Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists (AKA: Democrats) who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America’s history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill.

So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is “the nation’s schoolchildren” who should be made to “nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?” Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America’s war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up.

Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U.S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down — and was prepared to hang — the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union.

But Mr. Jackson is one of those Southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was — along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward Blacks and Indians — the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual “Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner,” which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking — southern fire-eaters like Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Lowndes Yancey, Edmund Ruffin, who, with the anti-slavery fanatics John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, made sectional compromise impossible and so lit the fuse that led to a civil war that nearly destroyed the Union.

Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats’ ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America’s history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence; namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats’ consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books.

But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson’s replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency. The names Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger have been floated by the Democratic history-haters, but they are, at very best, bit players in the nation’s story, perhaps meriting, at most, another portrayal on a small-denomination postage stamp.

The only American woman deserving a place on U.S. paper currency is, of course, Anne Hutchinson, a devout 17th century Protestant New Englander who was a fearless champion of religious liberty, family, free speech, and equality — not preference — for women in religious affairs. Perhaps a new piece of currency could be created, one to which the attachment of her portrait would do honor.

Ms. Hutchinson, however, is out of contention in the Democrats’ virulent anti-Southern currency crusade because her character traits — and the fifteen children she had with one husband — just do not jive with being Modern Democratic Party Women, those who glory in, and seek legal, economic, and political preference for their talents in whining, vamping, aborting, as well as recognition for their indispensable and eagerly given help in making the United States one of the world’s industrial-scale producers of both pornography and the dismembered corpses of infants.

There may be something that can be done, however. The portrait of another Democratic icon named Woodrow Wilson now adorns the $100,000 bill, which appears to be to be used mainly in transactions between the Federal Reserve and the larger banks. Now, the Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few Black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward Blacks, as today’s Democratic president is toward whites, especially white males who see the need for bibles and rifles. (NB: Wilson also gave America two other enduring curses, the policies of starting unnecessary wars and ordering interventionist military campaigns to teach foreigners how “to elect good men.” Each policy is now firmly part of the foundation of both Democratic and Republican foreign policy, which is one reason why the United States is always at war. The Democrats also are zealous domestic interventionists, a tack they are now using to hammer the battle flag and Jackson as a way to neuter and shame the South and to please their subordinate and lapdog Black and feminist colonies.)

Surely in this enlightened age the Modern Democrat Party Women would support erasing Woodrow from the bill — if it pleases them, the engravers could dismember Wilson’s portrait — and replace him with the three portraits of Ms. Tubman, Mrs. Roosevelt, and Ms. Sanger. But the newly redecorated bill — and the one-dollar coin which is honored by the image of Sacajawea, the key guide for Lewis and Clark — would then have to sate the Democratic Party’s history-destroyers until Modern Democratic Party Women can produce, certainly in the far distant future, a female even remotely worthy of being considered in the same value-to-America discussion as Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, and Franklin.

But one problem remains. How can the conspiracy-minded Modern Democratic Party Women be assured that the switch was made? It is true that not many people would see the new bills and so some doubt might arise among the Democratic sisterhood about whether Wilson was really removed and then replaced on the bill by the three ladies named above.

There is only one sure-fire means of relieving the Modern Democratic Party Women of their doubts before the whining starts. That means is to have the Democratic National Committee direct its current icon, Hilary Clinton, to publicly report on who appears on the $100,000 note each time she and her husband receive a packet of those bills from one or another of the foreign governments for which they are apparently selling out American interests.

After all, if you cannot trust America’s graft-taker-in-chief, who can you trust?

As on all Independence Days, the media is trotting out the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and suggesting that they are the only part of the document that matters and that they are passages that by themselves express what Jefferson and his 40-plus co-drafters called “the American mind.”

Actually, the media, the academy, and most members of both political parties stop reading the Declaration after the sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They then use this sentence as justification for the disastrous interventionist foreign and domestic policies the U.S. government has pursued since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency.

The quoted sentence, of course, was meant by Jefferson and his fellow drafters to say that because British Americans were entitled to those rights they were likewise entitled to try to defend them against usurpation by a tyrannical government. (NB: This also is the crux of the 2nd Amendment.) There is not the slightest historical basis for reading into the drafters’ words an American responsibility — then or now — to defend those rights for any other people or nation. Such a defense was and is up to those foreigners who believe their “unalienable rights” have been taken, constrained, or denied. If they do so, fine. If they do not, fine. If they try and fail, tough. It is all their business.

Jefferson and especially his fellow penman had not a lick of the mentality of the universal-rights crusader in them. (NB: Jefferson, being a true Democrat, later had some sympathy for the French revolutionaries in their violent and terror-filled effort to remake all the world in their image.) The Declaration’s drafters were pessimistic, hard-headed, non-idealistic, and commonsensical men who were defending their own just-born nation by seeking to recover a constitutional inheritance — English and British liberties and the rule of law — that had been taken from them in just over a decade by the British imperial government. They had no intention of setting the world ablaze with a revolution that would guarantee their recovered rights to all other peoples, nor were they going to war to exterminate monarchy and other authoritarian forms of government from the world. They were solely hoeing their own row, and could not have cared less about what foreigners did or did not do to acquire similar rights.

The Declaration is a stridently nationalistic document that announces the decision of British Americans to wage a war to achieve independence from the British Empire and recover the rights and liberties their ancestors brought with them from the British Isles. Their war was waged to restore the status quo ante not to change the world so it would be a reflection of America and its ways.

The Declaration is vital for Americans today because it frankly explains that Americans were and are responsible for defending their own liberty and therefore obliged to fight any governmental effort aimed at usurpation and/or enslavement. The document justifies rebellion squarely on this basis, indicting King George III and his government for their unrelenting intervention in governing matters that had been handled nearly exclusively by colonial legislative assemblies for more than a century, as well as for their introduction of economic sanctions; their military occupation of Boston and the closing of its port; their violation or suspension of colonial charters; their limitations on of trial by jury and the colonial judiciary’s independence; and their appointment of General Thomas Gage to govern Massachusetts by martial law and arming him with the authority to seize the weapons of British Americans.

Faced with London’s lawless interventionism, and after having patiently, lawfully, and mostly peacefully opposed it for a dozen years, Jefferson and his colleagues wrote that enough was enough, and in the Declaration’s single most important sentence laid down a timeless guideline for proper, lawful, and manly American political behavior, writing that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

America’s Declaration of Independence is a fierce statement of the determination of British Americans to separate themselves from an imperial government that had become tyrannical and lawless by ignoring the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent English Bill of Rights and by denying to British Americans the rights, liberties, and privileges that they guaranteed equally to the king’s subjects in the British Isles and North America.

The Declaration was meant to settle this intra-British crisis. Claims that it was meant to establish the new United States as a holier-than-thou, worldwide crusader promoting and imposing those rights by military force, as well as all the other absurd “universal rights” invented since Wilson’s second term, is a perverse invention by U.S. politicians, academics, preachers, pundits, and ideologues whose war-causing interventionist handiwork has made the U.S. government the most hated on earth, and to increasingly appear — given its “long train of abuses and usurpations” of the U.S. Constitution — as the enemy of Americans at home.

On this Independence Day it would be well for non-elite Americans to reflect on what their interventionist betters are doing at home and abroad that makes a mockery of the Declaration and the Constitution, and then take to heart the following sentiment that Robert E. Lee wrote to the British historian Lord Acton late in 1866, “I yet believe,” General Lee said,

that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.

The recent and rapid successes of the Islamic State (IS) in seizing Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq, together with its three successful same-day strikes on 26 June 2015 in Kuwait, France, and Tunisia seem to have left British Prime Minister David Cameron rather panicky — like a twitchy kitten experiencing its first thunder-and lightning storm.

In response to these events, Cameron has come somewhat unglued. The leader of a once mighty, respected, and feared nation has responded to IS’s offensive operations by (a) calling on the UK Muslim leaders to perform a miracle and control the thoughts, sympathies, and actions of all members of the Muslim community; (b) predicting that IS was on the verge of “terrible” attacks in Britain, without offering any sign of the backbone needed to credibly warn IS of “terrible” British retribution if its forces attack in the UK; and (c) demanding that the BBC stop identifying the Islamic State as the Islamic State and instead call it “ISIL” because it is “death cult” and has nothing to do with Islam. On the latter point, Cameron sounds like an Oxford-educated version of Barack Obama.

One must wonder what Cameron thinks he is accomplishing with such prattle for the defense of his nation or the deterrence of its enemies. The British prime minister seems to have missed the fact that there probably are not any leaders in the West’s expatriate Muslim communities who can reliably control their young males or lessen the strength of their faith, their admiration for IS victories, or their eagerness to join the jihad. Cameron perhaps should ask his advisers about the rumors he might have heard claiming that many thousands of young Muslim males — Muslim-born and converts — from the UK, all other EU nations, the U.S., Canada, and Australia are already fighting with IS forces or helping IS to build, organize, fund, and administer its nascent Caliphate. Braced with this hard data, the prime minister might stop delegating the UK’s defense to unnamed “Muslim leaders” and get on with his job of making sure the realm is both defended and capable of annihilating its enemies.

Cameron’s warning that “terrible” IS attacks are coming Britain’s way, also suggests he is a bit under informed. Thirty of the Queen’s subjects, for example, were slaughtered by IS fighters last week on a Tunisian beach, apparently after receiving militarily training from IS members based in the peaceful, multicultural, and secular Libyan democracy created by Cameron, Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Sarkozy.

Cameron has huffed, puffed, and looked sad about the murders of his countrymen, but the odds are that some or all of the dead might never have gone to swim and sunbathe in skimpy swimsuits, cavort, and drink alcohol in a Muslim country if Cameron had not constantly reiterated the now mandatory U.S.-UK.-EU lie that IS, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist groups are made up of small numbers of criminals, fanatics, and lunatics who have nothing to do with the Islamic faith, and whom the West is defeating by killing them one at a time. Had Cameron jettisoned this lie and truthfully said that an ever increasing portion of the Muslim world is waging a religious war against the West and is ready and eager to kill as many Westerners as necessary to drive the West out of the Muslim world, the now quite dead Britons might have stayed home to swim and frolic in the colder but safer waters of Britain’s resort towns.

And more will die because David Cameron — and all other Western leaders — will continue to base the defense of their individual nations and the West as a whole on three pivotal and ultimately self-defeating lies. First, as noted above, they will continue to claim that Islamists are not Islamic, that the war they are waging is not a religious war, and that Islam is a Quaker-like religion of eternal peace and pacifism, even when polls show that most Muslims believe their faith and brethren are under attack by the West, especially by the United States and its closest allies, and must be defended.

Second, Western leaders will continue to intervene militarily in Muslim countries that are oil-rich and/or governed by regimes they find odious; note here, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. While intervening, they will continue to support Israel and the tyrannical regimes that most Muslims find odious and/or anti-Islamic in the extreme, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait.

As a result, Western populations will continue to see their leaders push an apparent death wish toward fruition by motivating, through their interventionism, the Islamist movement to become larger, angrier, and more geographically dispersed, while at the same time motivating it on a second front by supporting, funding, arming, and protecting regimes that are cordially hated by their peoples.

Third, Cameron, Obama, and most Western leaders will publicly speak as if their nations, populations, and military capabilities currently equate to the united and powerful nation-states they were during the Cold War. They will speak in this manner because they are willing to lie to hold onto political office. In reality, most Western nations are bankrupt; each has knowingly eroded its national unity, internal security, and societal cohesion by allowing nearly unlimited immigration by people who refuse to assimilate and who are often anti-Western; and most have degraded their militaries by starving them of much-needed cash in order to pay for social services and fanatically pursue the nation-killing policies of diversity and multiculturalism.

Cameron and his fellow Western leaders have lied and deceived their peoples about the nature, size, and endurance of the Islamists for so long that the entire problem has resolved itself into four clear options, one easy and the other three brutally difficult:

1. The West must stop intervening in a region where it has consistently armed, funded, and backed tyranny for more than sixty years, and let Muslims sort out such problems as Israel, methods of governing, and sectarian hatreds. If the West is lucky, strict non-intervention will allow Sunnis and Shias to fight a prolonged and bloody regional religious war that will make the West more onlooker than target, or
2. The West must raise taxes considerably, rearm, reinstate conscription to provide troops for service at home and abroad, shelve most civil liberties to cope with the internal Islamist threat, and prepare to kill many millions of its enemies and their supporters, or
3. If too bankrupt too do (b) — which is likely — the West must get ready to use tactical nuclear weapons (NB: NATO leaders surely are doing this after attacking Russia’s national security with their insane democracy mongering in Ukraine), or
4. Give up and convert to Islam.

Western peoples must also begin to see their leaders as the Muslim world sees them — as effete blowhards and reliable appeasers — so they can gauge how little impact their leaders’ saber-rattling words have on our Islamist enemies and the Muslim world generally. As a starting point, some words that the honest and acerbic Thomas Paine wrote about another set of leaders who had undergone a change for the worse and did not realize that it was obvious to everyone but themselves are appropriate describing how Cameron, Obama, Hollande, and their NATO and EU peers are viewed by the non-Western world. “They have artfully changed themselves into a different sort of people to what they use to be,” Paine wrote in April, 1777,

“and yet they have the address to persuade each other that they have not altered; like antiquated virgins, they see not the havoc [that] deformity has made upon them, but pleasantly mistaking wrinkles for dimples, conceive themselves yet lovely and wonder at the stupid world for not admiring them.”

The Western world today is led by self-deceivers of Paine’s description. For twenty years the current crop of Western leaders and their predecessors have faced one of the easiest possible foreign policy problems to solve since 1900, and yet they have only whined about its bewildering complexity, lied about it being insusceptible to a military solution, and preached about the consequent need for a prudent, multifaceted, culturally sensitive, and highly intelligent response. This is horse hockey. Since Osama bin Laden first publicly spoke in 1996, it has been blindingly clear that the Islamists are going to keep killing Westerners until Western governments stop intervening in their world or until the West kills all or almost all of the Islamists. The Islamists have never altered this message — though they have intensified it with words and deeds — and Western leaders, by not listening, have wasted twenty years and thousands of military lives but have yet to begin to defend the West. These leaders are a burgeoning collection of, at best, university-educated mediocrities whose lethal fecklessness Tom Paine again captured when he wrote about similar leaders in his time.

“Strange! That a nation must run through such a labyrinth of trouble, and expend such a mass of wealth to gain the wisdom which an hour’s reflection might have taught.”

The Islamist problem should not even have taken an hour to solve when it was in its infancy. But today it stands a steadily increasing chance of finishing off the long-dying entity called Western civilization.

If there ever was a week in our Union’s history demonstrating that the national government must always be suspected of being the enemy of Americans, their liberty, and their social cohesion, this past week surely was the one.

Barack Obama and his party redoubled the national government’s marked preference for Black Americans, and not only by pretending that more Blacks are killed by racist Whites, than Whites by racist Blacks. As troubling, they also encouraged and then unleashed what can only be described as a lynch mob bent on destroying a historical symbol that means — and should mean — something important, tangible, and worth honoring to many more Americans than the number of half-baked but rabid Democratic haters who believe it is their right to destroy any piece of U.S. history with which they disagree or which casts a truthful light on the issues that define their party’s history, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, and socialism.

Black Americans have been legally free for nearly 150 years, and yet the truth is that they were kept in subjugation by the Democratic Party until the 1960s and have now re-enslaved themselves by their unquestioning allegiance to the same party, one that still keeps them poor and dependent. If the Democratic haters could burn or steal every Army of Northern Virginia battle flag in America, it would not change the fact that Black Americans remain oppressed by a Democratic Party that is, quite ironically, led today by a Black overseer.

In the past week, we also have endured a prize piece of nonsense from Justice Kennedy, who, in his god-like munificence, awarded “dignity” to another group of national government-preferred Americans — those of diverse sexual orientations — and decreed, because it cannot be proven, that the Supreme Court is empowered by the Constitution to define marriage to be whatever the Court says it is, not what even the slightest bit of commonsense would know to be the truth: that marriage can only occur between one man and one woman. Coming soon, one supposes, the dignity-hawking Justice Kennedy and his quartet of aging and addled hangers-on will decree that night is day, hot is cold, short is tall, winter is summer, and 320 million Americans should behave as directed to by judicial diktats concurred in by a judicial gadfly, an empty suit, and three empty dresses.

The idea that the national government or the Supreme Court can give any American “dignity” is a cynical and vote-craving fantasy. All human beings are created with dignity, an attribute which results from the fact that they are made in the image and likeness of God. History, of course, is the story of men and women striving to preserve their innate, God-given dignity against their own flawed and at times depraved human nature, as well as against relentless efforts by those who govern them to destroy their dignity as humans and citizens and then re-create them as unquestioningly obedient and unthinking automatons.

Black Americans may mistakenly think that Obama enhanced their dignity by inciting hatred toward the population of the once-Confederate South and the historically literate, but in fact they were only thrown a bone by their oppressors, men and women who will expect to be repaid with what they most prize, mindless, unanimous voting by Blacks for the Democratic Party. And Gay Americans may well believe their dignity has been elevated by Justice Kennedy’s tyrannical decision, but sooner or later reality will dawn on all but the most deluded and show that no matter how many ways you choose define “marriage” there is only one correct definition.

And what of those who are not and never will be among the national government’s preferred groups? Well, for tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of southern, religious, and commonsensical Americans, the national government’s unconstitutional restraints on free speech — usually called political correctness — are likely to limit truth-speaking for a time. But those who Obama and Kennedy incited hatred against are unlikely to forgive and forget that they were ostracized, ridiculed, and defamed by a national government that increasingly rules to please what it deems to be noble minorities, while those who work hard, raise families, educate children, and pay taxes are left to take the hindmost. This method of ruling in any country, if prolonged, knowingly courts civil war.

Lastly, during this infamous week all Americans were bombarded by the mindless chanting or scrawling of slogans like “Black lives matter” and “All lives matter.” Perhaps such sentiments are true in some of the world’s nations, but in America they are meaningless and, indeed, laughable.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the crazed Democratic Party Gauleiter Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and all of their Democratic colleagues do not believe that any human life matters except their own. Endangered species matter, beached dolphins matter, stray cats and dogs matter, but human lives — never. These folks, an earlier Supreme Court diktat, American women, and money-hungry, first-do-harm doctors have murdered nearly 60 million American infants since 1973, thereby leaving all modern genocides but Mao’s looking pretty pale in comparison.

While Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Representative Pelosi were chanting the foregoing slogans to their electoral colonies in Charleston, San Francisco, and elsewhere, the murder-for-hire doctors of the American Medical Association were merrily and profitably dismembering infants at a pace that earns the fanatic if depraved approval of the Democratic Party.

Now, how is that for respecting the dignity of all human beings? In Justice Kennedy-speak, the act of murdering infants probably awards them constitutionally protected dignity-in-death. For the sane, however, the enormous, Stalin-like callousness and blood lust of both the infant murderers and their Democratic advocates and protectors make the long-eliminated practice of slavery in America appear to be a minor historical indiscretion, while simultaneously making the legalized murdering of infants a far greater and more justifiable goad to civil strife than slavery ever was.

Well, the Charleston killings appear to have unleashed those who lead the Democratic Party and most of the U.S. media — that may be a redundancy — to make every effort to not only make race relations worse in the United States but to strain them to the breaking point if at all possible. Why? Two reasons really. First, with a grafter, liar, agent-of-multiple-foreign powers, and Benghazi-butcher like Hillary Clinton to lead them in the next presidential election, the Democrats need to make sure that Black Americans turn out in huge numbers in 2016 to vote against their own dearest interests and ensure they get at least four more years of the Obama policies that have economically ravaged the Black community economically.

Second, as the Democrats turn their post-Charleston focus toward a campaign to ban flying the Confederate battle flag — which fits nicely with their rank idiocy of wanting to put historical bit-players like Harriet Tubman or Eleanor Roosevelt on the ten-dollar bill to replace the irreplaceable Alexander Hamilton — Obama, Clinton, and their lieutenants intend to continue erasing from U.S. history any episode, person, or religious influence that does not please them, especially the fact of Democratic responsibility for slavery, civil war, segregation, and minority-domination of the national government. While doing so, they and their media toadies will shame, damn, and demonize any person who dares object to their absurd, party-line version of this nation’s history, a version that when taught truthfully would show their party to be the traditional and relentless scourge of Black Americans.

The tragedy of the U.S. Civil War, which was brought on by the Democratic Party and its unnecessary interventionist war in Mexico, was not only that it was fought, but that it was fought before it had to be fought. The South’s leaders feared what they believed the newly elected Lincoln administration would do in future years, not because of what Lincoln had promised to do during the just-concluded presidential election campaign. Indeed, Lincoln had repeatedly gone out of his way to stress with great clarity that he planned to do nothing that would either damage the South’s economy or revoke the constitutional guarantees protecting slavery that the South had secured in the Constitution. Southern leaders did not trust Lincoln — and his so-called “Black Republicans” — and so they declared independence and launched what really was an unnecessary and preemptive war, not unlike the one the Neoconservatives started in Iraq in 2003. The new Confederate States of America thus threw the dice and lost all they intended to win and most all of what they desired to preserve. One can only hope that history will repeat itself in regard to the Neoconservatives — and soon.

At its start, the Civil War was not fought as a war to free the slaves, but rather as a war to maintain the Union; in 1861, a war waged by the U.S. government to free the slaves — as Lincoln recognized — would have been very unpopular in the North and clearly unconstitutional. It was not until 1863, and then only as a war measure not a change in the Constitution, did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation and thereby begin a move toward the destruction of constitutionally sanctioned slavery. This move would have been terminated at Appomattox if the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had not been adopted by the Congress and the states. (NB: Oddly and perhaps ultimately tragically, those amendments, like the original 1787 Constitution, failed to state that the American Union is to be perpetual. They thus left a situation in which secessionists had been utterly defeated in war, but also one that left secession as a valid response to real or perceived tyranny, and it is a response to tyranny that was pretty clearly approved by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, by the tenets of the Reformed Protestant Christianity on which America was founded, and by that most rare characteristic, plain commonsense.)

So the war was fought and over 620,000 Americans were killed between 1861 and 1865. The war was fought for many reasons. In the North, to preserve the Union, put down “Southern traitors,” and, as the war proceeded, to forever end the institution of slavery in the United States. In the south, the Confederates fought not only to preserve the Constitution’s protection of slavery, but, equally, to defend the South’s agricultural economy and way of life, to maintain governing practices that gave primacy to county and state governments and abhorred national-government intervention, and to preserve the localist and communitarian culture that dominated the South even as it varied from state to state, all of which were intertwined with the institution of slavery.

The South’s defeat either undermined or destroyed much of the foregoing, and also left nearly 300,000 Confederate dead and many tens of thousands more maimed. In addition, no region of the United States has ever been as economically devastated and depopulated by war as was the Confederacy. Post-war reconstruction brought military government to the South, and under it the national Democratic Party and its southern affiliates labored mightily to re-subjugate the newly free Blacks, eventually succeeding by implementing Jim Crow laws; motivating the birth of the Klan and then protecting it; establishing separate-but-equal schools and public facilities; and enacting codes of lawful segregation — all of which Democrats defended in a fight to the death until the 1960s. In U.S. history, from the ratification of the Constitution to the economic devastation wrought by Obama on contemporary Black Americans, the men and women who run Democratic Party, from Jefferson and Jackson forward, have been the ferocious enemy of Black Americans entering the mainstream of American life, to this day bending every tool of political power — especially in the areas of free trade and unlimited, illegal immigration — to keep them angry, unemployed, mired in poverty, and politically and economically dependent in a manner that approaches quite near to re-enslavement.

And now, to maintain the Black community in their thrall, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and likely all of their party’s leaders — and Republican fools like Mitt Romney — will work to ban Americans or their elected representatives from flying one of the nation’s “other” flags, the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag. Why it should be permissible to fly the Grand Union Flag, the flag current during the war of 1812, the anti-British “Don’t treat on me” flag, the Black Panthers’ flag, or any other flag that has played a role in our national history is unfathomable, so long as Old Glory is always at the highest point wherever it is flown — as it is in South Carolina.

As noted, the Confederate flag in question was carried into battle by one of America’s three greatest armies, the Army of Northern Virginia. Under the superb command of Marse Robert that army’s battle flag came close to being a national flag of an independent Confederate States of America. Thank God it did not. But neither were those who fought under that banner executed, imprisoned, permanently disenfranchised, or exiled, as the losers in most other civil wars have been. As Lincoln advised, U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman “let ’em up easy.” Thereafter, the battle flag was flown for some bad purposes, as the emblem of the Klan and the Democratic Party’s southern wing, but also for one indispensable positive purpose — the slow but steady rejoining of north and south.

The flag of Lee’s army flew at innumerable annual reunions of regiments from both sides of the war, as well as national meetings of the veterans of both armies. The flag’s message — then and now — is one of deserved pride in the Confederacy’s principled and valiant, if losing fight against the Union; of reverence for southern war dead and untold numbers of amputees; and a stubborn determination to preserve what is best in the South’s traditional localist and communitarian lifestyle. At the same time, the flag flew over a region that gradually grew to again love the Union it had attempted to leave, and which today probably contributes a larger proportion of its young men and women to the U.S. armed services than any other region of the nation.

In one of the last great gatherings of Civil War veterans from both sides at Gettysburg on 3 July 1938, President Roosevelt recalled for the now elderly and quickly dwindling numbers of Johnnie Rebs and Billy Yanks that in November, 1863, another president had spoken on the same battlefield. “Lincoln,” Roosevelt said, “spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds. Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time. They are brought here by the memories of old divided loyalties, but they meet here in united loyalty to a united cause which the unfolding years have made it easier to see. All of them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.” As Roosevelt spoke, the Stars-and-Stripes and Stars-and-Bars fluttered weakly next to each other in the little bit of wind that blew on that sultry day.

In closing his speech, President Roosevelt reminded the wizened former enemies that the restoration of national unity was Lincoln’s most important message in his address at Gettysburg in 1863.

That is why Lincoln—commander of a people as well as of an army—asked that his battle end “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” To the hurt of those who came after him, Lincoln’s plea was long denied. A generation passed before the new unity became accepted fact. In later years new needs arose, and with them new tasks, worldwide in their perplexities, their bitterness and their modes of strife. Here in our land we give thanks that, avoiding war, we seek our ends through the peaceful processes of popular government under the Constitution. It is another conflict, a conflict as fundamental as Lincoln’s, fought not with glint of steel, but with appeals to reason and justice on a thousand fronts—seeking to save for our common country opportunity and security for citizens in a free society.

Like it or not, the Confederate Battle flag has and does play an important part in American history and society; it is a symbol of what we had, what we lost, and what we are now still in many ways working to recover. To ban that flag for the sake of making political hay for cynical Democratic authoritarians like Obama and Clinton — and to please the academy, the national media, and that fool Romney — would be a costly mistake and yet another disservice to American history.

A crazed young racist killed those nine Black Americans while they were studying the bible in Charleston. He used the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of his hatred, and to ban that much and rightly honored flag as a consequence of one man’s murderous action would be to shame and indict the entire South as racist entity, and, just perhaps, kindle in some small measure regional animosities toward what is still far from a perpetual union.

Nine black people shot dead in their church in Charleston, South Carolina, apparently by a young and mentally disturbed white man. A tragedy. A time for sympathy and prayer. A time for empathetic silence.

Enter Barack Obama. Hustling through some trite words of condolence, this man proceeds to demand the elimination of the 2nd Amendment, and to suggest that the murders are more evidence of a pervasive racism in the white community by inferring the killings are linked to a “dark” period of American history.

This savage and utterly self-centered man simply cannot resist ruthlessly exploiting dead people — adults and children —and their grieving families and communities to advance his and the Democratic Party’s increasingly inhuman and authoritarian agenda.

It is hard to know which is more reprehensible, this man’s exploitation of the dead to satisfy the personal goal of negating, and thereby stealing, the right to bear arms that is the birth-right, and so the property, of all Americans, or this man’s relentless and despicable effort to intensify racial hatreds in the country.

Mr. Obama has been and is a curse on the United States and on all Americans. He has intentionally shredded parts of the U.S. Constitution, and especially is obsessed with abrogating the 2nd Amendment, knowing that as long as it exists his and his party’s goal of one-party, arbitrary rule will never come to pass. He also deliberately has done much more than even the late and unlamented George Wallace to divide Americans into mutually hostile racial groupings.

Some years ago, after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton said it is absurd to argue that a U.S. citizen could love his country and despise his government. Barack Obama, since 2008, has not only proven Clinton to be dead wrong, but has behaved and spoken in precisely the manner necessary to create many tens of millions of U.S. citizens who love their country dearly and despise their national government with a white-hot passion.

There seems to be great Republican resistance to the idea that their interventions in Iraq and the Muslim world are the main cause of both the mess in Iraq and the growing and increasingly powerful worldwide Islamist movement. To the extent that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic senators and congressmen joined the Republicans in illegally delegating the war-declaring power to George W. Bush there is a point to the Republicans’ resistance. The correct formulation of the statement is that both parties are equally responsible for the mess in Iraq and for the formidable Islamist foe that now exists. Also a correct statement is that the bulk of both parties now want the United States to become an even stronger motivator of and recruiter for the Islamists by expanding the military re-intervention in Iraq that began in the summer of 2014. Before that occurs it would be best to review a few facts:

• The 2003 invasion of Iraq was approved by both parties and driven by the Neoconservatives in both parties. There was no need for a war in Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had WMD he was not a threat to the United States, and because we have none but parasitic allies in the Middle East, we needed to let them fend for themselves. (NB: We need to do this now.)
• Saddam Hussein was our best ally in the war against the Sunni Islamists, an ally that we did not have to cajole, pay, or urge to act against the Sunni militants. That he diddled around with and funded the Palestinian fighters is true, but he was reliably lethal — for his government’s own interests — when it came to killing mujahideen trying to transit or set up shop in Iraq. Without Saddam to hold the center of the Arab world and block the insurgents’ easy east-west movement, we now have a mujahideen theater of operations that extends from Morocco on the Atlantic, to Jakarta in the Pacific, and from the North Caucasus in the north, to Nigeria in the south.
• The U.S. military and its allies were defeated in Iraq. They were all shackled by political constraints and by suicidal rules-of-engagement, but U.S. generals dutifully played the role of toadies by telling the public there was “no military solution” in Iraq. There is always a military solution to war and, if it is not implemented, defeat is certain. (NB: This is equally true of the Afghan War.)
• All U.S. military personnel killed, wounded, or maimed in Iraq were a waste of our most precious assets. They were led to defeat by two presidents, myriad generals, and congresses that clearly never had any intention of winning the wars they started. (NB: (a) This is equally true of the Afghan War; (b) The cost of not winning either war has been the shredding of the 4th Amendment, and will be further constraints on civil liberty in the future.)
• U.S. Iraq policy in the Bush and Obama administrations was made by men and women who either cannot tell the difference between theory and reality, or were cursed with the feckless Ivy League educations that in the last four administrations have marched this country at quick step to the rim of hell. Saddam’s rule was brutal not only because he was brutal but because authoritarian government is the only way to keep Iraq united and the country’s Sunnis and Shias away from each other’s throat. The constant refrain by Obama, Cameron, Hollande, and other NATO leaders that there will be an “inclusive government” in Iraq — that is, Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, and Sufis amiably working together — is witness to either their deceit or stupidity. From March, 2003, until today there was never a chance of creating an inclusive regime in Iraq. It will not happen in the future.
• The now canonized “Surge” achieved a temporary halt in the mujahideen’s progress in Iraq, slowed the pace of U.S. casualties, and — as planned — got the Iraq war minimized on the agenda of the 2008 McCain-Obama presidential debates. But the most important long term result of the surge was that it pushed the mujahideen out of Iraq into Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon and so allowed them to regroup, rearm, and — as we now see in the Levant, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere — live to fight and win another day. At bottom, the surge was a cynical political scheme and tactical military act concocted by a political general. It was not meant to defeat the enemy, only to buy time for the politicians.
• The current call by most Republicans and many Democrats to return 10,000 or 20,000 U.S. ground troops to Iraq will not change the situation there except to make it worse; what more than 100,000 troops could not do, will not be done by a fifth or tenth of that total, especially when the foe is four times larger than it was a decade ago and the Iraqi regime’s forces will not fight. In addition, the Sunni-Shia bloodletting that has occurred in the last 30 months all but ensures a full-scale and perhaps regional sectarian war. This is the best possible outcome for a bankrupt and militarily worn out United States, and hopefully one that even supreme bumblers like Obama, Kerry, McCain, Graham, and multiple retired U.S. generals cannot prevent.
• The political demand for those troops is driven by U.S. politicians who refuse to recognize that they have warred and spent the United States into something akin to an over-the-hill Madam — John McCain in drag comes to mind — who deludes herself into believing that her now sagging attributes are as powerful as ever. We command no respect among the Islamists who see the U.S. government as afraid to kill them and their supporters; afraid to suffer casualties; and relatively indifferent to the reality that it is a superpower that regularly losses wars to insurgent forces with no air cover and limited heavy weaponry.
• The political demand also comes from the Israel-First-owned Neoconservatives in both parties who caused the 2003 invasion of Iraq believing that it would enhance the security of their country of first allegiance — Israel. They now realize that the Iraq war has likely signed Israel’s death warrant and so are desperate to undo the damage done to Israel for which they alone are responsible. Grasping at straws, for example, Neocon Charles Krauthammer last week said the answer in Iraq was to directly arm the Kurds and Sunni tribes to fight the Islamic State. This sophomoric strategy was applauded by other Neocons, not one of whom asked why the Kurds and Sunni tribes would fight and die to reestablish the power of the Iran-backed Shia tyranny in Baghdad that the U.S. government and its allies knowingly installed and then silently watched persecute Iraq’s Sunnis.

The bottom line in all of this is the uncontestable fact that there would be no ISIS today if there had not been a U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. There is no question that the Neocons’ Iraq war afforded the Islamists opportunities to successfully internationalize their movement, expand their manpower and financial resources, and seize and hold large tracts of territory. None of these achievements would have been even remotely possible for the mujahideen if Saddam’s regime still governed Iraq. The voices now calling for more U.S. troops in Iraq are not American voices; they are the voices of panic-stricken agents of a foreign power who have no qualms about driving the United States deeper into debt and wasting the lives and limbs of more of America’s soldier-children. Though oracular sounding, these are alien, anti-American voices that must not be heeded.

Those men who wrote our Constitution made it perfectly intelligible to anyone who cared to read it. They also left some flexibility in its articles to ensure that as time passed and circumstances changed the document would remain viable as the indispensable protector of the republic they created and of the liberty of citizens who delegated a limited amount of their sovereign power to the national government through its provisions. And after a long and often angry ratification debate, the first congress added a bill of rights to the Constitution as that document’s first ten amendments. These amendments were fully as clear as the text — perhaps more so — but less flexible than the body of the document because they dealt with the tenets of republican liberty which, if regularly and deliberately violated by the national government, would require that Americans, to paraphrase Jefferson, demolish the existing government and erect a new one that would better safeguard their liberties and their republic’s security.

In recent decades, however, Americans have been treated to an endless stream of politicians, academics, lawyers, and pundits who describe the opaqueness of the Founder’s Constitution and the need for “experts” to decipher or infer what the document means. As a result, we now have presidents who take the country to war on their whim; politicians who are legally bribed by “campaign contributions” from rich individuals, corporations, labor unions, and foreign lobbies and governments based on an absurd reading of the Constitution; a public that is increasingly endangered by flamboyant blasphemers who seek violence and war under the protection of the First Amendment; and the routine criminality of executive branch officials who refuse to obey their oath of office to execute the laws. We also have the overwhelming majority of both political parties willing to destroy the Fourth Amendment in the name of providing for national security against an enemy they have resolutely refused to either stop motivating or militarily annihilate. Together these realities amount to a more-than-full justification for Americans to recall that, as Jefferson wrote, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

In the midst of America’s third consecutive despotic presidency — each more despotic than its predecessor, and all more than Nixon — the citizenry now sees two singularly courageous individuals standing up and saying the destruction of the Fourth Amendment must stop. The junior senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul, and FOX’s senior judicial analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, have been and are saying that it is unconstitutional for any congress and/or president to order NSA to collect the electronic communications of all Americans. (NB: Note to Congressman Gowdy: Can’t you get Hillary Clinton’s e-mail from NSA? Or is the unconstitutional collection system rigged so the corrupt elite are exempt?) If the U.S. educational system was not run by people who yearn and work for despotism, and if that system taught civics and history instead of political indoctrination, the senator and the judge would not be so alone in their opposition to tyranny. (NB: Perhaps the sheep-like silence and passivity of much of the public toward this deliberate and cynical violation of their constitutionally protected rights is the best reason for destroying the federal Department of Education at the first opportunity.)

Those who support the destruction of the 4th Amendment, of course, do so because they have knowingly failed to provide for the security of the United States since Osama bin Laden declared war on the nation in August, 1996. The threat from al-Qaeda, and now from its progeny, the Islamic State, exists and is still growing because we have had three presidents who refused to either stop motivating the Islamists to attack us or to annihilate them, their supporters, and their infrastructure with U.S. military power. Instead, they have made Americans pay with the currency of their soldier-children’s lives and limbs and their liberty for the government’s deliberate failure to protect the republic against enemies foreign and domestic. Indeed, the last three presidents and their lieutenants have provided the bulk of America’s domestic enemies, and their transparently unconstitutional and enemy-protecting behavior is ample, accumulated justification for Americans to begin to look for ways to devise “Guards for their future security.”

Last Thursday evening (21 May 2015) on Bret Baier’s excellent “Special Report,” Judge Napolitano concisely and clearly explained the intention of the White House and Congress to continue their illegal evisceration — it began with the Mr. Bush’s Patriot Act — of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment. Napolitano convincingly made his point and then another panelist — the Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer — replied that he was “dead wrong.” Krauthammer and his Neocon brothers, who labored mightily for the 2003 invasion of Iraq (lost war 1), the 2014 re-intervention (lost war 2), and now for the return ground troops to Iraq to lose again — pray God, three strikes and they are exiled to Israel — have been accurately described by the erudite political scientist Claes G. Ryn as the “New Jacobins.”

The new Jacobin does not want competition in prescribing the right model [of government]. … The new Jacobin is convinced that he knows what is best for all mankind, and if much of mankind shows reluctance to follow his lead, it is to him a sign that injustice, superstition, and general backwardness or a misconceived modernistic radicalism is standing in the way of progress. The new Jacobin is not content with voicing his own ideas and letting the peoples of the world make their own decisions. They must recognize the superiority of his principles. Governments that do not do so appear to him perverse. … The world must be rid of unenlightened, undemocratic societies. If persuasion and diplomatic pressure fail, the forces of democracy should be willing to resort to military means, especially against powers that have the temerity of openly defying the United States. The new Jacobin desires strong, activist government that can enact what he considers virtuous purposes.*

Intolerably, individuals fitting Professor Ryn’s description dominate both American political parties and for decades have made foreign policy for the United States. Since the early 1990s they have brought America constant war and its reliable companion, the steadily broadening erosion of constitutional liberty. The names of these people are well known. Beyond Krauthammer, the following are, to name just a few, members of the Jacobin/Neocon fold: Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Madeline Albright, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Joseph Lieberman, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama John Boehner, Joe Biden, Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and the 90-plus Senators who did not join Kentucky’s junior senator in defending the 4th Amendment. All of them, to judge by their words, believe it is the absolute right of the United States to intervene politically and militarily abroad wherever and whenever it chooses, and to impose by force what they define as “universal values.”

But their words are lies, there are no such things as universal values. There is only one value common to all men in all times and that is the universal lust for gaining and exercising arbitrary power, and that power is exactly what the Jacobin/Neocon crowd is after. They want power abroad and they want power over the American citizenry at home. They have proven they cannot attain power abroad — having lost every war they started — and they cannot get power at home unless Americans permit them to continue to systematically hollow out the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

On that score, however, they are incrementally succeeding, and this success is the reason that Americans must begin thinking about what “new Guards for their future security” might be appropriate. And to ensure U.S. citizens can realistically discuss all options for preventing or destroying tyrannical government at home, the Founders left them the Second Amendment. After all, as Jefferson asked in 1787, “And what country can preserve its liberties, if the rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”

Since 9/11, Americans have been treated to an ongoing tutorial by the self-professed best-and brightest from America’s universities, media, Christian clergy, and national government explaining how American Muslims become radicalized into Islamist militants. These Muslims, say the country’s brains-trust, are discriminated against by other U.S. citizens; are disenfranchised by poverty; have a hard time transitioning to U.S. society from the Muslim culture they lived in abroad;hate all non-Muslims, or are brain-washed by cynical Islamist leaders and so learn to hate America and become eager to waste their lives in attacking it. These same explanations have been spewed forth by the aforementioned elites ever since the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and now fourteen years they later they are again being served up to explain to the citizenry — really, to mislead the citizenry — what radicalized the Garland, Texas, attackers.

Now each of the foregoing elements may have some peripheral impact on radicalizing young American Muslims, but they would all amount to nothing if the main motivational force — U.S. government policies and actions in the Islamic world — was absent. The attack in Garland, Texas, did not occur because two Muslims were out for a walk and, being bored, decided to kill some non-Muslim cartoonists. The attack occurred because Ms. Geller and her violence-seeking organization announced and then staged an event meant to flamboyantly defame, denigrate, and ridicule the Prophet Muhammad. The Simpson-Soofi attack in Garland was a planned, if poorly executed, operation meant to kill those who seek to humiliate Muslims and their faith by savaging the Prophet. Cause and effect are ever at hand, and in this case the attackers were responding to an attack by Geller et al. that for them and many other Muslims was much more painful than receiving a physical beating.

This cause-and-effect theme has been the constant reality of the U.S. confrontation with Islam since the late-Osama bin Laden began speaking publicly in 1996. He then explained that the mujahideen would continue attacking the United States as long as it maintained a foreign policy that defended Arab tyrannies, unquestioningly supported Israel, attacked and/or occupied Muslim territory, and denigrated the Islamic faith. Bin Laden thus put the U.S. government on notice that its actions and policies would motivate al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups to attack U.S. interests. In response, the U.S. government under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton has intensified and expanded the actions and policies that bin Laden specified as war motivators. In the case of Garland, Ms. Geller’s meeting might have been the immediate reason for the attack, but her nonsense — blasphemy is a non-starter for anyone taught good manners by their parents — pales in comparison to the success that the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Cinton troika has had in maintaining policies that provide the single most important source of motivation for both the worldwide spread of the Islamist insurgency and for the attacks that will eventually become routine events inside the United States.

While the Garland attack, and the sophomoric Geller meeting that prompted it, have almost faded from the media — but not, you can bet, from the mind of the mujahideen — it is worth noting that Ms. Geller’s childish and intended-to-create-violence conference is only part of what is the small, private-sector contribution to the U.S. government’s mindless agenda for motivating the further growth and geographical spread of what is now a nearly worldwide Islamist insurgency. While the zany Ms. Geller and her merry band of blasphemers were seeking violence in Texas, Washington was:

• Continuing its so far dismally unsuccessful but clearly ISIS-benefiting U.S. re-intervention in Iraq. So far our generals have managed to graphically revalidate what was already known: air power cannot win a war unless aircraft are dropping nuclear weapons, and that the hundreds of billions of U.S.-taxpayer dollars spent on arming and training the Iraqi army has produced — as in Afghanistan — a miserably incompetent military force that excels only in abandoning its weapons and sprinting away from the enemy. As this is published, in fact, ISIS forces have taken Ramadi.

• Being perceived across the Muslim world as supporting Israel’s recent decision to build 900 more homes for Israelis in east Jerusalem. And this after the Muslim world had witnessed the spectacle of most of the AIPAC-owned U.S. congressman and senators from both parties showing more loyalty to the Israeli prime minister and the war he wants than to their own country’s president, security, independence, and national interests.

• Supporting and applauding a coalition of Saudi-led Arab tyrants in their air war on Yemen’s Shia Houthis and, truthfully, any Yemeni who is in the way. The Sunni Arabs will find that air power is insufficient to beat the Houthis, and they will be left to decide whether to commit ground forces. Here is a truly lose-lose situation for the ossified tyrants. If the Saudi-led coalition decides to try to eradicate the Houthis by using Sunni Arab ground forces — and it is not a sure thing that they can do so — al-Qaeda, ISIS, and a large part of Yemen’s Sunni majority will remain heavily armed, as anti-al-Saud as ever, and utterly unwilling to accept any Potemkin Yemeni regime the tyrants try to install. The Saudi-led coalition over the long run may well destroy the Houthis only to see that they have midwifed the birth of an Islamic state in Yemen.

• Publicly cooperating with Iran in Iraq to fight ISIS, and implicitly with the Syrian Alawites and Shia Hezbollah to do the same. Now this is a piece of stupidity that is so rank that even bin Laden — who deemed U.S. leaders reliably but not suicidally stupid — could not have imagined it. Washington has concocted a policy that puts the United States on the side of apostate Shias and Shia-offshoot groups against the entire Sunni world. Like the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq, Washington’s decision to side with the Shias in Iraq and Syria against the Sunni world amounts to the same kind of long-desired but totally unexpected gift that Ralphy received in the Christmas Story movie; that is, a Red Ryder B-B Gun of a policy. And this gift is made more saucily piquant and hilarious for the Islamists by Washington’s bizarre (insane?) decision to simultaneously assist the Sunni Arab tyrants’ as they joyously kill off the Iran-supported Yemeni Shias.

The old saying that when you have dug yourself into a hole it’s best to stop digging has seldom been more applicable than in regard to U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. Clinton, Bush, and Obama/Clinton are all smart enough to know — they are all Ivy Leaguers, you know — that they have been and still are motivating our Islamist enemies, and yet they are also so divorced from reality and lost in theory that they are unwilling to kill those they have motivated and cannot recognize that America is up to its waist in a religious war — they are Ivy all Leaguers, you know. What to do? Stop U.S. intervention in the Islamic world, reissue President Washington’s 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality, and, as diplomatically as possible, tell Sunnis, Shias, Israelis, American Israel-Firsters, and Europeans to (a) piss off and (b) enjoy stewing in their own lethal juices.

Oh yes, and never again cast a vote for a presidential candidate who graduated from an Ivy League university.

During his term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey has shown a decided inability to differentiate between truth and falsehood when talking to Americans and their congressional representatives, more often than not erring on the side of the latter. Those paying attention, for example, will recall General Dempsey repeatedly telling the media, the citizenry, and the Congress that the U.S. military’s training of the Afghan National Army (ANA) had gone splendidly and the ANA would be ready to operate on its own when President Obama’s withdrawal date arrived. Now, we see that Obama’s deadline has been extended and the stay-behind force increased. General Dempsey, unless he has learned nothing in a long taxpayer-funded military career or is plainly brain dead, knew that what he was saying about the ANA was an absurd lie, but he tugged his forelock and lied for the administration.

This month, however, General Dempsey let slip a snippet of truth and then had to scramble to re-establish the lie that — sooner or later — all parents of America’s military personnel will have to accept, cope with, and, perhaps, avenge. In reaction to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance toward the city of Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar Province, General Dempsey said that he was not worried about IS taking the city because it was of little importance to the overall war that is occurring in Iraq. In reaction to Dempsey’s statement, Ms. Debbie Lee, the mother of U.S. Navy SEAL Marc Lee who was killed while fighting with his unit near Ramadi in August, 2006, spoke out in a letter of condemnation for Dempsey’s statement, saying that her son died at Ramadi as he was fighting for “freedom” and that Dempsey’s description of Ramadi as being of little importance denigrated her son’s sacrifice as well as that of many other troops. General Dempsey quickly retracted his statement, apologized, and said he honored Ms. Lee’s son and all of the fallen.

Now, one sympathizes with this still-grieving mother and surely shares her pride in her son’s love of and sacrifice for America. But the problem surfacing in this episode is that General Dempsey was telling the truth, and he was telling the truth about events today as well as when Marc Lee was killed in action. Today and during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, there is not a single village, town, or city in Iraq that is worth the life or limbs of one U.S. Marine, sailor, or soldier. Instigated by U.S. citizens who are the acolytes of a foreign power, George W. Bush started the war in Iraq for no credible reason — even with WMD, Saddam would not have been a threat to the United States — and with the unconstitutional delegation of power from a reliably supine national legislature. Bush and his advisers refused to put enough forces into Iraq to win, and they laid down rules of engagement that made our military personnel targets not killers, both of which guaranteed our Islamist enemy would survive and grow exponentially in size and power. Then, the deeply anti-military Barack Obama was content to let the Iraq war putter along — blithely letting the deaths, severed limbs, and cases of mental distress accumulate — until the political clock struck the hour that would yield the most electoral benefit for himself and his party.

As noted, General Dempsey quickly painted over his awkward revelation of the truth with the usual meaningless but syrupy “We honor your service” boiler plate. The service of young military men and women, of course, can only be honored by their leaders if they ensure that those youngsters’ lives are not knowingly wasted. But in regard to this, their most fundamental responsibility, Dempsey and his fellow general officers have been nowhere to be seen for nearly a decade and a half. Until recently, Americans still held to the hope that U.S. generals were honorable men and women who are trained to do three things: (a) destroy the enemy utterly: (b) bring home alive as many of their troops as possible; and (c) politely but strongly oppose any politician’s plan that threatens to make (a) and (b) impossible, and, if unsuccessful, resign and publicly describe the reason for resignation. Since the 9/11 attacks, it appears that almost no U.S. general officer has done anything but lick the boots of politicians, while saying something akin to “Yes, my genius leader” to presidents who start both necessary wars and unnecessary interventionist wars they do not intend to win; refuse to supply enough troops to make victory certain; and restrict U.S. troops from using enough force to protect their own lives, let alone to apply sufficient savagery to annihilate the enemy.

All told, U.S. general officers — with the admirable exception of General James Mattis, USMC — seem not to have a tenth of the moral courage of the grieving mother who denounced General Dempsey’s words. Indeed, Ms. Lee’s scathingly blunt attack caused Dempsey to do what most U.S. generals seem to do best, cravenly crawl back under the cover of a sanctimonious and cynical lie that protects themselves and their political masters, but which sooner or later will be seen through by the parents of America’s soldier-children. And then, pray God, both presidents and generals will have hell to pay.