unloaded their own views. At the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick writes of An Enfeebled Obama

The fact of the matter is that Brzezinski's view is in line with the general disposition of Obama's foreign policy. Since entering office, Obama has struck a hard-line position against Israel while adopting a soft, even apologetic line toward Iran and its allies.

For eight months, Obama has sought to force Israel to the wall. He has loudly and repeatedly ordered the Netanyahu government to prevent all private and public construction for Jews in Israel's capital city and its heartland in order to facilitate the eventual mass expulsion of Jews from both areas, which he believes ought to become part of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

...

In the meantime, in his address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday and in his remarks at his meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas on Tuesday, Obama made clear that, in the words of former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, he has "put Israel on the chopping block." He referred to Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines as "illegitimate."

Moreover, Obama explained that Israel can no longer expect US support for its security if it doesn't bow to his demand that it surrender all of the land it has controlled since 1967.

Apparently it is immaterial to the US leader that if Israel fulfilled his demand, the Jewish state would render itself defenseless against enemy attack and so embolden its neighbors to invade. That is, it matters not to Obama that were Israel to fulfill his demand, the prospect of an Arab war against Israel would rise steeply. The fact that Obama made these deeply antagonistic statements about Israel at the UN in itself exposes his hostility toward the country. The UN's institutional hostility toward Israel is surpassed only by that of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

...

Obama's failures in both foreign and domestic policy have weakened him politically. His response to this newfound weakness has been to put himself into the public eye seemingly around the clock. Apparently the thinking behind the move is that while Obama's policies are unpopular, Obama's personal popularity remains high, so if he personalizes his policies, it will become more difficult for his opponents to argue against them.

But alas, this policy too has failed. The more Obama exposes himself, the less he is able to leverage his personal celebrity into political power.

The question for the US's spurned allies in general - and for Israel in particular - is whether we are better off with a politically strong Obama or a politically weak Obama. Given that the general thrust of his foreign policy is detrimental to our interests, America's allies are best served by a weak Obama. Already this week Israel benefitted from his weakness. It was Obama's weakness that dictated his need to stage a photo-op with Netanyahu and Abbas at the UN. And it was this need - to be seen as doing something productive - that outweighed Obama's desire to put the screws on Israel by preconditioning talks with a freeze on Jewish construction. So Obama was forced to relent at least temporarily and Netanyahu won his first round against Obama.

These are key excerpts, but the entire article is certainly worth reading.

Muslims Against Sharia has the Hamas rebuttal

At IsraPundit, Ted Belman describes what he sees as The Master Plan

The best way for Britain to gain control of Palestine was to act ostensibly on behalf of the Jews. This was born out in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 in which the British Government backed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, mind you, not Palestine as the Jewish homeland. Britain would have Palestine and the Jews would have a homeland in it. Britain had no fears that too many Jews would want to come. Afterall they were not pioneers and certainly not fighters. The blueprint evolved: the Arabs when required would “revolt” against the “foreign invasion”; the Jews would be forever a threatened minority. Thus Britain would be called upon to maintain the peace. Unfortunately for them, as Robbie Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley,”

Throughout the twenties and thirties the British encouraged the Arabs to “revolt”. But because of the Holocaust, the Jews kept coming. Britain in order not to lose control had to limit their entry. Thus the Peel Commission in the late thirties recommended in a White Paper that only 75,000 Jews more, be allowed into Palestine by 1944. The Jews had to be kept to a minority at all costs. In fact Hitler’s Final Solution played into their hands as there would be less Jews left to emigrate to Eretz Yisroel. The British spin machine went into overdrive and overtime. “Afterall, couldn’t let German spies into Palestine, could we.”

...

The US is now the big power in the ME and she is following Britain’s Master Plan. The US wants Israel to be shrunk but not exterminated.[See The conspiracy to Shrink Israel] Thus the US will be needed to protect them. To this end she trains Fatah and keeps Hamas alive. The Saudis also depend on them for protection.

The US uses the same technique. In response to the Second Intifada after the failure of Camp David, the US sent Sen. Mitchell to Israel to investigate the violence, and wouldn’t you know it, he recommended a settlement freeze just as the Peel Commission recommended an immigration freeze. In both cases, Jewish rights were restricted as a result of Arab violence.

The United Nations does the same thing. As a result of Hamas rocket violence and Israeli self-defense, the UN appointed Goldstone to head a commission of enquiry. The Goldstone Report did what it was expected to do, namely, recommended Israel be tried for war crimes and perhaps crimes against humanity.

Israel Matzav has bitter reaction from Israel's left to Netanyahu's speech

You see, Barack Obama and the Arab world aren't the only ones who believe that theHolocaust is the only justification for the State of Israel's existence: So does Israel's religion rejecting Left. In the minds of Levy and his colleagues on the Left, if only Israel would forget about the Holocaust, it would be able to give the entire country away to the 'Palestinians,' peace would magically break out and the wolves and the sheep would lay down together.

That's why Levy is horrified that Binyamin Netanyahu reminded the world again that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis between 1939-45. That reminder may produce international sympathy for an Israeli position that is less generous than committing national suicide. And that's the last thing Levy wants to see happen.

...

Gideon Levy is a bitter man because his vision for a secular, 'humanitarian' state of all its citizens is losing out to a vision of a Jewish state that is much closer to what Israel's founders originally envisioned. Levy's friends the 'Palestinians' bear much of the blame for his vision's rejection. But like much of the world, for Levy and the bitter Israeli Left, the 'Palestinians' can do no wrong.

The Muqata blog has a focused take on both Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad's appearances

Oh My Valve who has been sharply critical of Netanyahu gives him some praises

In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Bibi Netanyahu stood up and defended Israel, and the Jewish people against the racism of the Iranian Theocracy, and the racism of the UN. He shamed the worthless sons of bitches in that worthless piece of crap building that houses that worthless piece of crap organization which watches silently while we are murdered by rockets and homicide bombs; while genocide is committed in Darfur, and then condemns us for fighting back against those that have sworn to enact and execute our destruction.

Beyond Israel, Atlas Shrugs has a look at the Islamic day of DC Colonization in photos.

Iran's second nuclear facility has come to light, at Gateway Pundit

Jonah Goldberg remembers Irving Kristol.

“I am so nostalgic.” That’s the phrase I associate most with Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89.

What piqued Irving’s nostalgia, at an American Enterprise Institute conference I worked on in 1992, was old-fashioned censorship. In the good old days, he explained, local communities were able to determine their own standards without inviting lawsuits from the ACLU and overwrought invocations of “Fahrenheit 451.” In fact, hanging a “Banned in Boston” banner in a bookstore window, he explained, was the surest way to sell that book in New York. Local censorship, tethered to common sense and grounded in community norms, gave communities a say in how they would live. It made the world a more diverse, sane place.

“Though they continue to speak the language of Progressive reform,” Kristol wrote, “in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation … toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.”

It's unfortunate that too few have remember Kristol, in contrast to the outpouring of grief for Bob Novak. HotAir, which ran not one but two pieces by Robert Stacy McCain in defense of Novak, did not bother to note Kristol's passing. I guess a pro-terrorist 9/11 Truther who obsessively hated Jews and Israel trumps a man who genuinely made a difference.

Show me the values, and I'll show you the man.

Jack Kemp in American Thinker puts brother's keeper' issues in a new light

After hearing Obama state at the U. N. that Israel's settlements are not legitimate, I believe the time has come for Israel to call out Obama's worldview versus theirs.

We know that Obama's step brother lives in a hut in Kenya on ten dollars a year.

In reply to the Biblical question "Am I my Brother's Keeper?",

I propose that the Israeli government offer to move George Obama from his Kenyan hut to a newly constructed settlement building in Judea or Samaria and give him a job. Whether George will accept this offer is debatable, but the offer should be made, nonetheless.

It is time to let the world see the contrast between Barack Obama's values and those of the Bible and the State of Israel.

Indeed. After all Israel took in Vietnamese boat people and today takes in Sudanese refugees, both from wars Israel has not at all been involved in.

Sherik Yermani at Winds of Jihad takes CNN to task for again covering up the religion of terror. It's interesting how hard it is to get the media to use the M word, for Muslim. By contrast we had numerous articles on Madoff's Jewishness and a priest who's investigated for child abuse has his religion put front and center, even though in neither case was religion the motivation, but the media can't point out the religion of an Islamically motivated terrorists.

At Soccer Dad, the Watcher's Council appears to have its results in, with my article as the second highest non-council submission, though of course who could top Big Government's Acorn takedown.

The council has spoken, again.

This week's winning entry was Bookworm Room's Liberals are correct: I have a serious problem with Obama's color, but it's his political color. This week's runners up were Mrs. Rhymes With Right's A Reflection On The First Anniversary Of Hurricane Ike, which isn't as well remembered as Hurricane Katrina and The Razor's Why Obama Ignores the War in Afghanistan, which struck me as being rather similar in theme to the winning entry.

On the non-council side the winning entry was Big Government's big splash Chaos for Glory: My Time With ACORN which drove a lot of the news this week. The runner up was the politically incorrect (though, I think, strategically correct Sultan Knish'sThe Future of the War on Terror, is the War on Islam.
Last week's winners are here.

I'm proud to announce that my take on the Goldstone Commission based on the UN's history, Verdict first; investigation afterwards was the winning entry. Thank you for the votes. The runner up last week was The Glittering Eye's Keep Faith With the Promise a fine rebuttal (of a sort) to the President's message to American students.

The winning non-council post was Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate / WSJ's How a Detainee Became An Asset. Said detainee was KSM. The non-council runner up was Villainous Company's Own It, Mr. Secretary on the unconscionable decision to publish the picture of a dying soldier.
Congratulations to all the winners!

From Earl at Another Pundit, Michael Barone's excellent article pointing out Obama's temporal disability

In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to look for histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States.

Available literature on Latin America today includes much more sensible accounts. But some people, including Barack Obama, whose college thesis written in those years has never been made public, seem stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy.

That, at least, seems to explain Obama's latest foreign policy moves, starting with Honduras, where the president was ousted by the country's supreme court for violating a constitutional provision that forbids any moves to seek a second term. (Other Latin countries, notably Mexico, have similar constitutional prohibitions.)

Today I appeared on The Gathering Storm at BlogTalk radio. Thank you to my hosts, please stop by their respective blogs, The Gathering Storm and Always on Watch. You can listen to the entire show here.



Finally with Yom Kippur coming up, an old Spengler article, It's Easy for the Jews To Talk About Life

What makes the Jews different is their unique belief that the Covenant gives them eternal life, a belief grounded, to be sure, by thousands of years of history, and survival against all odds against the depredations of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Alexandrine and Roman empires, not to mention more recent unpleasantness. It is not changing the baby's diapers or changing grandma's bedpan to which the Jews refer when they speak of delight in life, but rather the idealized, perpetual life of a kinship community.

From an old article of mine on Jewish chaplains in the US military

At the Yokosuka Naval Base and Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, chaplains will be specifically flown in to hold Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services. In South Korea, where American troops help democratic Korea hold the line against the forces of Kim Jong Il's Communist dictatorship, Jewish soldiers from all across the Korean pennisula will be gathering in Seoul for prayers under Chaplain Avrohom Horovitz.

The matter is not as simple as it sounds. Jewish chaplains have been wounded in the Korean war, though none fatally. Al Jolson, born Asa Joelson in Lithuanaia, son of a cantor who became a famous Jewish entertainer in America, starring in numerous shows, musicals and even movies including most famously the Jazz Singer. During the Korean War, he traveled against the advice of his doctors to entertain American Troops there. He spent months there entertaining the troops and continued on even though he developed a bronchial infection of which he finally died. And the lights of broadway were dimmed for ten minutes to mark his passing.

There is a famous story told about a Jewish soldier on Yom Kippur during the Korean war. A Jewish Marine corporal named Abraham Geller was engaged in combat at the Seoul-Kaesong road and under fire by snipers. It was Yom Kippur and difficult as it was to pray under those circumstances, Abraham Geller did his best. After encountering a company of North Korean soldiers near Seoul, Corporal Abraham Geller saved his Captain's life and took a bullet meant for him. The bullet penetrated his abdomen and several loops of his intestines. It would under ordinary circumstances have caused peronitis as the contents of the intestines would have spilled out into the body which would have been fatal, but according to the military surgeons, what saved Geller's life; was that there was no food at all in his stomach.

The Obama Administration has both a light side and a dark side. Its light side is the shallow media frenzy commonly referred to as Obama's Cult of Personality, while the actual mechanism of the policy agenda represented by Obama's czars, advisors and assorted organizations such as ACORN integrated into the system, remain hidden on the dark side.

The light Obama side has been kept deliberately glittery and surface. When Obama delivers policy proposals in speeches, he tends to speak in generalities and be vague on the details. What he sells is not so much a specific policy, as it is the idea of Obama, branded as a cool and trendy bunch of folks bringing the Hope and Change express to Washington D.C. He's the cover of the book, the shiny foil package that's supposed to tempt you into picking up a carton at the grocery store.

The dark side though is where the policy sausages get made. It's the side that Obama's perpetual campaign was meant to distract the public from. That side often operates outside any congressional or legal jurisdiction, through a crazy quilt network of Obama's associates and friends, and various left wing activists and organizations, structured in a variety of increasingly less formal roles, from posts created entirely for them, to the ubiquitous Czars on down to various advisers, whose actual influence is unclear, to organizations who play a major role in redistributing the actual funds produced by this deliberately convoluted policy mechanism.

These two sides, the light side, exposed to the constant glare of publicity, and the dark side, kept mostly hidden, out of public view. Instead Obama has played up the irrelevant. His casual comments about celebrities, his choice of a dog, his wife's shopping sprees-- all get played up in the media. But the actual ways in which he runs his administration remain deliberately hidden. The shallowness too is deliberately, it is about more than simply selling Americans a sugary product, it's about hiding the long list of ingredients that go into making it. And the Czars are only one of the many real ingredients that go into making the Obama Administration.

This two sided approach took Obama through the campaign and his first few months in office, and while everyone ohed and aahed at how historic it all was, the policy engine underneath was busy churning. While people watched Obama do his soft shoe routine, hundreds of billions of dollars were being spent, and the nature of government was being redefined. But that approach has now hit a serious snag, because with ObamaCare, suddenly the American people were asking for the numbers, they wanted more than a song and dance, and a few magazine covers, they wanted to actually know the details.

Socialism with Obama's smiling face hiding the gory details was the original plan. That plan depended on the majority of the American people being willing to be entertained by Obama without ever asking him any serious questions. And that plan went down in flames at the Town Hall meetings, where people showed up asking serious questions. Now Obama has hit the campaign trail again, built on the same blueprint that emphasizes vague generalities and the gosh wow power of his celebrity appearance, backed by media and celebrity firepower. And they can't seem to understand why it's not working.

Proponents of a socialist nanny state tend to view the people they rule over as stupid and incapable of serious thought. That after all is why they need to be "taken care of", to protect them from their own folly. That same contempt for the average American provided the architecture for the two layer administration, for Obama's entire campaign built on iconic logos, stylized posters and resounding but absolutely meaningless slogans. And everything that came beneath it, the shamelessly adulatory press coverage, ObamaGirl, the iPod attack ad, the songs, the celebrity posse and the entire artificial mass of artwork, social media, magazine covers and plagiarized slogans that the real campaign boiled down to.

The ObamaCare controversy and the plummeting poll numbers should have been a wake up call, but it's a wake up call that has gone unheard. Obama's tour of talk shows is a reversion to type, at a time when people want the facts, they're getting more media appearances. That is because while Obama's problem is that he has failed to seriously and honestly address people's concerns about ObamaCare, his people believe that the problem is that he is being outshouted by FOX News, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. The Obama Administration is incapable of breaking through its contempt for the American people to actually imagine them as individuals with real concerns. Instead they are rooted in a media shouting match model that assumes that whoever has the loudest microphone, the most channels and the most bandwidth, wins.

It's an approach that worked during the campaign when Obama was competing against McCain\Palin. But now he's no longer competing against politicians or a party, but against the demand of the American people for results. And the inability to understand and process that has destroyed Obama more thoroughly than anything else. Instead Obama and his media entourage have wasted time going after the already cowed Republican party and after conservative talk show hosts, thereby only giving them more of a platform. The negative campaign has failed. The racial scaremongering has gone nowhere. The media smears targeting Limbaugh and Beck have proven to be a political dead end. That is because they all ignore the fact that Obama's real challenge comes not from them, but from the American people.

Limbaugh and so many others, on the radio, on television and online; have helped shine a light on the dark side of the Obama Administration. But it was the culture of deceptiveness and the lack of professionalism within the Obama Administration, the multitude of czars, the lack of serious vetting, the casual attitude toward professional ethics and the profusion of political radicals given the run of the White House who made sure there would be plenty of cockroaches scurrying around when the light came on. But it is not the light that is the real problem for Obama. It is the dark side, the deceptiveness, the layers of czars and advisers who answer to no one in particular, the alliances with organizations such as ACORN-- and what that entire snapshot says about the way the Obama Administration is being run that is the problem.

If business was booming and the economy was running hot, the odds are that few people would care. Bill Clinton clambered up through economic doom and glooming, and survived because the times were good. The times now however aren't good, except perhaps in Paul Krugman's New York Times column. But the American people didn't just elect Obama as a lark, or for a moment of racial healing or any of the other shallow and surface reasons. It may have been why a lot of younger people came out to vote, but for the most people concerns about the economy was on the minds of the voters. Those voters should have paid better attention to Obama's real agenda, but it was not the first time the American electorate was fooled by a charlatan. It will likely not be the last. Nevertheless what they wanted were results. And the results being produced by the dark side of the administration are not for them.

Obama's flailing media frenzy demonstrates his inability to understand that the issue is not how loudly you repeat the message, but the results you actually produce. Instead what the entire ObamaCare controversy has done is forced the public to take a much closer look at the dark side of the administration, and they don't particularly like what they see.

While Obama has postured as FDR, the key difference between the two men is not in agenda, but that FDR and his advisers were not so divorced from the reality of how ordinary Americans lived, as to try and sell corporate bailouts and green spending as economic renewal. The FDR Administration created a massive, often illegal, socialist bureaucracy, but it did so in the name of helping the average American. The Obama Administration by contrast has unrolled massive spending plans during an economic recession that are not actually helping anyone but corporations, environmentalists and unions. The average American need not apply.

And despite his desire to posture as FDR, not to mention Lincoln and Reagan, Obama is incapable of projecting that same seriousness and grasp of not just rhetoric, but the details of government. The light side of Obama has always projected unseriousness, in order to protect the dark side lurking beneath. But it's the dark side from which answers come in a crisis. The White House is not a box of cereal. It cannot be purely wrapping that no plebian ever opens. And by trying to hide away the details of his administration, behind a thousand magazine covers, media appearances and glib but meaningless rhetoric, Obama has convinced those Americans who take his light side at full value of his incompetence, and convinced those who have investigated the dark side of his administration, of his corruption. That is why ObamaCare has failed the public test. It is why his poll numbers have fallen and barring a major turnaround or a new crisis, are only likely to keep on falling.

The advance promotion and interviews for Michael Moore's latest agitprop movie, Capitalism: A Love Story are well underway. The message of the movie, produced and distributed by the millionaire capitalists at Paramount, the Weinstein Company and TCI cable company spinoff Overture Films has as its message, what else but the evils of capitalism. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good.

The Weinstein Company, the production company behind Capitalism: A Love Story, does have its reasons to be down on capitalism. After leaving behind Miramax, the company they sold for a cool 70 million to Disney, the Weinstein Company has not been faring too well in the free market. Capitalism requires actually getting people to give you money in exchange for your products and services. And the Weinstein Company's biggest success up until this year was another Michael Moore screed against free market health care, Sicko. Now the Weinsteins are hoping to cash in with Capitalism: A Love Story in order to bring in new investors so that their company can continue its capitalistic existence.

It's of course easy enough to point out the irony of millionaire businessmen and entertainers preaching against capitalism as if they were radicals squatting in abandoned basements, not living in Moore's Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. And Michael Moore climbing up on his high horse to contend that "Capitalism is evil" and that it has to be replaced, is particularly ironic when you consider the message comes from a man who made millions hypocritically preaching slogans just like that to college students, while using the money to build up a portfolio of Haliburton, pharmaceutical, defense and oil company stocks.

What is particularly wonderful about Michael Moore's portfolio is that there is hardly a corporate field that he hasn't inveighed against... and invested in; thus letting him make money from condemning defense companies, Haliburton and the pharmaceutical industry, and earn money from investing in them at the same time. In the corporate world this sort of thing used to be called, synergy. Michael Moore can rant about the evils of war, free market health care and oil companies... and then invest the millions made from box office and book sales into those same companies. Because Michael Moore in the end is one thing above all else, a capitalist.

When Michael Moore shouts that the wealthy want all our money, he does know what he's talking about. After all the writers who worked on his TV show have gone into detail about how Michael Moore tried to deny them Writer's Guild standing and residuals, demonstrating that Moore put all his research into union busting to good use in the office. But that is par for the course for Moore, who denounces the rich for making money, sending their children to private schools and oppressing the workers-- only to make money, send his own children to private school and oppress his own workers.

When Michael Moore travels around the world with a team of bodyguards delivering paid lectures on the evils of making money,the obvious question becomes, is Michael Moore a self-hating capitalist or a hypocrite? The answer, like most of the left, is a little of both.

The left's anti-capitalist rhetoric after all is based on capitalism. Can anyone imagine the modern left without Woodstock, the Ford Foundation or George Soros? When you shove aside the populist distractions the roots of the left are just as corporate as anyone. Even the Communist Part of the United States has its investments and stock portfolios. And as the Obama Administration's corruption reminds us, the left is certainly not a non-profit organization.

It's possible to debate whether or not Al Gore believes in his own global warming alarmism, but he certainly doesn't live it. Instead his lifestyle of jet plane trips around the world and his hefty mansion are just the tip of the iceberg of a huge fortune, most of it made from turning his global warming cause into corporate bucks, Cap and Trade is the very embodiment of how the left fuses anti-capitalism with capitalism, making money trading futures created by penalizing people and companies who produce carbon emissions.

Similarly Michael Moore may talk about "dividing the pie equally", but his actual charitable contributions have been scant at best. And Michael Moore isn't about to share the proceeds of his films alike with the editors, grips and staffers and hundreds of other people involved in bringing his movies to theaters. Instead Moore pocketed half the gross for Sicko himself, in an upfront deal worthy of a true capitalist. And it's safe to assume that he has just as good a deal this time around, or an even better deal, in which he stages scenes with sympathetic or unsympathetic people, ladles the carefully edited result out for the public at 10 dollars a head, and pockets the profits.

Capitalism: A Love Story will be making money for Moore, the Weinsteins, John Malone of Liberty Media's Overture Films (who ironically enough sits on the board of the meta-capitalist Cato Institute) and Paramount's executives and stockholders. It will make that money by selling anti-capitalist sloganeering to leftists, college students and people too stupid to know any better... by a man who plays a radical on the big screen, and a traditional bloodsucking profiteer off it.

But the underlying story behind Capitalism: A Love Story is about far more than Wall Street, it's about the way that the left profits from slamming capitalism. Moore, like his former employer Ralph Nader, follows in the great tradition of demagogues who rise to fame by claiming to stand up for "the little guy". For the left such demagoguery can be a reliable way of making money while retaining their radical cred. And even more so for the left, anti-capitalist regulations is a get rich scheme for lawyers, bureaucrats and their corporate friends, who are always ready to hitch something like Cap and Trade to the anti-capitalist wagon.

Michael Moore's form of capitalism is Leftonomics, in which money is made not from success, but from denouncing the success of others. Moore is the court jester of the Democratic party, acting out a working class charade in a party of limousine liberals insecure about their own wealth, providing the propaganda tools to connect their agenda with the manufactured working class outrage peddled by a grotesquely obese millionaire, who without the flannel and lazy grooming could easily pose for the moneybags toting capitalist villain of a 19th century socialist cartoon. And the cause he agitates for, government regulation and centralization, continues the process his career has been built on, taking from the sons and daughters of the middle class to give to the progressive rich. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good for enriching the left.

Every now and then bewildered Israeli politicians and outreach professionals call conferences to wonder why the Hasbara is failing and why Israel can't get its story across. They are given the usual advice of hiring more PR firms, finding innovative ways to get the message through, using the internet in smarter ways and of course that all time favorite, rebranding Israel. Naturally they follow this advice, only to call another conference a year later wondering why nothing has changed.

The answer is simple enough. Defensive PR, like defensive warfare, never works. And Israeli PR and Israeli warfare has been on the defensive for decades now. If you break down Israel's message to a single sentence, it's "We didn't do any of the things we're accused of." That is the kind of message you expect to hear from criminal defendants, and it's a message that impresses no one. The only thing it does is produce a debate about the validity of the accusations themselves, which is to PR what Stalingrad was to the Russian front.

The recent Aftonbladet case represents a classic scenario that demonstrates why Israel's defensive PR is doomed to fail over and over again. The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers were killing Palestinian Arabs in order to harvest their organs. The Israeli government pointed out that the article presented no evidence whatsoever, that no such thing had ever happened and demanded a retraction from the newspaper and condemnation of it by the Swedish government. The only thing Israel accomplished was to popularize the false allegation thus creating a debate over whether or not Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian Arabs to harvest their organs. Pleased by his newfound fame, the author of the article has only escalated his allegations and gone on to do a tour of the Arab world. Leftist propagandists can only watch the fallout and chuckle, because once again Israel has been suckered into playing the mug's game of defensive PR.

Defensive warfare of any kind is reactive. For the last few decades Israel has run itself ragged because it has been reactive. And by reactive I mean that Israel keeps responding to attacks against it, rather than taking the offensive. In the Six Day War, Israel responded to Nasser's planned assault, by preempting him and taking the offensive. The result was Israel's finest hour. In the Yom Kippur War, Israel waited and watched, and was nearly destroyed.

Few nations can afford to be purely reactive and play defense alone, Israel least of all because it is outnumbered by larger and more numerous enemies who can wear it down through sheer brute force. And that is exactly what has been happening on both the media and the military front. The terrorist campaign, planned, financed and executed first by the USSR, and then by the Arab and Muslim world, has worn out Israel both militarily and politically.

Israel's greatest asset was its innovation, its mobility and brilliance. Qualities that are best employed on the offensive. Instead Israel has been restricted to the defensive, constantly retreating, giving up both physical and ideological territory to its enemies, while wondering how much to give up in order to stem the bleeding. Which is the one reaction certain to put it even further on the defensive.

Israel wants a solution to the conflict. So do its enemies in both Islam and on the left and far right. A final solution. Each attempt by Israel to offer a solution has only brought Israel closer to that final solution. The more Israel has tried to show its goodwill, the more it has gotten stuck on the defensive. The goal of successive Israeli governments is no longer to be a great nation or a strong nation, but to be a nation that everyone likes.

The fallacy there is that "everyone" consists of a billion Muslims and a sizable number of leftists who view Israel's very existence as an insult to their deeply held beliefs. And then there are the Western business interests who think Ahmed would be much friendlier to them if Israel weren't in the way. And Russia which cultivates wars in the Middle East the way gardeners cultivate flowers. Finally there's the rest of the world which isn't too keen on embracing losers who keep apologizing for their existence and cutting their own country to pieces in order to win the favor of the terrorists trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.

To boil down the problem simply enough, the more Israel goes on the defensive, the weaker it becomes, not just militarily, but politically as well. Reactive conflicts are hugely draining. They require endlessly watching for an attack and then trying to counter it. The advantage in such a scenario is always to the attacker who has more lead time to plan an attack, and room to retreat if the attack fails.

Strike and vanish into the desert, and then strike again, was the classic raiding strategy of the Arab bandit, including a charming head chopping fellow named Mohammed. The British General Orde Wingate, who helped pioneer much of the doctrine of the future IDF, responded to such attacks in the mandate era, by taking the battle to the enemy with small, fast moving and mobile units. To go on the offensive.

The following section from the official Wingate site says it best;

While impressed with the devotion & willingness to sacrifice in the Haganah, Wingate was exasperated by the defensive nature of the Jewish forces. He realized that they could not halt the violence with their defensive tactics of fortified settlements. The policy of restraint meant the Haganah was ceding the initiative and mobility to the Arab guerillas.

The British were trying to balance an active defense with mobile sweeps & strikes, with holding important static positions in order to maintain effective government control. Mobile columns & patrols were sent out to deny the rebels any sanctuary and to hunt them down. They became consistent and routine in their movements and their actions. With the enemy often indistinguishable from their civilian base and troops often quartered near Arab civilian areas, "it was very difficult to keep operations conducted in a largely hostile civilian milieu secret, and so the element of surprise was lost; at the same time, reliable information about the enemy was hard to come by."

Commented one Jewish official on a big sweep by British forces, "They marched over hills and valleys, and in the end emerged with some rusty Turkish pistols and a few empty rounds of ammunition...The Arab gangsters just hid their arms and mingled with the population of the villages. Not only did the huge British army find absolutely nothing, it discredited and ridiculed itself in the eyes of the whole population." In 1938 General Archibald Wavell, the temporary acting commander of British military forces in Palestine, was forced to admit these and other actions such as aerial bombing had only "a temporary effect."

Wingate envisioned carefully selected, small and mobile units of volunteers to fight aggressively and unconventionally...

"There is only one way to deal with the situation, to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into a government gang which is determined to destroy them, not by exchange of shots at a distance, but by bodily assault with bayonet and bomb." This new unit was to carry the war to the enemy, taking away his initiative and keeping him off-balance. And so it was, "to produce in their minds the belief government forces will move at night and can and will surprise them either in villages or across country." The force would be a mixed British-Jewish one operating under his command, moving primarily at night in areas of guerilla activity with the allies of the night: deception, surprise, shock.

Since then Israel has forgotten Wingate's lessons that helped make the IDF into the fearsome force that it was. Instead Israel has reverted to the fortified settlements and cities, the home guards maintaining watch... as well as the British assault teams thundering across the desert in a spectacular show of force that accomplishes absolutely nothing. And this applies not only to Israel, but to the United States post-2004 as well.

You cannot win through defensive tactics. You can only bleed. And Israel is bleeding badly. The nation that once executed Entebbe, rescuing hostages on another continent, can no longer even rescue one of its soldiers held captive within its own borders. The country that was once hailed as a symbol of rebirth has been internationally demonized. And the worst part of it all is that Israel sat back and let it happen.

Israel is too small to be able to keep on bleeding indefinitely. Its soldiers and citizens have tired of always being on watch, and always waiting for an attack. Its citizens and its defenders around the world are tired of being expected to answer increasingly outlandish charges. This cannot go on forever. Israeli leaders understood this, but they drew the wrong lesson, determining to go even further on the defensive by cutting deals with the enemy. They were wrong. Disastrously wrong.

To survive against larger enemies, a small country must be quick, it must be feared, it must use surprise and cultivate an aura of inhuman abilities. Israel used to be all of these things. Now it is none of these things. But if it is to survive, it must become those things again.

Israel does not have a terrorism problem, it has a defensiveness problem. Israel has the capability to destroy every terrorist group within its borders in a matter of a month. Israel does not have a PR problem. Its PR problem is created by an ongoing conflict with terrorist groups, who have extensive sympathizers abroad. Destroy the terrorist groups, regain control over the disputed areas, and the PR problem shrinks to a fraction of its former size. More importantly it ceases to have any useful meaning.

The media war against Israel, the lawfare and the other various non-military tactics require an investment of resources. For those resources to be worth investing, there must be a visible payoff. The more Israel stays on the defensive, and its enemies make territorial and political gains, the more those tactics seem to be paying off. Reverse that scenario, and the resources will be reinvested somewhere else because they are not achieving tangible results.

It has been demonstrated that the demonization of Israel is not significantly altered by the nature of Israeli tactics against terrorism. Whether Israeli tanks smash through Arafat's compound, or Israel builds a non-violent defensive border wall-- the demonization of Israel remains constant. That is because the demonization is not a moral response to specific policies, but an ongoing state of hostility directed against Israel in support of Muslim and Marxist terrorists. The only way to stop the demonization is to remove the incentive for it, by removing the terrorists.

The Oslo Accords did not lessen the global demonization of Israel. Instead after a brief honeymoon, it significantly worsened it. That is because the propaganda war was closer to achieving its purpose. The more Israel has compromised, the worse its international status has become. That is because by compromising, Israel demonstrated its weakness to both its enemies and allies, emboldening its enemies and making its allies reevaluate its ability to survive. The more Israel has gone on the defensive, the worse the terrorism and the demonization has become. That is only natural. If you retreat, the enemy's fire will increase in severity.

To many Jews and Israelis, and sympathizers with Israel as a nation battling Marxist and Islamist terror, the problem seems impossible. The political and military situation is a Gordian Knot of tangled complexities. Which is why it takes an Alexander or a Wingate to cut the knot. Israel's media and military problems are born of a defensive strategy that have allowed the country to be tied into a Gordian Knot. To survive Israel must go on the offensive to cut the knot and save itself, or be choked to death by the rope its enemies have tied around its neck.