Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

“We are gathered here tonight because we believe in an independent destiny for America. … An independent destiny for America means … that our soldiers will not have to fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.” — Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, 23 May 1941

Media commentary on the well-planned, professionally executed, and completely successful mujahideen operation in Paris is really quite quaint. Listened to closely, the ponderously somber pundits will have you thinking that it is September, 2001, rather than January, 2015. The canned, 15-year old comments and questions flow freely: “Horrific attack kills 12 innocents”; “the attackers have nothing to do with Islam”; “how are the young men radicalized?”; “an attack on freedom;” “Muslims must condemn the attacks;” “we are not at war with Islam;” “why this senseless violence?”; and, of course, the maddeningly absurd and irrelevant “we will bring them to justice.”

Fortunately, just before this tripe put listeners to sleep, the prize jackass of the week trotted on stage in the person of Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper. “The fact of the matter is this, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Harper told a small audience, “The international jihadist movement has declared war.” Here, then, is one of the main reasons why the West has gotten its collective behind so regularly kicked, humiliated, and defeated since 2001. An important NATO leader, Mr. Harper seems not to know — even though the fine Canadian army along with all NATO militaries were defeated in Afghanistan — that the jihadists declared war on the United States and its vassals in August, 1996. Harper’s ignorance is important because it reminds all Westerners how hard it will be to survive the war the Islamists are waging against them when their leaders are just beginning to think there might be a war at hand fifteen years after the enemy began to fight it in earnest.

The inane gabfest over the Paris attacks will end in a few days and nothing much will change — at least for the Islamists. Western leaders will continuing to thunder about the rule of law, the peacefulness of Islam, the protection of freedom of the press, but will scurry to avoid doing anything that will destroy the enemy in numbers that have any strategic impact whatsoever. They will savor and gloat over the fact that it only took 90,000 French police and military personnel to kill three Islamist shooters. They held an impromptu summit of senior officials to condemn terrorism and have set another, both will promise “unity and future action.” And they will publicly beg the Arab tyrants to do the dirty work they are too embarrassed or cowardly to let their own military and intelligence services do. And, of course, the public purse will be robbed by the whores who masquerade as social science professors. The will descend on Western capitals armed with quack answers about how to solve “the Islamic radicalization of youth,” and legislators will give them gobs of tax dollars just so they appear to be doing something. The sum of all of this will be what it has been since 2001: motion without movement.

The substantive post-Paris changes from Western leaders will come when they inevitably enhance the war they are already waging against their own people and their peoples’ civil liberties, rather than by ordering the hugely expensive Western militaries to annihilate the Islamists, their civilian supporters and funders, and whatever infrastructure they possess. Because it is so utterly unfashionable to kill in the necessary numbers those who are killing you, perpetual adolescents like Obama, Harper, Cameron, Hollande, Merkel, and their colleagues will increase surveillance of their own civilians, their communications, and their bank accounts; make international air travel more intrusive and arduous; and work overtime to silence and/or penalize those citizens who speak the simple, irrefutable fact that an increasing part of Islam is at war with the West, and that that war is motivated not by Western lifestyles but by what Western governments do in the Muslim world — be it invading Muslim countries, coddling Israel, or championing those who blaspheme the Prophet.

In many ways, the Islamists are the Western leaders’ best friends in that they give them credible reasons to progressively eliminate civil liberties and continue building the authoritarian states many of them seem to desire. Obama, in particular, is likely to take advantage of the Paris attacks to further savage the 1st and 4th Amendments of the Constitution. And it will not be long before Obama and his pro-tyranny sidekicks in both parties undertake a renewed campaign to gut the 2nd Amendment, probably claiming that the national government needs to control all arms so that domestic Islamists — or those who come in across the open southern border — cannot assemble an arsenal to use in attacks.

[NB: For two reasons, I think that seldom in American history has it been more important for every American to be armed, and armed with as deadly a weapon (or weapons) as possible. First, as the Paris attack shows, the cowardly refusal of the French and all other NATO regimes to militarily eradicate the Islamists abroad wherever they can be found means more and more attacks in NATO countries. The attacks will occur not because of George W. Bush’s nonsensical argument that if we do not kill them overseas we will have to fight them at home — those who attack at home will have been residents most or all of their lives — but because Washington and its NATO partners have deliberately lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Young Muslims believe Allah has given Islam victory in both places, and, as Osama bin Laden predicted, they are following the strong horse. American citizens need weapons to provide the protection against domestic Islamists for themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods that the national government deems unimportant. Second, if Obama sends his Islam-loving multicultural thugs to unconstitutionally do an inventory of privately held weapons or even to take the guns of law-abiding Americans they merit a heartily discouraging welcome from well-armed Americans.]

There really is not much more to say about the Paris attacks except that Western leaders and their acolytes in the media and churches will keep lying to their public about the Islamist issue. When you hear those lies and the asinine comments and questions mentioned in the first paragraph, there are five simple facts to keep in mind as a defense against the lethal deceit that dominates the current public debate.

1. An increasing portion of the Islamic world is waging war against the West; most of the Islamists who are fighting are adherents of the Salafi sect of Sunni Islam, which is a small but growing, martially inclined, and admired sect that has declared a defensive jihad against the U.S.-led West. On the basis of these facts, it is suicidal madness to pretend that the West is not engaged in a religious war.
2. The reformation that the West is urging on the Muslim world is already underway, but it is not a reformation that will be to Western liking. The message delivered by Osama bin Laden and his successors that the most basic relationship in Islam is between the individual Muslim and Allah without an intermediary is obviously gaining ground across the Muslim world. Part of this success is due to the example of bin Laden and the victorious mujahideen, but most of it is due to the recognition by Muslims that the religious scholars who work for Arab governments are on the take, and that they will deliver religious decisions in whatever form their tyrant-employer desires so as not to lose the wealth, position, and status and they have won by selling out their faith. In this aspect, the current Islamic Reformation mirrors in content and violence the Protestant Reformation that occurred in the West.
3. Most of those mujahideen who attack inside Western countries will be residents of those countries. Responsibility for facilitating this phenomena lies strictly with Western governments that for forty years have championed the immigration of foreigners who never intend to assimilate, and who in some cases mean to harm the nation to which they have immigrated. This intent to harm clearly increases with each generation that is born in the country of immigration. This sort of society-killing multiculturalism has been worsened and made unmanageable by the open borders specialized in by the U.S. and the European Community governments.
4. The worldwide Islamist insurgency that the West confronts is not susceptible to defeat by a combination of law enforcement methods, Special Forces, and intelligence operations, or by a coalition of Western nations and Arab tyrannies. The first three tools might have been decisive in the late 1990s, but President Clinton refused to use them and let the Islamist problem strengthen and mature. It is now much, much too late to successfully employ these methods as war winners because the enemy is simply too numerous, well-armed, and geographically dispersed; using them today, as I have said before, is like trying to destroy the Wehrmacht one man at a time. The last-mentioned coalition is, on its face, a huge and cynical joke. The West is looking for others to do their war fighting, and the Arab tyrants will not risk internal revolution by seriously injuring the mujahideen, who are fueled by money, volunteers, and prayers from the tyrannies. Indeed, the Saudis and their Gulf partners are experts in the exact opposite of the kind of coalition being called for by the West. In the case of Iraq, the West has on three occasions provided blond, blue-eyed slave soldiers to protect the tyrants by fighting and dying there, while the tyrants have kicked in a few bucks and continued their debauchery while joining the mujahideen in laughing at the fools in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris.
5. The bipartisan, interventionist foreign policy of the United States is today, as it was when bin Laden declared war on America in 1996, the main motivator — along with the West’s relentless military fecklessness — of the Islamist insurgency. Washington’s steady support for Arab tyrannies and the re-installation of one in Egypt; its unnecessary, corrupt, and dead Americans-causing relationship with Israel; and its willingness to invade Muslim countries at the drop of a hat make Washington — next to Allah — the only indispensable ally of the mujahideen. This reality all but ensures the inevitable demise of Western liberties. Western leaders are too cowardly to kill the Islamists and their supporters in the extraordinary numbers that now will be necessary to achieve victory, and yet they will continue to intervene militarily and culturally in the Muslim world and so motivate ever greater number of mujahideen to join the fight. Given this combination, Western leaders, in the name of defense, will crackdown on the liberties of their own citizens while the Islamist grow ever stronger.

When reviewing the five facts above, and knowing that each of them is fully substantiated in public, not secret sources, one can only conclude that Western leaders are pursuing their own political agendas, following the dictates of ruinous theories like multiculturalism, diversity, and uncontrolled borders and immigration, and hold in contempt the clear national interests of the nations they were chosen to govern. “Which is more blameworthy,” George Washington asked a correspondent in 1790, “those who see and steadily pursue their interest, or those who cannot see, or seeing will not act wisely?” The West today, sadly, is dangerously afflicted with both men and women in governing positions who — unless they are stupid — can easily see their nation’s interests but “will not act wisely.”

I had not intended to follow up on my last piece about MARC GRAYSON and his knowing conduct of a fraudulent LINKEDIN site, but the message that LINKEDIN sent to GRAYSON in an effort to try to help him continue perpetrating his fraud, pasted in below, is really priceless. I wonder how many such frauds are being conducted and assisted — hopefully unknowingly — by those who administer this service?

“Then, behold, Pallas, the hero’s guardian approaches, sinking down through the upper air, and orders him to turn the earth and sow the dragon’s teeth, destined to generate a people. He obeys, and opening the furrows with a slice of his plough, sows the teeth in the ground, as human seed. Then, almost beyond belief, the cultivated earth begins to move, and first spear points appear among the furrows, next helmets nodding their painted crests, then chests and shoulders spring up, and arms weighed down with spears, and the field is thick with the round shields of warriors.”

Metamorphoses, Book III: 95-114

With the unfolding of the Obama-Holder policy of restoring veteran Islamist insurgent fighters and future leaders to the forces of al-Qaeda and the growing array of America’s Islamist enemies — so far, 5 to Qatar, 4 to Uruguay, and 5 to Kazakhstan — it is worth repeating that the United States is engaged in a religious war with an increasing portion of the Muslim world. Obama’s release of Guantanamo prisoners again highlights the fact that the U.S. bipartisan political elite has not grasped this fact and so the national government continues to feed the manpower and motivation of America’s enemies.

The al-Qaeda training handbook — which is now the basic handbook for the growing Islamist movement — stresses the religious nature of the war each insurgent is waging against the United States and its European and Arab-tyrant allies. In this struggle, each fighter is taught that he can serve Allah in three ways: (a) he can fight the enemy on the battlefield and survive to continue fighting; (b) he can face the enemy on the battlefield and be killed, having prayed beforehand that Allah will accept him as paradise-bound martyr; and (c) he can fight the enemy in battle and be captured and continue to wage jihad from prison. The fighters are instructed that each these results pleases Allah and therefore it is good for them — and for all Muslims — to embrace whichever one comes down the road, and if it is (a) or (c) that arrives, he must keep fighting.

Those captured mujahideen who go to prison in the Arab world and carry on the fight from behind bars cannot reasonably expect to see freedom again, or, for that matter, find as easy-going and health-promoting a prison as the one at Guantanamo Bay. Many insurgent prisoners are executed by their Arab captors — with or without mock trials — soon after the latter are convinced that they have no more information to divulge and that they cannot be persuaded or forced to work as intelligence assets against their former Islamist brethren. Few are released from Arab prisons because the Arab world’s politicians are savvy enough to know that many would immediately go back to the battlefield and, as important, would do so with an inspiringly heroic demeanor as men who survived the brutality of, say, former-Egyptian President Mubarak’s prisons and remained both faithful to Allah and ready to resume fighting.

From the insurgent commanders’ perspective, incarcerated fighters who are released or escape are worth their weight in gold, perhaps more. Mostly combat veterans at the time of their capture, the returning mujahideen demonstrate to less experienced fighters that there can be life after capture, and these men also can be highlighted in the Islamists’ media to spur recruitment and greater monetary donations from across the Muslim world. The returnees also enjoy a certain aura of invincibility in that they have — with Allah’s favor — survived both battle and prison and so encourage other fighters to have confidence that Allah will look out for them if they remain steadfast in his cause. Readers will recall al-Qaeda leader Abu Yaha al-Libi as a man who rose to become al-Qaeda’s most effective recruiter and third or fourth in the group’s command structure — as well as its most charismatic leader, save bin Laden — after he escaped in July, 2005, from the U.S.-NATO prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, and returned to the fight and to regularly appear in the media. Abu Yaha was eventually killed by U.S. forces, but his legend remains, and that legend, to this day, is powered in part by his having survived imprisonment and escaped to fight again and die in Allah’s cause.

And if one example will not suffice, here is another. In February, 2006, a Yemeni national named Nasir al-Wuhayshi escaped with a number of other al-Qaeda fighters from a Yemeni regime prison. Al-Wuhayshi had once been one of bin Laden’s secretaries, but he was not a renowned fighter or obviously tagged for greater leadership responsibilities. After returning to the battlefield, al-Wuhayshi proved a fine fighter and rose to command all al-Qaeda forces in Yemen; he then presided over the merger of al-Qaeda’s forces in Yemen and Saudi Arabia and commanded the new Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Organization; and, in 2013, al-Wuhayshi was named by bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri as his deputy and second in command of all of al-Qaeda.

Oh, okay, one more example. An individual who had helped form an Islamist insurgent group to fight the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then served as chief of its Sharia committee, was captured in 2004 but then released by U.S. forces less than a year later. This fellow’s name is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he now leads an organization named the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which will again defeat the U.S. military and its motley coalition of Arab tyrants and effeminate Europeans.

Now, not all of the prisoners released by Obama, Holder, and their gang of Ivy League-educated international-law experts will have either the natural talent or the opportunity to mimic the stellar successes of al-Libi, al-Wuhayshi, and al-Baghdadi. But some will, and many of the rest will be happy to settle for returning to Allah’s fight and finding joy in killing Americans and others with an AK-47, a RPG, or a car bomb; none of the Americans who will die at their hands, of course, would be in line for death if the Islamists had not been released from Guantanamo by the all-knowing anti-American ideologue, Barack Obama. The Obama-freed jihadis, moreover, will serve as a reminder to current Islamist fighters, aspiring mujahideen, and those that fund them that Allah can be served by jihadis in many ways, and that there is no downside to any of them.

Because the supine Republicans apparently will do nothing to halt Obama’s calculated readiness to sow dragon’s teeth that will eventually see Americans killed by the crop of death yielded by those he releases, one can only hope, for America’s sake, that the old adage “What goes around, comes around” proves true in the future careers of the Islamists released from Guantanamo. When — not if — one or more of the freed mujahideen attack and kill Americans, fairness would dictate that they kill those who are responsible for their release and return to the battlefield, as well as those who did nothing to stop that insane process. If such an absolutely fair scenario plays out in the next two years, Mrs. Clinton can tear-up and empathize with the Islamist attackers, but I will rejoice for my family and all Americans, as it will be clearly the case that those killed in that scenario merited death, that they always have been worth less than nothing to the United States, and that America’s national security will be far better off without them. “No punishment, in my opinion, is too great,” General Washington said in 1778, almost as if he was thinking of Barack Obama, “for the man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”

We now have another reason to be thankful for the presidency of Barack Obama. Not only has he taught us the danger to the republic of electing a violence-provoking racist and tyrant to the presidency, but, on Cuba, Obama — with his similarly hapless and delusional sidekick Pope Francis — has ensured the survival of the Castros’ rule and thereby has shown Americans that all of the bipartisan U.S. foreign-policy elite’s endlessly boring and intellectually bankrupt rhetoric about universal human rights is nothing more than intervention-justifying and war-causing cant.

And that demonstration is long past due. Foreign policy is always about America’s life-and-death material interests and should never have anything to do with morality. Whether a “moral,” and therefore interventionist, foreign policy is conducted in the name of secularism, freedom, democratization, human rights, humanitarian concerns, women’s rights, or any other kind of crackpot universal right the bipartisan interventionists dream up for the U.S. military to install overseas, it always yields the same things — war, defeat, dead and maimed Americans, and bankruptcy for the United States.

Cuba, of course, is a country that is wrecked, and, in and of itself, is no threat to the United States. The Castro brothers and their murderous apparatchiks have run its economy into the ground and have maintained what amounts to an island-wide prison for the Cuban people and a refuge for those individuals and nations opposed to the United States. It is emblematic of Obama’s deranged mind that he welcomes the continued maintenance of the Castros’ Cuba-wide prison/refuge, but is obsessed with closing the easy-going, well-appointed prison American citizens have paid for at Guantanamo to pamper those who have tried to kill them and will do so again as soon as Obama and Eric Holder can find a way to release them. Clearly, Obama, being an aspiring tyrant himself, has no qualms about helping out his fellow tyrants in Havana. After all, they have been at the tyranny business for a long time and so probably have a lot to teach Obama and the Democratic Party about the glories of eliminating liberty and enslaving people in a one-party state.

But the truth is that the de-Castroization of Cuba is the sole business and responsibility of the Cuban people, not of Americans. If Cubans cannot find a way to achieve their unshackling and then slowly and painfully murder the Castro brothers and their gang, and afterwards draw and quarter them, then that is their problem.

The negative rub of recognition for U.S. security, on the other hand, lies in the fact that Obama’s new policy comes in the face of the near-certainty that the Cuban regime currently hosts large Chinese and Russian SIGINT facilities that allow Moscow and Beijing to intercept U.S. government, business, and personnel communications inside the United States and from the United States to the outside world. So far as media reporting shows, Obama apparently did not demand that these facilities be closed in return for fulfilling his ardor to embrace and prolong another tyranny, like those he proudly joined in the renewed interventionist war in Iraq. One supposes that Obama figures there is no harm in Russian and Chinese tyrants listening to Americans and their activities and plans when his own lawless regime already is doing the same thing.

The most important point here is that the United States should never cut diplomatic relations with any country for so-called “moral reasons” and then impose sanctions on it. We must revert to the Founders’ policy of recognizing and dealing with any country whose government effectively controls its territory and does not cause more than the average amount of trouble in the relatively few areas of international relations that are pertinent to genuine U.S. security interests. By maintaining a diplomatic presence in a foreign country, the U.S. government is able to deal immediately and face-to-face with bilateral problems as they arise; it can gather intelligence about the host state far more effectively; it can work to suborn the country’s citizens to conduct treasonous activities that benefit America’s interests; and it is in a position to conduct covert operations against the host government if the president so orders. It is a matter of simple common sense to acknowledge that the United States benefits from having a small diplomatic presence in all countries, and a larger one in those who are real, potential, or imagined enemies. Not to have such a presence is to intentionally blind ourselves — as we did in Cuba for a half-century and as Obama did by ending the rendition and interrogation programs — and thereby threaten genuine national interests by opening the door to unexpected and unpleasant events.

Sanctions, too, should be avoided. They are, of course, acts of offensive war that strong powers impose only on weak powers that cannot respond in any equal manner; in realistic terms, sanctions rather than terrorist attacks are the preferred tools of cowards. Sanctions seldom if ever work, except if “working” is defined as causing a war and hurting the sanctioned population. Under a sanctions regime, the ruling elite of the targeted country is not hurt, but the average citizens that the U.S. government and its allies sobbingly claim to be helping by imposing sanctions become worse off. Western sanctions, for example, are said to have killed 600,000 Iraqis — mostly children — while Saddam and his colleagues continued to wallow in tyranny and debauchery. Faced with this issue, Secretary of State Albright said that Washington believed the impact of the Iraq sanctions was “worth it.” That statement pretty much speaks for itself, but it leaves one to continue to wonder why Democrats, and particularly female Democrats, glory in and boast about the murder of untold numbers of children at home and abroad.

Obama’s recognition of Cuba is worthless in terms of what he and Pope Francis call a “humanitarian concern” for the Cuban people. They will continue to suffer economically and will gain little or no liberty. Simultaneously, the Castros, their fellow thugs, and the businessmen they favor will thrive on the hard currency earned from expanded tourism and the export of such high-end luxury goods as cigars and rum. Obama’s recognition of Cuba would have been worthwhile, from the U.S.-interest perspective, if he had: (a) affected the immediate and permanent closure of any Russian and Chinese SIGINT sites that are now operating on the island; (b) made arrangements to halt the Cuban regime’s role in narcotics and people trafficking; and (c) if he had cleared the way for a substantial enough U.S. diplomatic/intelligence presence there to ensure the collection of first-hand information and to be able to help kill the Castro regime if a U.S. president finds it necessary to do so. Because it appears that he secured none of these things, Obama’s recognition of the Castros leaves U.S. national security as or more vulnerable than it was beforehand. It also will earn a courteous thank you note to Obama from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Ayman al-Zawahiri for once again showing the mujahideen and all of the Muslim world that America is always on the side of tyranny.

All in all, another typical day’s unrealistic and effeminate work for President Obama and Pope Francis, both of whom seem willing to risk the lives and welfare of their own and other peoples on the basis of a “hope” that things may improve for all. Although he lived and worked millennia ago, the Greek historian Thucydides warned against the actions of men like Obama and Pope Francis when he wrote that a nation ought never trust its security to “hope, which is the prop of the desperate …”

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the baneful foes of republican government.”

George Washington, 17 September 1796

Perhaps the most salient point in the whole debate over Senator Feinstein’s report is the one that has not been mentioned. Feinstein and many of her congressional colleagues are out to wreck the CIA and thereby further propel Obama’s attack on America’s ability to defend itself. But they are always silent on an issue that, if you, like Feinstein, think foreign policy has to do with morality, is directly analogous to the one they are using to try to destroy CIA. That issue is, of course, Israel.

Feinstein’s staged and slobbering moral outrage over enhanced interrogation techniques belies her and her colleagues’ reliably bloodthirsty and always enthusiastic support for whatever Israel’s government wants to do against a Palestinian or any other Muslim. Israel uses harsher interrogation techniques against Islamist prisoners than any used by CIA; Israel intelligence services have murdered Palestinians in Europe; smothered them in the Emirates; stole their land and demolished their homes in a never-ending search for Jewish lebensraum in Palestine; periodically destroyed their social, economic, and educational infrastructures; and generally roughed-up Muslims in a manner that the gods of the pathetically outdated Geneva Conventions would frown upon. Israeli governments also have long supported, planned, and encouraged operations inside the United States to conduct espionage; suborn U.S. citizens to commit treason; control or block media reporting; and smear and arrange unemployment for Israel’s American critics. Added up, these Israel-approved actions must surely amount to something that Feinstein would define as a “stain” on a nation’s character.

But that is not the case. The critical comments about Israel’s behavior made by Feinstein and her ilk in the Congress — in both houses and both sides of the aisle — are virtually nonexistent. Indeed, when Israel engages in these practices, the stern Feinstein gang sends the billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to Israel to cheer on the death the Israeli military is raining down on the Palestinians, and to promise Israel more money, more ordnance, and the passing of more U.S. secrets from their agents in the U.S. Congress so they can kill more Muslims. Perhaps there is a double standard here?

Well, yes, there is, and one that makes it clear that Feinstein and the huge number of her fellow congressional fifth columnists are manifestly more interested in the survival of Israel than in that of the United States. Indeed, the monetary, military, rhetorical, and private aid they provide to Israel to kill Muslims is directly responsible for dead, wounded, and maimed U.S. military personnel and civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the U.S. cities raided on 9/11.  But for Feinstein and her Israel-First colleagues these dead American Marines, soldiers, and civilians are simply the well-worth-it price they are willing to pay protect their country of first allegiance, which is not the United States.

For these Israel-First folks, dead Americans are not even a passing concern when compared to what they see as the “crime” of the United States interrogating terrorists to defend itself against Islamist enemies who are, in a large part, motivated by the absurd, war-causing, and self-defeating relationship the United States has with Israel, one that is based on the rank disloyalty of the huge Israel-First fifth column in the U.S. Congress and, from all appearances, the most wealthy and influential leaders of the U.S. Jewish community.

At base, of course, this is not an Israel problem. Because foreign policy has nothing to do with morality, but with material interests and national security, no one should dare to tell the Israeli people how, when, and with what to defend their country. Clearly no sovereign state — except perhaps for the United States under Obama and Bush — can allow itself to be attacked without responding with overwhelmingly devastating military force. Indeed, it is only constant U.S. intervention in the affairs of both Israel and Palestine that has prevented either from applying this rule of thumb and seeking an end to a war that has been draining both Israeli and Palestinian blood for more than sixty years.

While no nation has a right to exist — not Israel, not the United States, not the UK, not any other nation-state — all have the right to defend themselves to whatever extent and in whatever manner they deem necessary in order to eradicate a threat to their survival. Governments owe this responsibility to their citizens, and those — like Obama’s America and Cameron’s Britain — that do not successfully fulfill this responsibility must be removed by their citizens to ensure the nation’s survival.

If America’s real problem is not the state of Israel, what is it? The answer is disloyal Americans like Feinstein and most of the rest of the members of both Houses of Congress. (NB: I wonder how many are dual U.S.-Israeli citizens?)  By prizing Israel’s security over that of the United States, by attacking and undermining U.S. defenses — like the CIA and border control; and by endorsing Israeli behaviors that motivate the mujahideen to attack America as much as any other single factor, they are knowingly murdering U.S. military personnel and committing Americans to an endless U.S.-Islam war.

The present Feinstein Phenomena is not the first time the United States has experienced a situation in which U.S. citizens are more loyal to a foreign nation’s interests than to those of America. In George Washington’s presidency his administration was plagued by disloyal members of the Republican Party — the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party — who sided with revolutionary France against the interests of the United States. Jefferson and Madison were among the disloyal, and the former schemed with French diplomats and emissaries to undercut U.S. neutrality, to promote attacks by U.S. citizens on the territory of Spain in Louisiana, and to involve a virtually unarmed United States in France’s war with Britain and much of the rest of Europe.

President Washington, with the able assistance of Alexander Hamilton and a mostly loyal and nationalist citizenry, faced down and broke the pro-French fifth column of American citizens by enforcing U.S. neutrality and letting Republican disloyalty become so publicly obvious that Jefferson and the party’s other leaders had to back away from France so their organization would survive. Hamilton, at the time, accurately and succinctly described U.S. citizens who behaved as Feinstein, her congressional colleagues, and influential Jewish-Americans are now behaving as follows (readers should simply insert “Israel” in the place of “France.”) “The man who … shall be the apologist of France and the calumniator of his own Government is not an American. The choice for him lies between being deemed a fool, a madman, or traitor.”

Having listened to Feinstein and her supporters during the past week, it may well be deemed that she and they are all three of the vile miscreants Mr. Hamilton described.

“But there is nothing more hurtful in a State than that cunning men should pass for wise.” — James Harrington, Oceana, 1656

Senator Finestein’s dastardly but cunning decision to release the lying, Democrat-only “study” of the rendition-and-interrogation program is less an attempt to wreck the CIA than a desperate gambit to protect the Democratic Party from political annihilation. Because it already has been proven irrefutably that the information produced by the CIA program saved lives, protected property, and kept the United States in the fight against the Sunni Islamists — and did so at a time when both George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to use U.S. military power to whatever extent was necessary to defeat the Islamists — the CIA will survive and flourish once a non-interventionist adult arrives to run the national government.

That said, however, the era when the CIA and the other U.S. intelligence services could protect the United States against al-Qaeda and all the groups that have flowed from it is long gone. The Islamists are now firmly ensconced and expanding on four continents, are slowly forming a nation-state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, and Western commentators and politicians are again whining about a “lack of intelligence” regarding the mujahideen. Responsibility for this claimed lack of intelligence, of course, lies in the laps of Barack Obama, who ended the rendition/interrogation program and has never sought an adequate replacement for it; Senator John McCain for first describing the interrogation program as “torture,” thereby giving gravitas to the Democrats’ anti-Bush-and-Cheney witch hunt; and to the media of all descriptions for only partially covering the ongoing war which an ever growing portion of Islam is waging against the United States, as well as for continuing to claim that America’s foes are “terrorists” when it is obvious to any honest person that the Islamists have made themselves into an international insurgency which is now fielding semi-conventional military units in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

What to do? Well, Mrs. Clinton suggests abject surrender in her call for “empathizing” with the Islamists, while in the next breath she calls for the United States to work with women in the Muslim world for peace and, presumably, to pick-up the White-woman’s burden to feminize and de-Islamicize them. Poor, addled Mrs. Clinton, she still does not see the obvious, which is that her Israel-first-ism and interventionism, and that of her bipartisan colleagues, are the Islamists’ greatest motivators, recruitment tools, and donation generators. She likewise does not seem to know that she and all others in both parties — if elected — are obligated to protect Americans, period. No U.S. Marine or soldier should ever be called on to risk his or her life to make sure foreign women can vote, abort, and be — like American feminists —arrogant and viciously intolerant toward those who disagree with them.

Given Mrs. Clinton’s typically juvenile suggestion, it is essential that Americans understand that Finestein’s politically motivated report was issued because the United States and its allies are headed toward a world war with Islam, one they will have to fight domestically and overseas. The citizenry must also understand that since 2008 the Obama administration has done everything in its power — with able assistance from many Republicans — to facilitate an extraordinary strengthening of Islamism, and so has greatly increased the chances of a world war. The policies of Obama and Mrs. Clinton have, for example,

• Returned numerous incarcerated mujahideen commanders to the fields of war, and endorsed the opening of Arab prisons during the Arab Spring, events that sent thousands of skilled and veteran reinforcements to Islamist forces.
• Largely blinded the U.S. Intelligence Community by ending the rendition-interrogation program while having nothing comparably successful to take its place. They then resorted to eavesdropping on 300-plus million Americans — negating their 4th Amendment protections — and lied that this improved U.S. security. (This with Republican support) Eavesdropping does nothing but move America another long step down the road toward a tyrannical national government that will have to be removed.
• Invaded Libya and knowingly created a new Islamist safe haven, staging area, and arsenal. (This with Republican support)
• Supported both the military coup in Egypt that overthrew the victor in a valid democratic election and Israel’s war with Palestine, thereby ending the chance that any Muslim will believe Washington’s assertions of support for democracy in the Muslim world or that America is an “even handed” broke in the Arab-Israel war. (This with Republican support)
• Worked assiduously to destroy the Syrian regime so the mujahideen will have a safe haven and arsenal in the Levant from which they can begin destroying the Lebanese and Jordanian regimes. (This with Republican support)
• Assisted the EU, Hollywood, and the UN to steal half of Muslim Sudan’s territory and most of its oil resources and give them to Christian leaders who are corrupt, incompetent, and bent on waging war amongst themselves for tribal supremacy.
• Re-intervened in Iraq on the side of the Shia and so cemented America’s reputation as the eternal enemy of Sunni Islam. (This with Republican support)
• Kept America’s borders wide open, apparently assuming our Islamist foes are Ivy League graduates and so cannot find Mexico and then cross into the United States.
• Repeatedly proclaimed America is not and never will be at war with Islam, thereby reassuring Islamist leaders that the U.S. national government is still run by deaf and clueless morons.
• Willingly presided over U.S. military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by doing so helped arm the coming generation of young Muslim fighters with the conviction that Allah approves of their elders’ jihad and has rewarded them by providing the double defeat of a superpower.
• Cut the U.S. military to the bone monetarily and gave pink slips to many combat experienced officers and NCOs at a time when the Islamist movement has never been larger, better armed, richer, more talented, more geographically dispersed, and mo re ferocious.
• Spent Americans into $9 trillion of additional debt so when the world war arrives the U.S. war effort will start from a position of utter bankruptcy.
• Lied to Americans that bin Laden’s demise marked the terminal decline of the Islamist threat, a lie that will ensure shock and disbelief among the citizenry when it becomes clear that the Obama administration not only failed to reduce the threat, but by its deliberate actions made the Islamist movement a far greater threat then before it took office.

It is against this background that Finestein’s report must be viewed. Obama and the leading Democrats know that their years in power have at least paved the way toward, and probably ensured, an U.S.-vs.-Sunni Islam world war. They also know that such a war will be partially the result of Obama ending the effective and intelligence producing rendition-and-extradition program. Thus, Finestein’s report is meant to fix in the public mind the transparent but media-supported lie that the CIA’s rendition-interrogation program never yielded a single useful piece of intelligence. This will permit the Democrats, when the war comes, to counter attacks claiming that America would have been better prepared for war if Finestein, Obama, and their party had not blinded the U.S. intelligence community.

With the great physical destruction and cost in dollars and lives that will be attendant to the coming war, Finestein’s lie might be neither cunning nor durable enough to save the Democrats’ necks, or those of their Republican accomplices, from the fully appropriate rage of a populace that will quickly wise up to the fact that they were played for fools.

President Obama knowingly has taken America another step toward widespread racial violence. Between his implicit endorsement of what the looters, arsonists, and rioters have done in Missouri, and his plan to spend hundreds of millions on cameras for policemen so they can help Obama, Holder, and other Black bigots railroad them into prison, Obama has emerged in full splendor as both a racist and a teacher of hate and violence.

For myself, I think it would better serve Americans if Obama had to wear such a camera so that all of us can see who he meets in his ongoing effort to make the United States into a Third World economic basket-case and an even more laughable and war-losing military power than he has so far made it. Geez, such a camera on Obama and Mrs. Clinton might have allowed the citizenry to see how their two employees were amusing themselves while they were allowing Americans to be butchered in Benghazi. Given her recent statements, we probably would have seen a worried Mrs. Clinton sitting, fretting, empathizing, and fearing that one or more of the noble mujahideen might get hurt while they were murdering U.S. officials in Benghazi.

The problem Obama claims to be trying to fix, of course, lies not with the police, but in the fact that Obama, Holder, and other of the Black elite’s bigots have no use for equality. What they want is preference, a special status among their countrymen, funding from working Americans, and a privileged place for their views, their lawlessness, their out-of-control children, and their inexplicably mindless voting for men who have re-enslaved and buried the great bulk of the Black community deeper — speaking in terms of economics and employment — than it has been for a very long time. Obama and Holder, in truth, are clones of Al Sharpton. They simply are men who better manage to hide their Sharpton-like hatred for the people of all races but the elite of their own.

Have we recently seen the rest of the U.S. population — enraged and made violent by the rhetoric of their political and religious leaders — take to the streets and try to kill Blacks and burn their homes and businesses in response to the murder, kidnapping, rape, beating, mugging, car-jacking, stabbings on a train, or some other criminal act inflicted by a young Black thug on a non-Black American(s)? If such action was as acceptable as the barbaric, Obama-endorsed events that occurred in Ferguson, Black communities across America would seldom have a quiet night.

What causes this difference? The answer is the national government’s forty-year, forced indoctrination of students so that they possess an illogical and completely out-sized feeling of guilt for the existence of slavery in this country before 1865. This is among the national government’s Department of Education’s foremost goals, along with inducing guilt for the supposedly inferior status of Gays, women, environmentalists, American Indians, and the other preference seekers who inhabit the Democratic Party’s plantations. This is the main reason why that department must to be demolished in its entirety as quickly as possible, and control over education returned to the states, and, especially, to elected local school boards.

No living American has ever owned a Black slave, but living and working American of all races pay inordinate taxes, a goodly part of which appears to go to the national government’s coddling of those of all races who reside on Democrats’ plantations and feel oppressed, dislike working, believe the law does not apply to them or — like Obama and Holder — that they are above the law, and generally want monetary compensation for being “oppressed” that is to be paid by Americans of whatever color who work for a living, pay taxes, and obey the law.

It is far past time for such extreme dementia to be first refuted and thereafter ignored. Americans paid for slavery with 620,000 dead men and several multiples of that number in missing, wounded, and maimed. The supposed White debt to Black Americans has long been paid in full, and then some. For the national government to continue to tyrannically mandate additional payments and preferential treatment is to court sustained national discord leading, ultimately, to another civil war. Perhaps that is what Obama and Holder want.

It also is far past time for sane Black community leaders — indeed,the leaders of all of America’s racial communities — to start working to put their own house(s) in order by keeping their children in school, insisting fathers stick around to raise and support their kids, and by teaching children civics from kindergarten on so they respect their country, the law, the police, and other Americans of all races. Perhaps most of all, responsible Black leaders ought to be both damning and boycotting the producers and sponsors of the television programs and movies that have done more than any other American institution — until Obama poisoned the presidency — to lead Americans to perceive Blacks as violent, inferior, lawless, and want-something-for-nothing human beings. If you want to find the reason why so many Americans of all colors fear young Black men, you only need to focus on the Democratic Party’s funding arm in Hollywood and its products.

And now for Obama. When I was in grade school Sister Mary Lawrence stressed to her students that each of us would be known by the company we keep, and over the years I have found this to be not only true, but revelatory of a person’s character. When a man or a woman consistently associates with the unsavory, the good Sister said, it is more than likely the case that he or she is associating with his or her own kind. Ticking off names of lying, anti-American, racist, or traitorous individuals like Bill Ayrs, Rahm Emanuel, Van Jones, Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Charles Rangel, Bill De Blasio, Kathleen Sibelius, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jonathan Gruber, and those of a legion of Hollywood luminaries tells Americans all they really need to know about Obama’s deceitful and — given his immigration diktat —criminal character. Obama and such a supporting cast are certainly well-fitted to star in a much-needed move entitled — with apologies to Mr. Hemingway — “The Scum Also Rises.”

Americans, however, do owe one debt of gratitude to Mr. Obama. In years to come we all will be able to use him as an example with which to teach our children and grandchildren about the frightful dangers posed to the republic’s existence by electing an unqualified, Ivy League mal-educated, two-bit, Chicago punk-bigot to the presidency. Although he died century before Obama was born, Alexis De Tocqueville knew him well. “The first, and in a way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing power in a democratic society,” the Frenchman wrote, clearly in anticipation of Obama, “is to love equality or to make believe [that one does]. Thus the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified: it is reduced, so to speak, to a single principle.”

“The real defeatist in America is the man who says this nation cannot survive alone.” — Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, 1 July 1941

“There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.” — Walter Lippman

The Founders created a republic that could survive if it was run by honest men of moderate intelligence and common sense, but not one that could survive if run by men and women who are well-educated but also ideologues and pathological liars. Hence, America today is on the verge of being done like dinner.

Since Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in August, 1996, the people of the United States have elected presidents, senators, and congressmen who are neither honest not apparently very intelligent. This kind of electoral result is the chance that voters take in every republican political system, and it is a painful result that, in normal times, can be endured until a more savvy and less dishonest American emerges to win the reins of power and talk frankly and factually to the citizenry.

These are not normal times, however, and the kind of leadership we have had continuously since 1996 is leading the nation into a world war with Islam that will be among the bloodiest ever fought by this country. This war will kill and maim so many American soldiers and Marines that those already killed in Afghanistan and Iraq will form no more than a corporal’s guard for the coming dead.

And why are we getting involved into this war?

• Because two U.S. journalists and one British journalist were beheaded by IS fighters? This a national security threat to neither the U.S. nor the UK.
• Because Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities are being persecuted by IS forces? This is not a national security threat to the United States?
• Because Iraqi, Syrian, and other Sunnis are warring against Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian Shia and Alawites? This is a clear plus for U.S. national security and should be encouraged.
• Because IS forces will eventually threaten and destabilize our “allies” — most large oil producers — in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE? This is only a threat because Obama’s administration has not sprinted the final small distance to U.S. energy self sufficiency. And, by the way, most of our Arab allies and/or their wealthy citizens are sending arms, funds, and recruits to IS, as well as paying for the intolerant religious education of youngsters — who will become future jihadis — in the United States and its English-speaking allies.
• Because IS is inspiring/funding/ordering local Islamists to attack in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia? This is a threat to those countries only because the insane leadership class in each believes in the fatuous and debilitating myths of multiculturalism and diversity, has made it easy for foreigners who cannot or will not assimilate to enter those countries, and has refused to fully secure national borders.
• Because the fast-growing forces of militant Sunni Islam are threatening Israel? This is true, but it is not a national security threat to the United States. It is a threat only to the politicians in both U.S. parties who are on the take from AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.

And why should we have refused to re-intervene in Iraq?

• Because IS is cutting the heads off Westerners to lure America into re-intervening. Why? Because U.S. military intervention in any Muslim country means more donations, recruits, and popular support for IS, al-Qaeda, and other like-minded organizations. U.S. intervention in the Iraq-Syria theater will, over time, make everything it is designed to stop much worse.
• Because we will lose again, and so further add to the Muslim world’s perception that the United States is finished as a superpower, is unwilling to destroy its enemies; and can, with continued patience and sacrifice, be defeated. In addition, the U.S., UK, Canadian, and Australian militaries have proven themselves — in Iraq and Afghanistan — almost completely incompetent when it comes to defeating Islamist insurgents. Until they relearn the art of killing massive numbers of their enemies and their supporters those militaries should stay home and defend borders.
• Because the recklessly lawless Barack Obama has again violated the Constitution by attacking in Syria without congressional approval. He also has created a coalition of Arab tyrannies that will appear to Sunni Muslims as a clear U.S. effort to insure the stability of the Sunni tyrants who oppress them, as well as to protect the hated Shia and Alawite dictators who rule Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
• Because we are BROKE as a nation; re-intervention will be prolonged and extraordinarily expensive; and the goal of IS and all Islamist groups vis. the United States is to complete its economic ruin.
• Because Obama and the national government will further shred the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the name of “protecting Americans” from the Islamist enemies Washington is constantly motivating — through military intervention — to kill them and their soldier-children.
• Because we live in North America and our enemy has neither the naval nor air power to reach us. We also have the capability to incinerate them and their supporters if they find a way to hurt us badly at home. The Islamist enemy’s threat at the moment stems largely from the refusal of America’s bipartisan elite to control the nation’s borders and its willingness to tolerate the entry of enormous numbers of illegal aliens about whose location and intentions we are ignorant. (NB: If another major attack occurs in the United States, it should provoke not only the eradication of the enemy and its supporters, but also something akin to drum-head courts-martial for politicians who have served in the national government since 9/11 and opposed border control. The trials should be conducted with a substantial number of gallows and, as Willie Nelson would say, “all the rope in Texas” standing by and ready to promptly execute the sentences imposed.)

Having been taught by my parents and my faith never to pray for anything bad, or for anything bad to happen to another person, I have for more than 60 years obeyed that lesson. But I do admit that for the past few years I have stopped each morning before leaving for work to check GOOGLE News with a feeling of what President Obama once called “hope,” a hope that something seemingly beyond reach but very beneficial for America might have happened overnight. Alas, over the course of those years GOOGLE News has never reported what would be most wonderful news for America, that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Valerie Jarrett, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder were no longer available to continue their intentional destruction of the United States. I sometimes think that a regular prayer from me toward that end might have helped produce that most glorious issue, but lessons learned young die hard and that one is till strong in me.

So, if happenstance and great good luck are not going to deliver America from the clutches of the above-mentioned six-headed plague, Americans —like their ancestors — will have to do it themselves, by the ballot box if possible but, in the last resort, by whatever means suffice. A first action really ought to be for every family in America not resident on one of the Democrat’s plantations for the mindless, lazy, theoretical, illegal, and Ivy-League educated to purchase weapons and ammunition with which to defend themselves, their families, and their property against the coming felonious wave of unwanted, unneeded, and crime-inclined migrants that Obama and his plague-on-America gang are motivating to cross the southern border. The media is reporting that more than 100,000 American citizens have been killed by the Democrats’ pet illegals, and the more of that kind of human scum that enters the country, the more Americans will be killed. So get yourselves armed and pray that you do not have to shoot at both the illegals attacking you and the body-armored gunmen that the national government probably will send to protect the illegals who are intent on doing you harm.

The next step is in the lap of the governors. I have never understood why there are no state militias under the governors’ sole control — unless called into national service to defend against a foreign enemy — as mandated by the Bill of Right’s 2nd Amendment. I look and look and look but cannot find the amendment that negated that part of the 2nd Amendment, and that is because there is none. Over the years, the executive and legislative branches of the national government have cooperated to simply legislate away that constitutional right from the American people and their state governments in order to monopolize the tools of force and use them to enforce laws — and even executive orders — that Americans oppose and which hurt their home states. I have heard several legal experts “explain” what they called the “perfectly constitutional and legal process” by which the state militias and part of the 2nd Amendment were annihilated. Some pretty fancy talk for sure, but it was just deceitful, Obama-like lawyer prattle.

The U.S. Constitution cannot be altered except by the successful completion of the prescribed process for amending the original document. This was not done, and so all the legislation passed in the past century to destroy state militias is simply illegal, it provides no legal basis for preventing the governors from reestablishing the state militias; indeed, the unamended 2nd Amendment makes it their duty to do so. Unconstitutional legislation, no matter how voluminous and bipartisan, cannot negate a constitutional right.

The governors of at least the southern tier of U.S. states ought to soon meet and initiate efforts to recreate, train, and arm state militias that will be under their control. The governors can then use that force to protect their citizens from the felonious influx Obama is fueling, as well as to protect the viability of their states’ economies, health services, educational systems, and local law-enforcement capabilities. This is serious business, however, and those state militias might at some point have to face and fight the above-mentioned gunmen sent by the national government to protect the illegals and see to it that they are permitted to make a wreck out of any state they choose to focus on.

As always, force must ever be a citizen’s last resort when dealing with the national government, but Obama’s brazen disregard for both the Constitution and the welfare of working, and especially rural Americans; his quite obvious goal of making the United States into a Third World country; and his eagerness to wage war when the mood strikes him, makes a willingness on his part to ruthlessly oppress American citizens in favor of his illegals is something to be expected. I suppose the best Americans can do is reflect on and perhaps mimic the actions of an American militia captain named John Parker, a man who found himself at the head of his unit on Lexington green more than two hundred years ago. Standing face-to-face against the forces of a central government that was oppressing Americans and trying to disarm them, that captain forbid his men from firing first, but he added that “if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

All told, Americans are today seeing what no Americans before them have seen — a president-turned-tyrant acting unconstituitionally to impose his ideology and will on the citizenry, thereby illegally punishing them economically and socially, undermining the effectiveness of their state and local law-and-order regimes, making their elections irrelevant, weakening the bonds of the Union, and alienating whatever sentiments of affection Americans may still retain for their national government. We shall see in the next few years whether President Obama’s diktat on immigration turns out to be a last straw in what Mr. Jefferson once described as “a long train of abuses and usurpations” that required Americans to take up arms and “throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” We should all pray that such is not the case, but if it so turns out, it will be Mr. Obama who, quite knowingly and deliberately, broke the camel’s back and thereby started a fire that will grow hot and bloody enough to consume the plague that he and his colleagues injected into the nation.

What had been a steady but relatively quiet process of the Executive Branch usurping powers belonging to the American people or their representatives, has in recent months become a noisy, arrogant, and voracious theft. War-making, immigration, healthcare, privacy invasions, property seizures, and industry-wrecking and other environmental matters have, it seems, become the sole prerogative of President Obama and the unconstitutional power he is blithely wielding.

Obama, with Eric Holder’s helpful shredding of the Constitution, also has assumed to himself the power to conduct his long-intended war on white and Asian Americans, who work, raise families, keep their kids in school, and mind their own business, in order to make sure that they are subordinated and outvoted, but can still be taxed at higher rates to fund to his Black constituency; the current insipid, give-us-something-for-free generation of university students and recent graduates; and the millions of illegal Hispanics who are here, have no skills, and so bring no value to America, as well as the millions more that Obama, the Democratic Party, the academy, and the media intend to motivate to illegally enter the United States in hope of having His Majesty Obama smile on them and give them citizenship and lots of free stuff in return for living forever on another Democrat plantation.

The net result of Obama’s studied and incremental rise to the status of tyrant is that ordinary, hardworking Americans now have genuine, honorable, and actionable motivations to reclaim many of the powers that their ancestors delegated to the national government in the settlement of 1787. Indeed, they have more substantive and obvious reasons to reclaim their powers and liberty than did men who acted against British tyranny in 1775, and certainly much more substantive reasons to consider secession than did the Southern secessionists in 1861.

What is the remedy to Obama’s tyranny? Well, as my pro-Israel and other assorted admirers never tire of saying, Scheuer is a bear of little brain — “After all, he went to university in Canada, you know?!” So let me step aside and provide a few pertinent comments by men we can all agree are far smarter than this aging and, by most accounts, halfwit former-intelligence officer. The following words come from America’s Founders and those whose writings markedly influenced them, and their upshot for Americans was well said by Julius Caesar in his admonition that “heaven helps those who help themselves.”

CICERO

“For it is not by some accident — no, it is because our own moral failings — that we are left with the name of the Republic, having long since lost its substance.”

CICERO

“Most foolish of all is the belief that everything decreed by the institutions or laws of a particular country is just.”

SENECA

“There can be slaine/No sacrifice to God more acceptable/Than an unjust and wicked king.”

SALLUST

“All human beings who want to be superior to other animals ought to struggle with every resource not to be like cattle passing through life silently.”

TACITUS

“All that is achieved by submissiveness is that heavier burdens are imposed, as if we found them easier to bear.”

THUCYDIDES

“I do not blame those who wish to rule, but those who are too ready to serve. It is just as much in men’s nature to rule those who submit to them, as it is to resist those who molest them.”

DAVID HUME

“The right of self-preservation is unalienable in every individual, much more in every community.”

REV. RICHARD HOOKER

“Laws therefore are not, which public consent hath not made so …”

JOHN MILTON

“… turning to tyranny, they [the tryants] may be as lawfully despos’d and punish’d, as they were at first elected.”

JOHN MILTON

“… justice done upon a tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defense of the whole Commonwealth.”

ALGERNON SYDNEY

“The perpetual jarrings we hear everyday; the division of the nation into such factions as threaten us with ruin, and all the disorders we see or fear, are the affects of this rupture. These things are not to be imputed to our original constitutions, but to those who have subverted them.”

ALGERNON SYDNEY

“They [the people] know how to preserve their liberty, or to vindicate the violation of it; and the more patient they have been, the more inflexible they are when they resolve to be so no longer. Those who are so foolish to put them upon such courses, do to their cost find that there is a difference between lions and asses; and he is a fool who knows not that swords were given to men, that none might be slaves, but such as know not how to use them”

JAMES HARRINGTON

“… the liberty of the commonwealth consists in the empire of the laws, the absence whereof would betray her to the lusts of tyrants.”

REV. JONATHAN MAYHEW

“For the essence of slavery consists in being subjected to the arbitrary pleasures of others, whether many, few, or one, it matters not.”

JOSIAH QUINCY

“[T]he supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined in the use of them …”

JAMES MADISON

“If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is, that every nation has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one.”

JAMES IREDELL

“The only real security in any country is the jealousy and circumspection of the people themselves. Let them be watchful over their rulers. Should they find a combination against their liberties, and all other methods appear insufficient to preserve them, they have, thank God, an ultimate remedy. The power which created the government can destroy it.”

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

“Like all serious and reflective peoples, Americans have a vindictive temperment. They almost never forget an offense; but it is not easy to offend them, and their resentment is as slow to ignited, as to be extinguished.”

In compiling the foregoing I was struck that it is dominated by Romans, Englishmen, and east-coast Americans, and that I ought to include at least one appropriate viewpoint from Americans resident west of the Mississippi River. Happily, I found a statement that seems to pretty much summarize the foregoing in the American idiom. So here goes:

TOBY KEITH and WILLIE NELSON

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.

All the foregoing give food for thought, at least to this bear of little brain. Perhaps a bottom line is in order here and I can think of no better one than the following thought from Algernon Sydney. When considering how to remove a tyrannical government, Sydney wrote, “Civil war in Machiavelli’s account is a disease, but tyranny is the death of the state. Gentle ways are first to be used, and ’tis best if the work can be done by them; but it must not be left undone if it they fail.”