Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Just in passing, I thought it might be worth mentioning that one of the main jobs of the Russian and ALL intelligence services is to try to swing elections in a direction that is favorable to their country. I have no idea of whether the Russians actually tried to swing the 2016 election in favor of Mr. Trump, but I doubt it for the reason stated below. But if they or another nation did try, they were knowingly abetted by U.S. citizens named Hillary Clinton and Podesta.

As I have said before in this space, the Russian, Israeli, Iranian, Chinese regimes, all NATO governments, and probably dozens of others have — thanks to their intelligence services — every one of the e-mails that Hillary Clinton and here correspondents put on her non-secure personal server.

For foreign governments this kind of e-mail haul is the stuff dreams are made of, but it becomes worthless if Clinton looses the election. If she wins, however, the foreign regimes are on easy street as they can exert an unprecedented level of effective blackmail against a President Hillary Clinton because they have documentary proof that she is a liar, a traitor, a racketeer, and — given press reports of her sordid and unhinged behavior on election night — a coward, or a drunk, or a drug user. No wretches on earth at this point in history are more susceptible to successful blackmail operations — or more frantic to fully hide or at least obfuscate their crimes by blaming Russia — than Hillary Clinton and her husband. Thankfully, she lost.

It has long been important that the great bulk of Americans begin to become adults, and this episode ought to give them a shot of maturity. Where was their outrage when Hillary Clinton’s State Department intervened in elections in Russia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Ukraine? In case of the Ukraine, she and her EU counterparts caused the downfall of the country’s pro-Russia government, and thereby gave Putin every right — indeed, the clear patriotic duty — to annex Crimea to protect Russia’s facilities for its Black Sea Fleet. All of the troubles the West now has with Russia flows from this mindless Clinton-EU intervention to change the regime in Ukraine. In Iran, Clinton and her State Department halfwits — and probably some EU regimes — sought to swing the election against the Mullahs, but failed and accomplished nothing but making themselves the cause of all the dead Iranian young people who Hillary encouraged to challenge that murderous Iranian regime unarmed.

Part of becoming an adult, of course, is reading and understanding history, and so learning how the always zero-sum world always works. Today’s perpetually adolescent American citizens — had they been properly educated — would know that history shows U.S. intelligence services, as well as the intelligence services of all nations who have the capability to do so, try to guide, alter, or control elections so as to serve their nation’s interests. South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Africa have all been places where scholars have shown that foreign intelligence services have covertly and repeatedly intervened in elections. There is absolutely nothing new about this practice, it is very old hat and a time-honored tradition.

The new part of what can be called “election interventionism” lies in the invention of technologies pertinent to manipulating elections. The makers of computers, social-media systems, mobile phones, and a thousand other kinds of communication tools have made the world an easier place to live. Too often, however, all that most people think about is the pleasant side of the technologies, chanting childish and patently insane words about making all the world one big, united, talkative, and happily multicultural community. That sounds good to adolescents, but adults would know that hell lays on the other side of that coin. In devising these technologies, their creators also have built electronic gear which greatly advances the likelihood that invulnerable tyrannies and police states will be built by people who — like Hillary Clinton and her party — want permanent power and no resistance thereto. After all, if the security and intelligence services run by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin had today’s technologies, there would be no way to even try to change the German, Chinese, or Soviet police states, or any other police state, from within. Communications technology, in short, will inevitably pave the road to tyranny.

The bottom line, then, is that libraries are full of books showing that elections are the targets of all intelligence services — including those of the United States — and some have more luck than others. This is the way the game of international affairs has been played since at least 1945, and it will be played this way for as long as we can stave off the would-be tyrants that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerburg have so blithely assisted.

If there is a question, however, about why Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and those of the DNC were hacked, the answer is because both Hillary and John Podesta thought that their e-mails were impregnable, and that they had corrupted the U.S. election process to the point where “Madame President” was unbeatable. They were not only wrong on that score, but used security protection that could have been — and probably was — hacked by 18-year-old, geeky high-school dropouts from Hoboken. Quite simply, Clinton and Podesta were astoundingly negligent, the former criminally so.

Infuriating though it is, Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Russia — and China, Iran, Israel, dozens of other countries, Julian Assange, and a gang of yet to be heard from folks — who seized the all-but-unprotected e-mails of Hillary Clinton. They demonstrated for thoroughly adolescent America that its national government — in the person of Hillary Clinton, her correspondents, and all the other agencies that have been hacked in the past decade — is either willfully negligent in protecting sensitive data or technologically incompetent to do so. It is no wonder America is consistently defeated on the battlefield, when it is led by politicians who refuse to obey the simple-to-comply-with laws that are in place to protect the republic’s sensitive electronic communications.

The foreigners also have taught us another much-needed lesson; namely, that that the laws of the United States are irrelevant, even laughable, if they are not enforced. Yes, we learned from the e-mails that Hillary Clinton is a criminal in every sense of the word, but most Americans knew that, and many were ready to vote for a criminal. But the most important thing we have learned is that Hillary Clinton and those government officials who dealt with her via that e-mail server — all of them violators of the espionage acts — have so far both flaunted and escaped what is, and must be, the hard-hand of the law on this issue.

What can be done by the citizenry when the national government refuses to enforce laws meant to defend the republic against enemies, as the saying goes, foreign and domestic? Well, the voters peacefully and fairly voted the Clinton crime family out of power, and they put in a new bunch on the condition that they be significantly more law abiding. But in the back of many minds there must be a lingering question of what can be done if the new folks offer the same kind of lawlessness.

It is in such a situation that knowledge of America’s history is a most useful resource. That knowledge teaches that it was once possible for Americans to defend themselves against domestic enemies, if the government refused to do so, or was just incompetent to do so. Indeed, the theme of citizens enforcing the law when the government will not, still reverberates in some of contemporary America’s popular music, and it provides all Americans with with a bit of nostalgia, perhaps even some food for thought.

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street,
For all the people to see

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
We’ve got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ’em all to their maker and he’ll settle ’em down
You can bet he’ll set ’em down (1)

Endnote

1. Scott Emerick and Toby Keith, “Beer for my horses,” https://www.google.com/webhp?tab=nw&ei=6-pPWJyfDMTY-gGTg6qgDQ&ved=0EKkuCAUoAQ#q=beer+for+my+horses+lyrics

For both the individual and the nation, America’s Founders believed, it is necessary to regularly look around and ask why what is being done is being done, this to ensure that genuine interests are being addressed. For an individual such a review may lead to an assessment that all is well, or it may detect a need to change course, perhaps a decision to quit smoking, to recant support for the Boston Red Sox, or to refuse to hold your tongue for fear of hurting daintily effete sensibilities.

It is just as important for the national government to ask itself the “Why are we doing doing what we are doing?” question. There are numbers of the national government’s operations that merit this kind of examination, but none more so — at least in the foreign policy arena — than its ongoing military interventions in Syria and Iraq.

As has been noted here more than once, the Islamic State’s activities in those two nations have irremediably destroyed them, and so neither poses a serious threat to genuine U.S. security interests. Since 2011, moreover, the war there has taken the lives of only the few American civilians who chose to risk their own lives a war zone, and not many more U.S. military lives, the latter lost only because President Obama put U.S. forces back into an already lost and now unwinnable war. The war also has cost U.S. taxpayers a small fortune to arms and train Islamists to fight other Islamists — and then turn on the U.S. military — as well as to arm and train Kurds, who will soon be the cause of the finally crumbling of the Syrian and Iraqi states and the destabilizing of Turkey and Iran.

The truthful answer to this question, if posed by the president to his advisers, would be that what today’s U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria is doing is playing the brain-dead midwife to the birth of utter civil anarchy and sectarian and ethnic civil wars, a mess that is likely to be so broad and bloody that to claim the U.S. government’s now 13-year-old intervention there has advanced any of the abstract causes championed by Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons — freedom, liberty, women’s rights, secularism, etc. — would be just about the blackest lie that could be told. None of these things can be achieved — or even begun — in an environment of intense chaos and accelerating violence, and that is exactly what the Bush administration ignited in 2003 and Obama has stoked since 2014.

Why should the U.S. national government continue to not only participate in, but drive this irrelevant-to-America war? Which genuine — that is, life-and-death — U.S. national security interests does the current level, or a future greater level, of U.S. military intervention in Syria and Iraq serve to secure or advance? The answer is none. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite.

The Syrian and Iraqi nation-states are decaying corpses. How many new states, or annexations to existing states, will come out of the wreckage is an open question. A new Kurdish State? A Shia Iraqi state so closely joined at the hip to Iran as to be a de facto single unit? A new version of the Ottoman Empire as Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey grabs territory in Syria and Iraq and seeks to annihilate the Kurds? A new Lebanese state that amounts to a de facto Iranian province, though not contiguous? The destruction of Jordan by the thousands of its Islamist nationals that are now serving with IS and other Muslim insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq?

What about the Sunni Arab populations in Syria and Iraq? Will they sit idly by as Shias, Kurds, Turks, and Alawites carve up the region and exclude them from power, drive them from the new states, or simply annihilate them? Not likely. Much more likely is a general series of prolonged and extremely violent activities which will see Turks fighting Kurds, the returned-to-insurgency Islamic State trying to claw back power in both disintegrating nations, the massacre of the region’s remaining Christians, and inter- and intra-tribal wars for territory and power. All of this will be worsened by an overarching anti-Shia regional war that will be waged by Sunni Islamists armed, supported, and provided manpower by Saudi Arabia, the other Sunni Gulf regimes, and other Sunni Muslim states and wealthy Sunni Muslims around the world.

And what if the foregoing is entirely wrong? What if IS is utterly defeated and gives up the fight; the Shia offer the hand of friendship, love, and reconciliation to the Sunnis and the Sunnis reciprocate; the Kurds politely agree to remain disunited and oppressed by the Turkish, Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi regimes; Ankara swears off its re-Ottomanization plans; and Russia comes to its senses and goes home to prepare for its coming, necessary war in Afghanistan?

The answer is that America would still be loser, as the argument would be made by NATO governments, the UN, and the Arab tyrants that because George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq gave birth to the Islamists’ war that has destroyed so much of Iraq and Syria, the enormous bill for reconstruction ought to be borne by U.S. taxpayers. The Democratic Party would go whole hog for this idea, and neoconservative Republicans would agree because it would give them a chance to trade their cooperation for a guarantee that the United States will maintain a postwar military force in Iraq with the unattainable goals of training one group or another and ensuring U.S. funding is properly spent. What the Neocons really will be seeking, of course, is a permanent military base in Iraq that can help wage the war against Iran they and the Israel Firsters have so long and so ardently desired.

Obviously, Mr. Trump, what we are doing in Iraq and Syria is both counter-productive to the genuine national security interests of the United States, and stirring a potential vortex into which another enormous tranche of U.S. taxpayer money will be poured and wasted. If this is not the answer your advisers provide to the above-noted question, get new, adult advisers immediately. Find advisers who will be honest enough to tell you that anything more you do in Iraq and Syria will amount to the feckless reinforcement of utter defeat, but, on the other hand, getting the United States out of that lethal, near-the-boil, sectarian caldron will yield substantial near- and long-term rewards, among which are:

• An end to the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted and now stand as the only reliable product of George W. Bush’s unwarranted invasion of Iraq in 2003. Mr. Trump, you and your advisers must have better uses for these funds, no? On this score, a certain wall comes immediately to mind, as does the simple kindness of halting the pillaging of American taxpayers for funds to be wasted or stolen by anti-American foreigners.
• An end to the possibility of any additional U.S. military lives being wasted in the morass known as Syria and Iraq, which is certain to evolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all, a war that, ironically, will do nothing but benefit U.S. national security if the republic’s government is smart enough to stand aside and let it rip.
• A respite for the U.S. military as a whole to rest, digest lessons learned lessons, and reequip after the serial and mostly unnecessary and lost wars that U.S. presidents have illegally waged since the elder Bush’s insane military intervention in Somalia in 1992.
• A detachment from the Middle East that will permit the soonest possible flowering of an all-out sectarian war between Sunnis and Shia, thereby allowing the broad bloodletting such a war will engender and which will consume the focus, activities, funds, and manpower of Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus, as well as of our Islamist enemies and their Sunni nation-state backers.
• An abandonment of the so-far effective efforts of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama to empower Shia regimes at the Sunnis’ expense. Bush, Cheney, and General Petraeus allowed the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, while Obama and Clinton have long facilitated Shia and Kurdish efforts to cleanse Arab Sunnis from Aleppo, Mosul, Damascus, Raqqa, and other historically Sunni Arab cities in Syria and Iraq. If you are not careful, Mr. Trump, you and your administration will be held responsible by Sunnis worldwide for leaving their brethren in Syria and Iraq with the choice of living in the desert or fleeing the homelands you have helped give to non-Arab, Shia apostates. This perception among Sunnis will do nothing but strengthen groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in terms of funding, manpower, popular support, and hatred for the U.S. government’s intervention in Sunni affairs. This perception is very much worth avoiding.
• A refusal to give the Democrats a chance to distract or even wreck your administration early in its tenure. You surely have noticed, Mr. Trump, that despite Obama’s wide-ranging and unnecessary overseas military interventions, and his replacement of the CIA’s tremendously effective, non-lethal rendition/interrogation program, with slaughter-by-drone operations, the so-called “American Peace Movement” has been dead silent and brooding in its malodorous sties for both of his terms. That is because, as you must know, the U.S. “peace” movement is the wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and George Soros, and is used only when it is in their political interest to awaken it with lucre and then deploy it — and the mainstream media that is part of it and portrays it as apolitical — to wreck any administration they oppose, even one of their own, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson. This is an easily predictable and perhaps fatal domestic trap for your administration, Mr. Trump, and another one that is well worth avoiding.

Think about the foregoing, Mr. Trump. Expanded spending and military operations in Iraq and Syria will keep America on the losing end of the stick, and they may well sink your chance to put matters to rights back here at home in the republic.

Because, Mr. Trump, you will set your own foreign policy, the main tasks for the next secretary of state will be to execute that policy and to purge the Department of State of those who have, for so many decades, championed the causes of foreign countries and have plied those foreigners with taxpayer money that should have been spent at home. In simple terms, if American taxpayer money is to be spent to make life better for people, those people can only be Americans.

The next secretary also will have to find and remove the cadre of interventionists, socialists, one-worlders, environmental-quacks, anti-Christians, social engineers, and that corps of incompetent, bespectacled, and ill-spoken young feminists, who have shown beyond doubt that feminism’s only real power is to block a young woman’s growth into a mature adult. Two terms of the Obama administration have sewn this useless and destructive ideological menagerie into the department’s fabric, and, if the department is to be re-professionalized, it must be sent packing.

Of the current names being bandied about for the secretary’s position, not one can be expected to do the necessary in terms of either cleansing the institution of the just noted rubbish or of reliably executing your America First foreign policy.

Mitt Romney: He is a part of the bipartisan governing class that, over the past 40 years, has made the State Department a hive of Ivy League-educated bees who advocate republic-killing interventionist wars and the spending of taxpayer money on what Kipling would have called their favorite “little brown brothers.” Romney and the State Department together would be more of the same status quo doctrine — everything for foreigners whatever it costs Americans — unless you or another adult reviews and approves everything Romney wants to do. It also should be recalled that Romney is a coward. He lost the 2012 election — like McCain did the 2008 election — because they feared being tagged racists if they publicly dismantled a Black man named Barack Obama by proving in debate that he had no contact points with the real world. Romney’s 2012 campaign staff also was flush with Israel-Firsters who spoke and wrote to damn and slander Dr. Ron Paul and other American non-interventionists as “isolationists” and anti-Semites. Finally, Romney and his buddy Netanyahu would keep the United States mired in religious wars that concern none of the republic’s life-and-death national interests.

John Bolton: This man is the quintessential Neoconservative-interventionist-Israel First war monger. The only senior-level, foreign-policy posts for which he is fitted are located in the Israeli government.

Robert Corker: The Senator is Bolton-lite. As secretary of state, he would want more unnecessary military interventions, more aid for and protection of Israeli interests, and probably would ask to have Bolton as his deputy.

David Petraeus: The General lost two wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and wasted U.S. military lives in his faux “surge” in Iraq, which was all show and no substance. The surge’s net result was to allow many of the Islamist fighters now serving with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to escape to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and build networks and destabilize each before returning to the battlefield. He also happens to be a self-confessed felon who passed classified intelligence to his paramour. Petraeus should be neither appointed nor pardoned. Let him stew in his own self-made juices, and make sure that Hillary Clinton — a person Petraeus championed — stews in the same kind of juices for her multiple and similar felonies.

Rudy Giuliani: Do you recall his arrogant, scurrilous, and neoconservative attacks on Dr. Ron Paul for his reverence for the Founders, his America First philosophy, his non-interventionist policies, and his reluctance to make Israel his country of first allegiance? In so doing, Giuliani displayed his support for the Bush-Cheney-Obama doctrine of relentless militarily intervention in places where no genuine U.S. national interests are at risk; for going to war for the ludicrous and unattainable causes of spreading democracy, freedom, human rights, and feminism; and for continuing the enormous and unconscionable amounts of taxpayer funds that are expended on such wars, and on aid — monetary or military, or both — for such “noble” but unnecessary and generally useless allies as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, most of NATO, and the other Gulf states.

These five men taken individually or together amount to a poisonous dog’s breakfast of intervention, war-mongering, deeper bankruptcy, and Israel First. There is not an America First-bone in any of them, and they would work against your often-stated goal of reforming U.S. foreign policy in the direction the Founders intended, and ending the influence of the passions of Neoconservatives and Israel Firsters for involving the republic in endless, unnecessary wars.

Able alternatives to these war-lovers are available and ought to be considered, two of whom come quickly to my mind, Senator Rand Paul and Professor Walter A. McDougall, perhaps as a team. The former is a consistent non-interventionist by inclination and birth-right, and the latter wrote the two best books ever written on the cost of a U.S. foreign that deviates from the Founders’ guidance: Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997) and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016). MacDougall’s long survival in the academy as a non-interventionist and champion of the Founders’ wisdom also suggests a talent for in-fighting that would help to clear the State Department of the dross mentioned above.

Think it over, Mr. Trump. The five men you are reported to be considering for Secretary of State will do nothing but make America more hated around the world; begin and lose more wars that waste the lives and limbs of young Americans; and, perhaps, distract your government from addressing and funding all the work that needs to be done in the United States. Long-term security for America, after all, depends on stopping illegal immigration, ridding the nation of illegal aliens, unleashing business to create jobs and profits, restoring law and order, rebuilding the military, and completely removing our children’s education from the malign hands of the national government.

Avoiding the cost and distractions caused by war are keys to accomplishing these other, more important domestic tasks. If we have to fight somewhere to defend ourselves and our interests, you have General Mattis to do the job, and there is no better man for doing that task quickly and definitively. Give him a colleague at the State Department who will not seek unnecessary wars for him to fight.

Michael F. Scheuer
December 2, 2016

Image source: A billboard in Detroit stating ‘America First Not Israel’ is causing controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism. The advertisement was paid for by the Deir Yassin Remembered group, which aims to make American’s more aware of the plight of Palestinians. The billboard can be seen 8 Mile Road in the city, and was placed there by Deir Yassin Remembered, which is based in New York. — Blog.deiryassin.org, Oct.27.2016 / selected by wg.pco

Although Obama’s effort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by taking Mosul on the eve of the election failed, there is a good chance that Mosul will fall to the heterogeneous coalition that is attacking it. Be that event in six weeks, six months, or a year, the United States and its allies will rejoice over the event as if it is the death knell of the Islamic State (IS). They will be wrong to do so, showing again how deeply ignorant they are of the Islamist enemy and the religious war it is waging against them.

IS has lost in Palmyra, Anbar, Ramadi, and other territories, and yet its troops are putting up their hardest fight yet in Mosul. Why? Two reasons: (a) IS leaders prematurely declared the caliphate, ignoring Osama bin Laden’s guidance that the lasting re-creation of caliphate was impossible until the United States was driven from the Arab World; if he was alive, he would probably add Russia to that guidance; and (b) because in the minds of IS leaders, fighters, and their supporters, everything, good or bad, comes from Allah; victory is from Allah, and defeat is a trial sent by Allah to test His followers’ faith and perseverance. While far from irrelevant, IS’s defeats in 2016, in Islamist minds, are in part a consequence of a IS leadership mistakes, but overwhelmingly because Allah did not grant them victory at this time.

The stubborn defense of Mosul and other places in Syria and Iraq, as well as the not infrequent, often unexpected IS offensive actions occurring in tandem, are mujahideen operations meant to prove to Allah that they are working through His test and trying to prove that they are fighting His fight and are worthy of His assistance. This is not a new phenomenon. Between 1979 and 1991, the Afghan Islamists were constantly beaten up, tactically defeated, and generally beleaguered by the Red Army and Air Force, but they stayed in the field, fought the Soviets and their Afghan allies, and Allah ultimately gave them victory. More recently, the West and its African allies have twice dealt the Somali Islamists heavy blows and declared victory. Today, however, Al-Shabaab remains in the field and is advancing, and a nascent Islamic State outfit has joined the war.

Faced with an enemy that thinks in this manner, victory for the United States, Russia, and their respective allies requires nothing less than as a complete annihilation of the mujahideen and their supporters as is militarily possible. As noted here previously, the loss of the cities that IS held or holds in Syria and Iraq is a blow to the organization’s prestige, and is costly in financial and manpower terms. It does not destroy the eternal goal of recreating the caliphate, or the IS organization. Indeed, in the counter-intuitive ways of insurgent warfare — where losses are often wins — those defeats will make IS stronger, more elusive, and more appealing to young Muslims. The latter due to its fierce resistance against what is irrefutably the strongest Crusader force that has ever taken the field against Islam.

Without the cities, IS will no longer need to supply food, electricity, water, roads, health, education, and social services, or law-and-order for urban populations, all of which are expensive and manpower-intensive. Shed of this burden, IS forces will be reapplied. Much of IS’s remaining force will return to what they do best, which is to base in remote areas of Syria and Iraq and conduct a patient insurgent campaign, which will be fought by small groups, in a hit-and-run manner, and will be punctuated by ambushes, IEDs, and car-bombs in urban areas.

IS’s loss of the cities and return to its main fighting skills will coincide with a gradual recognition on the part of the U.S.-Russia-Iran-NATO coalition that its string of urban victories have yielded a catastrophic result. In the space of a year, for example, the coalition will have lost the only kind of targets in which it has prevailed against Islamists since 2001 — cities — and will then confront an enemy that requires quite large numbers of infantrymen for use in undertaking the long, bloody, costly, and usually unsuccessful counter-insurgency campaign needed to have any chance of annihilating IS and the other Islamist fighting groups. Oh yes, the Western members coalition also will have to pay through the nose — given that Syria, Russia, and Iraq do not have a pot to piss in — to rebuild the urban areas and infrastructure its air forces and IS have destroyed. They also will have to feed the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes and jobs; who largely blame the current coalition’s Westerners, Russians, and Shias for their dire predicament; and who hold an enduring hatred for the U.S. government for invading Iraq in 2003.

An Islamist insurgency being waged from Damascus eastward to the Iranian border, however, will be only one part of the catastrophe which will be delivered by the coalition’s successful campaign to drive IS from the cities. As noted, IS will return to its strongest military skill, and it also will return to kind of warfare that requires less manpower. IS leaders, therefore, will be free to redeploy their fighters to areas of its choosing, and, as the history of the last 20 years has shown, the arrival of even a few veteran mujahideen can make a notable difference to the quality and lethality of local jihadi operations.

The European governments are already in a public and cowardly tizzy about IS’s foreign fighters returning to their home countries. Some will certainly return to Europe and stage attacks, but they will only serve as icing on the Islamists’ cake. The Europeans have already sealed their well-deserved fate by letting in a tidal wave of Arab refugees — in the name “Merkelism,” which is an insane, Western civilization-destroying brand of humanitarianism — in whose ranks were untold numbers of mujahideen in the guise of innocent refuge seekers. Indeed, the greatest threat posed by IS fighters returning home probably lies not in Europe, but in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Jordan, India, and western China, where the ample local supplies of would-be Salafi mujahideen are in dire need of military trainers, combat-experienced leaders, explosives experts, and talented organization-builders and logisticians.

The real rub for the victorious U.S.-Russia-NATO-Shia coalition will come when IS leaders deploy — as they now are — fighters to countries where other jihad struggles are ongoing. IS fighters from Syria and Iraq, for example, have been and will be sent to Afghanistan, among them Pakistanis and Afghans going home with significant combat experience and organizational and leadership abilities. This move will strengthen IS’s foothold in Afghanistan, and begin to pave the way for the priority IS goal of entering Central Asia and opening another front against Russia.

Other IS fighters will be deployed to Gaza to strengthen the growing Salafi movement, as well as to be filtered by HAMAS’s military wing into the Sinai Peninsula to fight the Egyptian military and attack Israel. IS fighters also will sent to assist the growth of Salafi organizations and military capabilities in the Tripoli region of northern Lebanon. IS leaders will continue deploying fighters, munitions, and explosives into Iran, and will surely move some troops to Yemen, either to fight there or to move across the Red Sea to serve in Somalia and East Africa, to reinforce IS fighters in Libya and the rest of North Africa, and to join IS-allies in Mali, where the regional Islamist tide again appears to be rising.

In this religious war, U.S. and NATO “victories” — such as the deposing of Saddam, killing Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gadhafi, and backing the coup that overthrew Muhammad Morsi — have very often led to more, rather than less war, as well as to sky-rocketing expenditures by that effete gang of war-without-killing bankrupts. The retaking of the Syrian and Iraq cities from IS seems likely to yield the same kind of result, only this time perhaps on a much broader international scale.

In view of the foregoing budding reality, and the long string of disasters that have preceded it, there never has been a better time for the U.S. national government to make a clearly America-First decision to complete the Mosul operation and then withdraw all U.S. troops, aircraft, and private contractors from Syria and Iraq. That action will let the nations from Europe, the Levant, and the Arab Peninsula who have what America has not — genuine life-and-death national interests in the ultimate outcome there — continue the war until they are successful or until they perish.

While that melodrama plays out, Americans can work on defending U.S. interests, in all of their dimensions, in the place it matters most, in North America. That is, after all, the clearest and most important of all the constitutional responsibilities assigned to the U.S. national government, as well as the one that won Mr. Trump the recent election.

Until inaugurated on 20 January 2017, Mr. Trump would be well advised to follow the pre-inaugural behavior of one of his predecessors, a fellow New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From November, 1932, until his inaugural on 4 March 1933, FDR refused to make any public statement that would tie him to the floundering policies of Herbert Hoover’s government. Roosevelt was about to undertake the monumental task of trying to get America out of still deepening economic depression and wanted no association with the administration that Americans — rightly or wrongly — perceived as the cause of their economic misery. FDR resisted requests for supportive statements from the Hoover administration and defied the bashing he received from parts of the media for not speaking out on the economy and the worsening banking crisis.

FDR always held his cards close to his vest — earning the nickname “Sphinx” — and Trump should follow his lead. The domestic and overseas ravages caused by eight years of Obama-Clinton policies and unconstitutional actions are coming home to roost and Trump ought to leave them to reap the whirlwind and wither alone. Obama, Clinton, and their party are also behind the violent post-election demonstrations America is now witnessing, and they are hoping that Trump will say something that can be used to blame for the spreading violence.

Mr. Trump has a few election-provided blessings to count, but his biggest task at the moment seems to be to keep silent on a number of domestic and foreign-policy disasters that he had no hand in creating, thereby letting those disasters fall squarely into the laps of Obama and Clinton.

Following are a number of silence-worthy topics, and two blessings to count.

Silence: The unusually fast expressions supporting a “peaceful transfer of power” from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently were meant to impress Americans with their even-handed handling of a stunning and well-merited electoral defeat. Do not be fooled. They knew that street violence was coming because their surrogates, led and paid by Soros-ites, had it prepared just in case the unimaginable happened and the American people prevailed. If Mr. Trump is smart he will say very little — preferably nothing — about the issue and sit back and see where the violence goes. Paid-for violence often takes on a life of its own, and if the anti-Trump violence continues, he should then say — absolutely nothing. If the violence grows and gets out of hand, Mr. Trump should led Obama, Clinton, Podesta, Pelosi, Schumer, et al. stew in their own juices. If Trump says anything at all, the Democrats will blame him for causing the violence and then simply pay for more of it. As did FDR before he was inaugurated, Trump should remain silent and let Obama and Clinton manage the problem they created, either by ignoring it and falsely publicly blaming it on Trump or by cracking down on their own paid goons. Either way, Trump and the republic win, and hopefully a goodly number of the Soros-paid mercenary thugs will get killed.

Blessing: Trump enters the presidency with the unqualified blessing of having seen Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) and Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) defeated in their bids for reelection. Kirk and Ayotte are both ardent interventionists and even more ardent Israel-Firsters. The loss of two Republican votes in the Senate is more than compensated for by the departure of two war-mongering interventionists who would have been nothing but enemies and underminers of an America First foreign policy.

Silence: Trump and his team ought to silently make plans to close all of the White House space that has been used by journalists, either as work areas or for the daily press briefing. Almost all the U.S.-media worked as an extension of the Democratic Party during the recent election and manufactured coverage of Trump that was 91-percent negative. Trump owes the U.S. media nothing, and certainly not coddling inside the White House. Trump must not ignore the press, however, and so ought to have a covered platform built — with no walls — on the White House grounds where the journalists can gather for the daily press briefing, and from there can ask questions via a skype-like arrangement to the president’s spokesman who will be in his office inside the White House.

Blessing: The reelection of Republican Senator Rand Paul in Kentucky is unalloyed good news for non-interventionists and for Trump’s intent — if it is sincere — to conduct an America First foreign policy. Senator Paul’s victory gives him the chance to clarify and sharpen some of his foreign policy ideas and objectives — which seem to have drifted a bit from non-intervention — and to keep Mr. Trump up to mark on his foreign policy promises. Senator Paul’s presence, moreover, will give Trump a non-interventionist ally in a Republican senate caucus where the majority has never seen a war it did not want to get into, and which long ago hired on as well-paid shills for Israel First.

Silence: Mr. Trump should remain silent on the ideas coming from the media, and even some Republican quarters, that suggest he should “wipe the slate clean” and pardon Hillary Clinton and her coterie of fellow felons if the felon-in-chief Obama does not do so. If the possibility of pardoning Clinton and her gang remains viable at the time of his inauguration, Trump ought to slam the door shut on it on his second day as president. Although Gerald Ford is surely among the most decent men ever to be U.S. president, it was his pardoning of Richard Nixon that cleared the way for the Clintons’ criminal operations. Ford said the pardon of Nixon was meant to end a “long American nightmare,” but it really did nothing but demonstrate to the electorate that the U.S. political elite was above the law. Trump is likely to be faced by the same king of nightmare-ending arguments — as noted, even from Republicans — if he is sworn in with Hillary and her comrades in crime still unpardoned. At that point, the new president ought to appoint Patrick Fitzgerald — the Special Counsel who nailed the Bush administration’s Scooter Libby for leaking a CIA officer’s true name — and let him examine both the use of the unsecured server and the activities of the Clinton Foundation. If he finds no illegality, fine, but if he finds illegality, then indictments and a trial are mandatory to bring the lawless political elite to book. If their are valid legal grounds for indictment, trial, conviction, and incarceration, nothing could do more to help the citizenry to start to believe that the republic is returning to the concept of the equality of all before the law.

Silence: Trump also should remain silent on Iraq. The current siege of Mosul — which Obama timed to help Clinton win the election — is producing increasing numbers of reports that Iraq’s Shia fighters are indiscriminately killing and torturing Sunni civilians in retribution for similar behavior by the Islamic State. With any luck, this will be the proverbial final feather that turns Shia-Sunni violence into a full-blown sectarian war. If that happens, the 5,000-6,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines that Obama has pointlessly put on the ground there may have to fight their way to safety, as the inter-sect warfare expands. If those troops can get safely out of harm’s way, Obama will have to either send them back into the fight, in what would be a suicide mission; massively reinforce them, a move that would produce nothing but dead Americans; or bring them home. Such an all-consuming sectarian war that begins in Iraq has been the end toward which events there have been heading since Obama foolishly re-entered Iraq in August, 2014. Trump should remain silent on the issue, and let Obama reap the disgrace he deserves by repeating George W. Bush’s two-fold madness of (a) sending the U.S. military into Iraq and (b) deploying just enough troops to ensure U.S. defeat.

Let me first say how much I appreciate people taking the time to write, whether from a favorable or unfavorable view. I have learned a good deal from those who kindly take time to read what I write.

At some point in the last six-weeks, I received an e-mail telling me the blog has been defaced a bit. So far I have tried to cope with the problem — placing articles a bit farther down from the page top — but have not found a way to fix it.

Then, about 7 or 10 days ago, I received another e-mail saying that my responses to readers’ comments were not appearing on the blog. I checked and found that to be the case. I have not found a way to fix that either.

Anyway, below are the responses that I have so far written on some of the comments received about the last three blog pieces. I will continue to put responses in this format until I can fix the problems.

Again, many thanks for your comments. MFS

“The Jewish-American media elite intends to kill the republic,” 2 November 2016

In reply to Mike Phillips.

Thanks for writing. None of them is CIA inventions. They are the inventions of (a) devout Muslims and (b) the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (1979) and the USG’s pots-1945, bipartisan interventionist foreign policy that is thoroughly hated across the Muslim world, as well as by any right-thinking American. MFS

In reply to Jacques.

Thanks for writing. I have detested that elite most of my adult life. It has given Trump nothing but negative/lying coverage since the start of the primary season. Indeed, they have been more despicably anti-Trump than parts of the liberal media. Have you been on vacation for the past 18 month? MFS

“The choice in 2016: Liberty or the yoke,” 29 October 2016

In reply to Jacques.

Thank you for writing. I have, incidentally, answered everyone of the comments you have sent. Slavery was legal/constitutional at the time of the Civil War. The slaves were freed by a Civil War that prepared the ground for the 13th-15th amendments. The Civil war was not waged to free the slaves. Lincoln could not have fought the South to free slaves because he would have been fighting an unconstitutional war and he would have had almost no popular support. The slaves were freed by constitutional amendments, as it should be in a constitutional republic. Without question, the Confederate nation was opposing what it perceived as tyranny, and perception is always reality. As in, I perceive you as a hopeless fool. MFS

In reply to Warren.

Thank you for writing. Yes, the anti-Federalists almost to a man saw what the new constitution could and has lead to, and that is why the liberal academy has for so long tried damn them as complainers, cranks, and men with no alternative plan. The anti-Federalists are as, if not more, important than the Federalists because they never for a second forgot that man is a fallen creature and will behave tyrannically given half a chance. On the other side, Washington, Madison, and some others were of the exact same mind. Had the Founders lived forever we might have been okay, but here we are with a traitor/butcher/felon running for president and access to all the arbitrary power the anti-Federalist warned off. Time is running out. Finally, I am about have way through a new book on the anti- Federalists. The book is by William A. Watkins Jr. and called Crossroads of Liberty. I think it is excellent in showing how much liberty was lost at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. MFS

“Of course the 2016 election is rigged, here’s how, and what it may yield,” 17 October 2016

In reply to Jacques.

Thanks for writing. Do you have a script from the DNC that you use for these witty and compelling notes. I always try to be polite, but I’ll tell the truth. If your grandparents are alive today, they must surely regret the mess you have made of the opportunities they won for you at high personal costs. You and your kind wouldn’t get up off your asses to do anything for yourselves if it required going farther than the refrigerator, and so you depend on a criminal, Wall-Street whore like Hillary to take as much money as possible from people who work and give it to you worthless, narcissistic, and lazy creeps. Grow up and get to work, and learn what it feels like to have half of America get paid from what you earn. MFS

In reply to Z.V. Dongone.

Thanks for writing. The media is completely biased in favor of the left and of suffocating liberty and the republic at all times. Because they have neither respect for, nor knowledge of the citizenry, they covered Trump initially to bedevil the Republican Party establishment and — given Trump’s wealth — reinforce the idea that Wall Street owns the party. (NB: You’ll note the media has been largely silent now that we know that Hillary is Wall Street’s aged but bought-and-paid-for whore.) After it became clear that Trump had struck a nerve in the populace and had growing support, the coverage simply continued and grew increasingly negative toward Trump and vastly more pro-Clinton, especially in what they chose not to report about Clinton’s criminality. It is all of a piece really, and has been for nearly half a century. I read yesterday that the public record shows 96-percent of all the media people — reporters, editors, pundits, media owners, anchors, etc. — who can be identified as having made a contribution to a presidential candidate in the 2016 race gave their money to Hillary. I would say that the 96-percent figure is a pretty clear proof of bias if any more was needed. MFS

In reply to Charles Byrd.

Thanks for writing. For my money, Rand Paul never made clear where he stood and so came off as one who would trim as the situation demanded. I thought the material on his website was especially confusing in this regard. This may be unfair because part of the lens through which I see Rand Paul is his dad, whom I never had to worry about straying off course. I also think that Rand Paul and the 15 or 16 other candidates missed what is truly clear about the Republican Party; namely, that it, as well as the Democratic Party, are well and truly hated by much of the citizenry. There was Trump and 16 other candidates, and the latter group would have run Romney-like campaigns and would not have gotten down in the gutter where Hillary and her party live and thrive, and which is the only place in which they can be beaten. Hillary would have mopped the floor with any of the other fifteen, moreover, because all of them would have been made to look like Romney by the Clinton machine, and all would have played the role of the well intentioned but soon-to-be-defeated gentlemen because they would have not spoken frankly and in the blue-collar idiom, as Trump has, about her criminality, treason, greed, arrogance, run-away corruption, and the obvious hatred in her heart for non-elite white Americans and this republic. Anyway, I am no expert on any of this, but I am confident of one thing. Trump is the last chance for our republic, and much of the election depends on whether Christians and Protestants can see, and act accordingly, on the what I think is the irrefutable fact that if they turn their back on Trump — a fallen creature just as I and they all are — they in fact turn their collective backs on themselves and their children, and volunteer to see the closest thing to heaven on earth turned into a genuinely hellish tyranny that intends to finish banning faith from the public square and constitutional liberty and order from the republic and its citizens. MFS

There clearly is a good deal of malign foreign intervention occurring in the 2016 presidential election, but it is not coming from Russian President Putin and his intelligence services. It is coming, rather, from Israel, and it is being executed through that country’s legion of disloyal U.S. citizens, be they Israel-Firsters, Neoconservatives, AIPAC’ers, or that steadily filling sty of war-loving foreign policy gurus and general officers that hate Trump.

First, the Russians. The idea that the Russians are the only ones who stole the DNC and Podesta e-mails and gave them to Wikileaks is a hoot. Of course the Russians stole them — that is what all intelligence services do and should do — and the Russians also no doubt have the entire body of Hillary Clinton’s pre-bleach-bit e-mails, as do the Iranians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, all the EU governments, the Saudis, the Israelis, and, really, any savvy teenage computer jockey. The three e-mail collections now in the hands of foreign governments are there because the DNC, John Podesta, and Hillary Clinton did not put an even marginally effective safeguard on their e-mail files.

But neither the Russian nor any other government would waste its e-mail hauls by giving them to Julian Assange or Anonymous; indeed, both hacking organizations are fully capable of stealing the e-mail collections off their own hook. No, foreign governments would save them for use in controlling a President Clinton by threatening to release them after her election, a form of ruthless shake-down that Hillary would no doubt recognize and admire. This simple fact makes nonsense of the argument that Russia stole the e-mails to prevent Clinton from becoming president. Clinton and Podesta are proven and dependable commodities for the Kremlin. Each has done Moscow’s bidding for pay, and that behavior, at least on Clinton’s part, would be guaranteed to continue if she is elected, given Mr. Putin’s possession of her e-mail.

Russian intervention is a bogey that has driven James Carville publicly insane, but Israeli intervention is a hard and long-standing fact. While the Israeli government has been properly silent about the election, its fanatic supporters in the United States have been trying to destroy Trump and elect an anti-American — like themselves — felon, traitor, and tyrant as the next U.S. President. Oh, they dress up their opposition to Trump in the glad-rags of “principle” — he gropes, swears, evades taxes, etc., etc. — but no one should be fooled by this faux mix of moral righteousness and indignation. No, they hate Trump because of two words, namely “AMERICA FIRST.”

You see, these disloyal Israel-First U.S. citizens have spend decades and billions of dollars — in the form of campaign contributions and other kinds of rewards-for-politicians — on effectively suborning much of the bipartisan governing elite, the media, the military, and the federal civil service so that each always acts in Israel’s foreign-policy interests, and almost never in the foreign-policy interests of the United States.

When Trump said he would pursue a foreign policy of America First, the Israel-Firtsers suddenly envisioned that long-past-due day when the FBI would be dismantling their network of high-level, U.S. citizen espionage agents; when their subversive organizations would be required to register as agents-of-a-foreign-power; and perhaps even when veteran FBI and Intelligence Community officers would testify under oath before the Congress, describing what they know about how disloyal Israel-Firsters hurt the United States, a truth that many of those officers believe their fellow citizens also ought to know.

Most of all, the Israel-Firtsers knew that “America First” would mean the end of the U.S. government’s heretofore supine willingness to go to war on behalf of a country that is of no national-security value to the republic — indeed, it is an acid that erodes that security — and against an Islamist enemy who attacks America primarily because the U.S. government, under both parties, supports all-things Israel, as well as every two-bit Arab tyrant who can offer bribes disguised as campaign contributions, gifts to help build presidential libraries, or arms contracts.

The difficulty of speaking the truth about Israel-First’s anti-American malignity is obvious to all. Given that fact, I thought I would end this piece by offering readers the chance to decide for themselves. There follow below citations for a series of articles that have been published by leading Israel-Firsters, Neocons, pundits, professors, and other of their associates during the past 14 days. Note the steady increase in their venomous and panicky tone as Trump’s campaign picked up political momentum, and especially since the FBI began taking another look a Hillary’s unmistakable criminality.

The theme of each article is two-fold: (a) Donald Trump is an unprincipled, crude, and genuinely bad guy, and (b) Hillary Clinton is a flawed but far preferable alternative for the presidency, notwithstanding that she is a liar, a felon, a self-confessed traitor, a war lover, an aspiring tyrant, a spendthrift intending to bankrupt the republic, and a deadly enemy of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Also making these flaws tolerable is the fact that the Israel-Firsters know that they own Hillary, her husband, and their party — and many senior Republicans — because they have been on the take from Israel First for decades and will do its bidding no matter how many interventionist wars are required or how many dead or maimed U.S. soldiers and Marines result.

For the writers below these are minor flaws and vastly better than the havoc and political impotence that would ensue for Israel-Firsters, their subversive networks, and their ability to serve their country of first affection, if Mr. Trump wins and implements a policy of America First at home and abroad.

So have a read, and see what you think. And remember, the writers are so viciously anti-Trump not because of who he is and how he speaks, but only because the disloyal Israel-Firsters are so palpably and quite correctly terrorized by that clear, simple, historically resonant, and enormously popular phrase “America First.”

• Thomas L. Friedman, “Donald Trump Voters, Just hear me out,” 2 November 2016.
• Michael Gerson, “My Reluctant and Strategic Vote for Clinton,” 1 November 2016.
• Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Expose Trump’s enablers: How many people who should know better are making it easier for him to lie to the American people,” 31 October 2016.
• Michael A. Cohen, “FBI director James Comey should resign,” 31 October 2016.
• Benjy Sarlin, “The Vengeful World of Donald Trump, and Why It Matters,” 31 October 2016.
• Damon Linker, “Clinton Scandal Nothing Compared to the Plague of Trump,” 31 October 2016.
• Jonathan Chait, “Republicans’ Age of Authoritarianism Has Just Begun,” 30 October 2016.
• Howard Fineman, “James Comey Just Unmasked Himself,” 30 October 2016.
• Mort Zuckerman, “The Intolerable Donald Trump,” 30 October 2016.
• William Kristol, “A Populist-Nationalist Right? No Thanks,” 30 October 2016.
• Dana Milbank, “Mr. Comey’s Dangerous October Surprise,” 29 October 2016.
• Eli Lake, “Don’t Let the FBI’s E-Mail Surprise Swing the Election,” 28 October 2016.
• Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Comey’s letter is not a bombshell: Donald Trump is still unfit, and we’re unlikely to learn anything new about Hillary Clinton’s email error,” 28 October 2016.
• Dana Milbank, “The Bricks in Trump’s Wall of Shame,” 28 October 2016.
• Alan J. Lipman, “The narcissism of Donald Trump’s candidacy,” 28 October 2016.
• Harold Myerson, “Dems Get Out the Vote; GOP Suppresses It,” 28 October 2016.
• Thomas Friedman, “Trump is the enemy of all that’s great,” 26 October 2016.
• Dana Milbank, “The Lap Dogs of Democracy Who Didn’t Bark at Trump,” 25 October 2016.
• Yoni Applebaum, “Trump’s Gettysburg Address Attacks Faith in Government,” 24 October 2016.
• Michelle Goldberg, “The Anguish of Being a Republican Woman in Age of Trump,” 24 October 2016.
• Noah Feldman, “On Nov. 9, Let’s Forget Donald Trump Happened,” 24 October 2016.
• Laurence Tribe, “Donald Trump’s Dangerous Nonsense,” 23 October 2016.
• William Kristol, “Donald Trump: The Loser,” 22 October 2016.
• Jonah Goldberg, “Aren’t Trump’s Supporters Living in a Bubble, Too?” 22 October 2016.
• Roger Cohen, “Donald Trump the anti-American,” 22 October 2016.
• Dana Milbank, “Trump Can’t Just Be Defeated. He Must Be Humiliated,” 22 October 2016.
• Michael Cohen, “Trump Undermines the Legitimacy of Our Democracy,” 21 October 2016.
• Charles Krauthammer, “My vote, explained,” 21 October 2016.
• Paul Krugman, “Why Hillary Clinton wins,” 21 October 2016.
• Jonathan Cohn, “Trump Disqualified Himself from the Presidency,” 20 October 2016.

“No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for a man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”

George Washington, 12 December 1778 (1)

A few weeks ago, a reader of this blog sent a comment saying that perhaps our republic is just finally “fizzling out,” as have almost all of history’s previous republic’s. I did not answer this cogent note at the time because I wanted to think about it. Little did I then imagine that so much new data would appear since the reader’s comment that, at least in my mind, makes the fizzling option seem all too real. The days pass and the picture gradually fills in, and the fuller and more complete it gets the louder the fizzling becomes. But there is a last-resort option for Americans, one that has strong precedent and sanction in the republic’s history, tradition, and founding documents.

Long ago, in 1963, America’s newest Nobel Laureate for Literature wrote a song that seems to pretty much fit this particular point in U.S. history, which is a knack Bob Dylan has demonstrated repeatedly during his remarkable if, at times, ornery and reclusive career. One verse of that song is worth quoting in full:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ (2)

This week’s news that Colin Powell has said he will vote for Hillary Clinton highlights the point that, as Mr. Dylan said, the old “order is rapidly fadin’. Powell is brave and intelligent man, a military officer who served his country well and was highly honored by it. And now, in return for those honors, he publicly champions for the presidency a woman who is a felon, a traitor, and a proven war lover. I must confess that I stopped respecting Powell when he supported Barack Obama for president twice. Obama is a man that, given his lack of every credential of character, experience, and personal accomplishment, General Powell would not have given the command of a squad of soldiers. I wonder what Powell now thinks about backing Obama after Wikileaks has shown that he, like Hillary, is a documented traitor for knowingly using an unsecured server to conduct the classified business of the nation.

The famous ex-General Powell has dug for his once enviable reputation a grave that would be best left unmarked. History will remember him as man who willingly and openly betrayed his oath as a military officer, and his duty as a citizen, to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution not only against foreign foes, but from domestic traitors like Clinton and Obama. The much-praised General Powell has though his own words and actions now built a permanent place for himself in U.S. history, one where he will be remembered not as a combat veteran and a secretary of state, but rather as a man who will be deservedly damned for being the callous abettor of two of the most despicable traitors in all of American history.

But Powell is only one voter. What is to be thought about the tens of millions of other U.S. citizens who apparently intend to vote for a woman whose entire career has been one of intentionally applying her lethal brand of wickedness to the body politic?

• How will parents explain to their children and grandchildren that they voted for a woman who is congenital liar; for a woman who speaks loudly of her ardor for helping children, but has been and is the relentless champion of murdering 60 million of them, a fact that makes the history of slavery in American slavery seem a quite minor event; and for a woman who claims to be liberated and independent, but has spent 30-plus years protecting a sexual-predator husband, defaming and threatening the women he attacked, and utterly depending on that predator and dozens of other girly-whipped, criminal-loving men — think of John Podesta, Robert Creamer, James Carville, Terry McAuliffe, and all the male and semi-male reporters at ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC — to do the lying, violence-making, cheating, and bribing that are responsible for winning her the offices, riches, and status that she could never have won on the basis of her own meager stores of talent, brains, character, and courage.
• How will the parents of America’s soldier-children explain to them why they voted for a woman who loves war, cares not a bit about dead or maimed soldiers and Marines, and has helped to start, or has started, the wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and now seems eager to start one with Russia? And if that war with Russia comes, how will those parents explain that they voted for the woman who lit the fire that led to that war by joining with George Soros and the globalist U.S. and European elites to recklessly foment the coup that overthrew the pro-Russia government of the Ukraine and then continually lied by blaming all that happened in Ukraine on Vladimir Putin?
• As citizens, how will pro-Hillary voters justify to themselves, and to the rest of the citizenry, the fact that they voted for a woman (a) who helped deprive enormous numbers of Americans of affordable and effective health insurance, and who has promised to make that problem bigger and more expensive; (b) who intends to appoint Supreme Court justices who will complete the destruction of the U.S. Constitution by permanently entrenching rule by and for minorities, be they ethnic, racial, sexual, or illegal aliens and refugees; (c) who intends to make sure that working people get to keep only the smallest possible portion of the salaries they earn; and (d) who will use the bogey of climate change to destroy the jobs of millions of Americans — do not think coal miners are only targets — and also use Obama’s unconstitutional climate-change deal to expand the executive branch’s power, pour on ever increasing taxation and growth-killing regulations, and eradicate the 2nd Amendment so that she can cede more and more U.S. sovereignty and independence to world governance via an America-hating abomination like the UN or some even worse international institution that she, Soros, and their globalist pals have readied but for now is hidden.
• Perhaps most important — though there is no small beer in the foregoing — how will those who intend to vote for Clinton explain that they knowingly voted for a third American civil war. The election of Clinton will leave those who did not vote for her with only the stark choice between supinely submitting to her goal of creating a country that is a republic in name but without liberty, Christianity, or a viable economy, or to do as their ancestors did and decide to risk all on the long-shot of an armed rebellion to rescue and then rehabilitate all that is politically, spiritually, historically, and economically dear to them.

It is on this last point that pro-Clinton voters ought to focus and reflect because it is their lives that will be on the line, and they will be easily identifiable. All of the republic’s enemies — Liberals, Neocons, media personalities, Israel-Firsters, socialists, teacher unions, abortionists, etc., etc. — brilliantly chose to gather together under Clinton’s tent and and loudly proclaim their support for her plans to destroy America and those they deem “deplorable” inhabitants via taxes, interventionist wars, and executive orders. It is only commonsense to say that it always is a good thing to know who and where your enemies, and the pro-Clinton folks have made that as easy as targeting apples bobbing in a barrel of water.

Historically, Americans are one for two in armed rebellions against those whom they perceived as intending to impose tyrannical rule on them. The Founder’s generation won; the Confederate-American generation lost. The Founders delayed rebellion until Britain’s tyranny was installed in the northern parts of British North America and could be seen to threaten all of it; the patience-short Confederate-Americans rebelled on the suspicion that a northern-run tyranny was coming their way.

The Founders, as noted, won, and the Confederate-Americans lost, but the latter’s defeat really provided no guarantee against a future civil war, notwithstanding the many clueless historians who have claimed that armed rebellion has been unthinkable since peace was made by two wise soldiers at Appomattox.

Why did the civil war’s conclusion fail to make a future armed rebellion impossible? Simple. The door to and duty of rebellion can never be permanently closed or denied to citizens who are armed; who sense the approach and/or have experienced the beginnings of tyranny; and who believe a failure to attempt rebellion will only yield their enslavement as serfs to the elite. This hard and ominous fact, of course, is why Clinton and her ilk are striving to neuter the 2nd Amendment.

Today, the U.S. citizens who will never vote for Clinton have been much more patient than either the Founders or the Confederate-Americans, but that patience is near to run out. For over 40 years they have watched their taxes steadily increased and even more quickly wasted; their religion vilified, ridiculed, and attacked by unconstitutional laws and undermined by federal control of education; their jobs deliberately exported, thereby blighting their communities and their own and their children’s futures; their kids killed or maimed in unnecessary interventionist wars the governing elite never intends to win; their share of equality before the law eroded by the unconstitutional legal, financial, employment, and educational preferences given to favored ethnic groups, illegal aliens, and dangerous, unwanted refugees; their civil liberties deliberately constricted by presidents using the impact of needless wars and the mad advice of Ivy League ideologues to increase the executive’s power; and their own and their nation’s history, traditions, sovereignty, and independence sold out in the name of an anti-democratic, God-less, authoritarian-cum-fascist world order.

It seems quite likely that there are many millions of nationalistic Americans who now stand only a short step or two from the enough-is-enough line, and that they may soon see little recourse save an armed rebellion while the 2nd Amendment is still operative and doing what the Founders intended. The Founders’ goal for the 2nd Amendment was, of course, to ensure that succeeding generations of Americans always have the tools with which to overturn rigged elections, protect and defend their Constitution, and, especially, to kill as many as necessary, and then a few, of their fellow citizens who are trying to subject them to the whims and wickedness of a liberty-murdering tyranny imposed — in this case — by a lying, corrupt, arrogant, power-and-money hungry, and obviously mentally disturbed politician.

Those refusing to vote for Clinton can, I think, take pride and succor in knowing that America’s Founders faced much the same situation and, against long odds, took up arms and restored their liberty. From that day to the ever-pertinent Dylan’s, no one has described the duty of rebellion better than a prominent, Boston-based Protestant divine named Jonathan Mayhew. Reverend Mayhew, a cleric when clergymen were intelligent, manly, and courageous, preceded most of the Founders by 20 years in telling to his congregants that they had no obligation — under either God or the law — to submit to tyranny. “The king,” Mayhew told his congregation in 1750:

“is as much bound by his oath of office, not to infringe the legal rights of the people, as the people are bound to yield subjection to him. From whence it follows, that as soon as the prince sets himself up above the law, he loses the king in the tyrant: he does to all intents and purposes, unking himself, by acting out of, and beyond, that sphere which the constitution allows him to move in. And in such cases, he has no more right to be obeyed, than any inferior officer who acts beyond his commission. The subject’s obligation to allegiance then ceases of course; and to resist him, is no more rebellion, than to resist any foreign invader.” (2)

If Mrs. Clinton and her supporters — that is, the criminal and her accomplices — win the 2016 election, the “obligation to allegiance” to her government ceases for those who opposed her and her abettors. As the Reverend Mayhew, and later a Virginian named Jefferson, said their is no obligation for citizens to continue to offer unlimited submission to a tyrant or to fail to resist her government’s tyranny. Under God, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and plain commonsense, the citizens’ duty and responsibility lies squarely in refusing to submit to the taking of their liberty, and a grim willingness to risk death, family, and property by seeking to preserve the republic by destroying the tyrant, her associates, and their enslaving intentions.

Endnotes

1. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 12 December 1778. See, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-18-02-0452
2. Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” 1963. See, http://bobdylan.com/albums/the-times-they-are-a-changin/
3. Jonathan Mayhew, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to Higher Powers, 1750.” See, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=etase

Imagine that naughty Mr. Trump having the nerve to suggest the 2016 presidential election is rigged. Most in the mainstream media and the Democratic party establishments are now in a high, Captain Renault-like faux dudgeon over Trump’s assertion. Their noisy anger and syrupy, patriotic-sounding rejection of the fact that the vote is clearly rigged serve to do only two things: (a) validate Trump’s claim, and (b) confirm the voters’ growing suspicion that they are again being had by the powerful, wealthy, and tyrannical political elite that hates everything about them except for the money that they can take from their pockets. Trump must stand by this accurate assessment of this year’s rigged presidential election, no matter how much the media and Democratic hounds — and probably some similarly slobbering Republicans — bay for him to recant and repent.

So absurd is it to deny the obvious fact that the powerful, rich, and sordid Clintonites have rigged the vote to maintain their access to the federal treasury and their ability to wield arbitrary power that it might be considered superfluous to note a few examples of the conclusive evidence of rigging. But their egregious rigging of the election is so threatening to the republic’s peace, prosperity, cohesion, and survival, and a Clinton victory is so full of chances for an armed rebellion against the tyranny she plans, that a few issues proving the election has been rigged are worth pointing out.

• In the macro sense, U.S. elections at all levels became readily riggable when Democratic and Republican elected officials agreed to install electronic voting. The Democrats always have gotten the dead, hopelessly addled drug addicts, and illegal aliens to vote. Why do you think they so viciously oppose voters being required to show a photo ID before voting? But today, every citizen’s vote can be changed by either party because elected officials have suborned the computer companies and their experts — never forget that Silicon Valley’s collective head is very far up Hillary’s butt — with the rich contracts given to them for installing, maintaining, and monitoring the electronic equipment used in elections. Like social media’s elimination of personal privacy with tools Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would have killed more millions to possess, electronic voting negates the personal and private choice of the voter by making it simple for the political elites and their computer-geek minions to change a citizen’s marking of his or her ballot silently and without chance of detection.
• In the day-to-day political arena, the mainstream media for more than a year have been rigging this election. They have focused on ephemera such as Trump’s blue-collar speech, his legally paid taxes, his un-political correctness, his honest and correct economic pessimism, and now the steady and predictable parade of weepy, lying women that the DNC probably recruited from Bill Clinton’s history-of-the-women-I’ve-attacked ledger. (NB: Is there anything more surreal than a wretched criminal like Hillary Clinton claiming that her character is more admirable than Trump’s? How many wars has Trump started and lost? How many legless Marines are now hobbling about because of Trump? How many times has Trump betrayed the republic for money? How many sexual predators has Trump protected? How many blue-collar jobs has Trump promised to destroy? How many millions of infants has Trump helped to murder?)
• The media also have ignored the campaign’s real issues, such as Obama’s Hillary-approved excessive taxation, regulation, and debt expansion; the Obama-Clinton war on free speech, religious liberty, and the 2nd Amendment; the long-stagnant economy that produces few jobs and almost no growth; the Democrats’ war on whites and all blue-collar Americans; unlimited illegal immigration; Hillary’s silence about Obama’s arbitrary and so unconstitutional rule; Hillary’s advocacy for importing the Islamist terrorists she has said are among the unvetted Syrian Muslim refugees; Hillary’s love for starting and losing wars and not giving a damn about American casualties; and Hillary’s championing of the currently collapsing, unaffordable, and unfixable Obama health-care system.
• While the citizenry looks squarely into the face of their dying jobs, kids’ futures, communities, and nation, Clinton, the Democrats, the mainstream media, and many in the Republican establishment want to focus on what they claim are the greater dangers of offensive language, the unforgivable sin of hurting feelings, and — most hilariously — the dire need for an increase in rights for women, but only for those who agree with Hillary. My God, pro-Hillary American women already are legally superior to every American male; no man, after all, can hire a medical doctor to murder the human being he designates for death. This limited cackle of pro-Hillary women, moreover, has contributed nothing to the nation save its always negative trademarks; namely, its constant adolescent whining and groundless discontent over long-resolved problems; its targeted humiliation of stay-at-home mothers and women who live their faith; its joyous support for the murder of 60 million infants and rabid enthusiasm for killing millions more at home and abroad if Hillary wins; its arrogant demands for unconstitutional legal preference and free contraceptives; and its eagerness to provide the stars and extras needed by the pro-Hillary producers of the massive and ever increasing amount of made-in-America pornography.

While Trump’s political and mainstream media opponents focus on tripe, it is worth recalling that the citizenry has heard only limited snatches of news about Hillary Clinton’s record of relentless incompetence, deceit, sleaze, and crime. Among dozens of examples are:

• The fact that Hillary’s campaign chairman and his brother have been in the pay of a Russian state bank that is reported to have built Putin’s personal fortune and to serve as a conduit for the conduct of Russian intelligence operations. This fact comes on top of the fact that Clinton approved the sale of nearly a quarter of the U.S. uranium supply to a Russian company that has given millions of dollars to her foundation. (1)
• The fact that President Obama procured a false e-mail address to communicate with Clinton about classified national-security issues through her unsecured server. FOIA data has proven Obama lied when he claimed have learned about the server in the press, and so now we have irrefutable evidence that both the commander-in-chief and the secretary of state deliberately compromised sensitive national security information to the republic’s enemies. (NB: The same kind of Obama/Clinton disregard for U.S. security is manifested by much of the Republican elite in its support for the clearly lying and traitorous Hillary Clinton over the patriot Trump because, they claim, “she is better fit to be commander-in-chief.”)
• The fact that the current tense situation between the United States and Russia began with the Clinton-approved State Department operations — assisted by our feckless NATO and EU allies — that helped to over throw the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine and replace it with an anti-Russian regime.
• The fact that Hillary Clinton has been wrong on every issue in the Middle East, having supported the invasion of Iraq; approved Obama’s re-interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan; led the destruction of Libya, which is destabilizing Africa; intervened in the Arab Spring with a sublime ignorance of Islam; cheered the re-establishment of a military tyranny in Egypt; and took money for her foundation from the Saudis and Qataris even though she knew they were supporting the Islamic State as it killed Americans and so many others.
• The fact that Obama has put more than 5,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers on the ground in Iraq to participate in the battle for Mosul, the timing of which was set to help Hillary’s campaign. The Democrats’ disregard not only for U.S. military lives but all human lives in the Mosul area in this politically timed battle is stunning, though not surprising. If U.S.-backed, Iraqi forces take the city, more than a million people will be displaced to starve at winter’s onset; the Shia will slaughter Sunnis and Christians; Kurds will fight Turks and Arabs; Iran’s presence and military strength in Iraq will be strengthened; Iraq will become an even greater economic catastrophe that America will expected to rebuild; and the Sunni world will once again see the United States killing Sunnis, helping Shias take territory from Sunnis, and intervening in an oil-rich Islamic country. And what will happen to the Islamic State? Well it will lose a city and some manpower, but afterwards it will simply return to what it is best at, and what U.S. forces have proven they cannot defeat — an insurgency — and try to find a way to keep track of the flood of donations and foreign fighters that will be flowing in from wealthy Sunnis and newly radicalized young men enraged by U.S. actions.

In time, there will be numbers of books written about the manner in which the 2016 presidential election was rigged. The evidence for that reality is already massive and irrefutable, and it is in the form historians’ describe as “primary sources;” that is, contemporary documents that are written by the individuals involved — usually at the leadership level — and record the events they led and/or experienced.

If Trump wins, these books might be written by Americans. If he loses, the books will have to be written by foreigners who have saved the now-available materials, because Clinton, in power, will wage a much more thorough Sandy Berger-like war on the historical record — bleach-bit-ing the National Archives, if you will — so as to protect her power, fortune, and grotesquely false, media-built reputation.

But Hillary best be quick to start and finish her war on the historical record, as ordinary Americans are not likely to long delay acting to render her, her tyranny, her deceit, and her hatred for the republic entirely unable to further damage America. To paraphrase President Roosevelt’s December, 1941, words about the much less formidable threat Japan posed to the republic, I am confident that the mortal danger irrefutably posed to America by Hillary Clinton will be met and annihilated by “… the unbounding determination of our people — [and] we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.”

Whether that vital defeat is inflicted at the polls on November 8th, or sometime after the election, matters not, though the former certainly will be less unpleasant than the latter. Come what may, however, this rigged election marks the end of the Clintons’ era of arrogance, corruption, treason, criminality, and greed. Just retribution is quickly approaching.

Endnotes

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=0
2. http://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/speeches/speech-3324

In a republic whose media are rife with lunacy, addled by sex, and enthralled by magically appearing damsels in distress, there are few crazier analyses than that which argues Russian president Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Let us leave aside that Putin’s government is closely linked to Mrs. Clinton’s senior lieutenant John Podesta’s consulting company, which was hired and paid by Putin’s favorite Russian bank. (1) Let us also leave aside the fact Putin also has all of the e-mails — as do China, Iran, and others — that Mrs. Clinton and her traitorous, Comey/Lynch-immunized team of IT experts and senior aides made easily accessible to the republic’s enemies. There is no use arguing this point. Whether Julian Assange got none, some, or all of his Clinton e-mails from Putin’s intelligence service is irrelevant. (NB: My own guess — and it is only that — is that Assange got them via his own methods, perhaps including the young DNC employee murdered in Washington after Assange’s first Clinton-related leak, about which the media is now silent.)

Mr. Putin is not a moron. There simply is no way that it is in Putin’s and Russia’s interests to give Assange the cream of the crop of the Clinton e-mails; namely, those that document Clinton’s sale of the influence via the Clinton Foundation while secretary of state; those showing her extorting highly paid speaking jobs for he husband; those demonstrating the top-secret material she intentionally put on the unsecured server is now safely cached on secure servers in Moscow; and those that show she is wholly responsible for the murder of four Americans in Benghazi and the Iranian nuclear scientist who was working for U.S. intelligence.

No, dear, dumb media and foreign-policy experts, those e-mails — or at least copies of them — will be presented, if she is elected, to President Clinton by the Russian ambassador just after the inauguration. The copies will be accompanied by a short, hand-written note from Putin that will read something like, “Madam President, congratulations to you and to me! Please read these documents and then guess who is now calling the shots. Call me soon — that’s not a suggestion. Respectfully, V. Putin.”

Does anyone really think that Putin is stupid enough to give away one of history’s greatest intelligence coups by giving all the e-mails he derived from Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured server to Mr. Assange to exhaust prior to an election from which may emerge a U.S. president whom he will be able to control, perhaps even command? No, Mr. Putin is much too talented, street smart, nationalistic, and, frankly, simply has too much of a taste for the jugular of Russia’s enemies to do such a self-defeating thing and thereby let Mrs. Clinton off the meat hook she crafted for herself and on which she so richly deserves to be impaled.

But, again, let us leave aside the realities of the Catholic-hating Podesta playing Putin’s cat’s-paw and Mrs. Clinton’s obvious treason, and again ask why the Russian president would want a hard-ass, frugal, economy-reviving, nationalist like Trump to be president, when he could have a corrupt, compromised, lawless, profligate, bankruptcy-loving, and civil war-promoting virago like Mrs. Clinton at the helm of Russia’s greatest enemy? If he did want Trump elected, Putin would be trying to end a string of four U.S. presidents — Bush, Clinton, Bush, and especially Obama — whose mad foreign and economic policies have all but killed America, while putting Russia back on the road toward superpower-dom, even though its economy is still in only marginally better condition than the shambles the USSR left behind. This kind of self-immolating tack can make sense to no one except a Democrat or Anderson Cooper. (NB: Forgive my being redundant.)

What Putin absolutely does not want to encounter — much less help to elect — is a U.S. president bent on reestablishing the republic’s financial solvency, military and economic power, social cohesion, and rule-of-law. Nor does he want to face a U.S. president who will stop conducting a foreign policy of relentless and unnecessary interventionism, which is, clearly, a pro-Russia policy in that it has earned much of the world’s hatred, all of its laughter for America losing the wars Washington starts, and which has made Putin and Russia appear to be a stronger, smarter, more reliable, and less indiscriminately destructive nation than the United States.

No, Putin is not going to waste all of the best e-mail bullets he stole from Clinton’s unsecured server in order to prevent the election of a hectoring woman whose personal greed, dreams of open borders, elitism, stated intentions, education, Ivy League-colleagues, and tyrannical goals certainly will finish the destruction of the United States — either by bankruptcy, civil war, or both — and quicken the rehabilitation of Russia’s international stature and power. Indeed, Putin knows that, with Clinton’s election, Russia will be well-positioned to win the nearly 75 year-old contest between Russia and the United States, and would be set do so without firing a shot, spending a nickel, or losing a soldier.

If Putin knows anything about U.S. history, he must know that Mrs. Clinton — despite her recent assertions — is not even the palest shadow of Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Clinton is as close to being like Lincoln, as her husband is to being like a celibate monk. But what Mr. Putin might not know is that Mrs. Clinton, her party, and their supporters are fully capable of making one of Lincoln’s still-pending predictions come true. “Shall we expect,” Lincoln asked an audience in Illinois in January, 1838,

“some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach[es] us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Mrs. Clinton’s actions as president surely would make Mr. Lincoln’s prediction come true. Under Mrs. Clinton and her party, the American “nation of freemen” undoubtedly will “die by suicide,” and she, her party, their supporters, and most of the media will be “the author and finisher” of the republic’s destruction.

Mr. Putin must be licking his chops.

Endnote

1. See, for example: With Saudi and Russian ties, Clinton machine’s tentacles are far reaching, according to Panama Papers, and Clinton campaign chief linked to Russian bank listed in Panama Papers.