January 1, 2003 (Happy New Year!)

Hugh Hewitt Mega Ping!!

Bullseye! Good one!

-The Atomic Genie- what we know about North Korea's Nuclear program--

-Bush and Clinton and 911- some facts... --

Clinton amateurism

Those two words say a lot.

I was in jr. high school. I remember the shakedowns for lunch money. The confrontations weren't conducted by the "cool kids" as Mitchell describes it. These muggings were by the disaffected leftist thugs. The Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the school were always the bad guys.

Why all the attempts to recussitate the lagacy of X42? It seems to be just an attempt to bolster clinton so their contemproaneous support of the impeached former president isn't shown to have been a colossal intellectual failure.

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

That's funny.... I thought outrage as a result of an injustice done was a legitiminate emotion on the left. Instead, stealing lunch money appears to be seen as "cool" on the left.

Ah, well, as one of the small, glasses-wearing kids, who was regularly beaten-up in grade school, I learned something around 6th or 7th grade. How to put up enough of a fight to protect myself. Putting on a few extra pounds didn't hurt, either, though I stayed short and glasses-wearing.

But here's what cold-eyed realism taught me. You fight back -- act as a hawk -- and the burnout bullies backed off.

"...I don't mind Marshall trying his best to cover for the foreign-policy sins of eight years of Clinton fecklessness. To assess the effort as "threadbare" would be generous. It is a lot like the dilemma faced by the friends of Chamberlain, Baldwin and MacDonald: There are some political decisions that cannot be defended, and silence is the best tactic.

Marshall and others, however, have decided that the best defense is a good offense, and are trying to pin the perfidy of North Korea – abetted by the see-no-evil resoluteness of the Clinton team – on the Bush administration. In doing so, Marshall uses an absolutely childish tactic of attributing psychological defects to the people who were correct about North Korea and most other matters all along. Marshall wrote just this week that:

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.
I can't give you precise lunch-money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I'm getting at.

I do know some of these guys, and I do know what Marshall is getting at: He's getting at the fact that for eight long years of Clinton amateurism, these guys were right on every major foreign-policy issue. To be specific on just one issue: When the sands of the hourglass were running out on Clinton, just prior to the orgy of parties and pardons, the great legacy hunt was leading to a Clinton visit to North Korea and "normalization" of relations with the despot who was cheating us then, even as he starved his own people.
It was Gaffney, Perle and a few others who raised the alarms and prevented another massive, self-inflicted wound..." - Hugh Hewitt
See also, from one of Hugh's favorite left-wing rags, The New Republic - FROM 1998:

Is there an anti-missile gap?
Playing Defense

By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Issue date: 08.17.98
Post date: 07.31.98
As an intercontinental ballistic missile streaks from the Middle East toward the United States, an apoplectic American general stands before an array of flashing computer consoles. Grabbing a red telephone, he exclaims, "Mr. President, I can't shoot it down! We don't have a defense. There's nothing I can do about it." Does this sound like a scene from a Hollywood thriller? Guess again. It's an excerpt from a new videotape made by the Center for Security Policy, a think tank run by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney. The videotape's title: "America the Vulnerable."
Until a few weeks ago, the video might have seemed the stuff of right-wing paranoia. Gaffney himself has consistently been the hardest of the hard-liners. But then, in July, a bipartisan commission led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld released its report on missile technology. Overnight, the debate changed.
The report said that official U.S. intelligence assessments have grossly underestimated the time it would take countries such as Iran or North Korea to develop and field an intercontinental ballistic missile. According to the report, these countries are using huge underground laboratories (invisible to U.S. spy satellites) to test weaponry, and it would take them only five years, not the 15 predicted by the Clinton administration's November 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, to build it. "Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads," the report said, "pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and its friends and allies.... We are unanimous in our assessment of the threat, an assessment which differs from published intelligence estimates." Days later, Iran tested the Shahab-3 medium-range missile.
The Rumsfeld Commission set out to diagnose a problem--not to prescribe a solution. But for conservatives, who have been searching for a foreign policy wedge issue ever since the Berlin Wall fell, the report was heaven-sent. "If we do not decide now to deploy a rudimentary shield," New York Times columnist William Safire warned, "we run the risk of Iran or North Korea or Libya building the weapon that will enable it to get the drop on us." "It's a missile-gap problem," says Frank Gaffney. Gaffney had just gotten off the phone with an adviser to Steve Forbes--who, like every other GOP presidential contender from George W. Bush to Gary Bauer, plans to back a missile defense program come 2000.
Ever since March 1983, when Ronald Reagan--to the astonishment of his own advisers--announced in a nationwide address that the United States would develop a space-based missile defense known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, liberals and conservatives have fought over the idea. Democrats argued that arms control was the only way to go. A leakproof, invulnerable missile shield was impossible to build, they said, not to mention prohibitively expensive. In the end, the skeptics won. Although Reagan himself never abandoned the dream of SDI, he also turned out to be a great arms controller. He signed sweeping arms-reduction agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaffney and other hawks resigned from the Pentagon in protest..."
CLICK HERE for more

An interesting man, Mr. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. - eh?

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If you listen to Hugh Hewitt, or read his WND commentaries,
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The retrospective view of history can be coolly focused on productivity and fact. The parallels between first two terms of FDR and the two terms of Clinton are interesting.

Clinton's economy ran on the lies of leftist executives who falsely elevated their stock valuation. FDR's economy had no such opportunity, but leftist economists like Kennedy ran the early SEC.

Clinton had poor gov't foreign policy tactics. FDR also had poor foreign policy tactics. Under FDR, Hitler expanded across Europe, Italy in Africa, and Japan in Asia. Under Clinton, AQ expanded a "religious" totalitarian regime across Arabia and North Korea developed nuclear weapons.

Happy 2003. Let's make it a better one than previous years.

Marshall wrote just this week that:
"It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids..."
See also, from:

Feeley's 'chickenhawk' blunder: Hugh Hewitt slams 'all hat, no cattle' Dem
WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, October 2, 2002 | Hugh Hewitt
Posted on 10/02/2002 0:04 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Colorado's 7th Congressional District is an "open" seat, created by judicial order and carefully balanced between registered Republicans and Democrats. It is a shame that the Democratic candidate for the seat, Mike Feeley, couldn't have been as balanced as the district he seeks to represent.

This is a story of one candidate's meltdown, but it also an indictment of the leadership of Tom Daschle and Al Gore. Feeley could understandably claim that these two leaders made him do "it."

What is it that he did? Feeley branded the president and vice president as "chickenhawks" and called Cheney an "SOB" to boot. Then he tried to squirm out of having done so.

Here's what happened.

The Republican candidate is businessman and community stalwart Bob Beauprez. Beauprez is believed to have a small but significant lead in the race which both parties have targeted. Beauprez and Feeley met to debate on the same night that Tom Daschle melted down on the Senate floor, two days after Al Gore went hard left in a bid to lead the Democratic peace caucus.

Feeley must have been carried away by the rhetoric he heard that day, as he used the debate to demand an apology from the president. If the president didn't apologize to the Senate, Feeley said, "we'll play politics." He continued, "I'll talk about every chickenhawk Republican running for office – who never served a day in uniform defending his nation – asking for your vote so they can go to Washington and send someone else's child to war."

Reaction was immediate and negative..." - Hugh Hewitt
CLICK HERE for more
-- snip --
The definitive analysis on this "chicken hawk" fallacy was written in a Washington COMPost article - which we are not allowed to post the FULL TEXT of here, but here is the HEART of that unassailable argument:
"...The second variant of "chicken hawk" is that veterans per se are uniquely qualified to make judgments on matters of war and peace.
How does that work, though? Does a former airborne ranger get twice as loud a voice as an ICBM crew chief? Does the stateside finance corps lieutenant count more than the civilian who came under fire running an aid mission in Mogadishu?
According to this view, to fill a senior policy position during a war one would of course prefer a West Point graduate who had led a regiment in combat, as opposed to a corporate lawyer turned politician with a few weeks' experience in a militia unit that did not fight.
The former profile fits Jefferson Davis and the latter Abraham Lincoln. Not only did Davis turn against the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, he was a poor commander in chief, while Lincoln was the greatest of our war presidents.
Being a veteran is no guarantee of strategic wisdom..."
more

-- snip --
To: RonDog

Many thanks for the excerpt and the link. That is absolutely brilliant ! And to think that this was actually printed in the Washinton COMpost, is even more stunning !
I wish that I could have heard that show. The posted article is mighty good . :-)

11 posted on 10/02/2002 0:38 AM PDT by nopardons
-- snip --
Hard to believe, but it is still there:
washingtonpost.com
Hunting 'Chicken Hawks'

By Eliot A. Cohen

Thursday, September 5, 2002; Page A31
See also, from http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens.asp
The historical record illustrates that the judgment of soldiers is not always on the money. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1990, Colin Powell preferred sanctions against Iraq to the use of force. Eliot Cohen, author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, pointed out in the Post the day after Webb's article appeared that George Marshall, the greatest soldier-statesman since Washington, opposed arms shipments to Great Britain in 1940. Most of the policymakers who involved the United States in Vietnam were veterans of World War II...

15 posted on 10/02/2002 0:50 AM PDT by RonDog

Bump.

"As is usually the case with the left, witty is mistaken for wise, clever arguments are mistaken for persuasive arguments and wishful thinking is mistaken for hard facts."

This one sentence is so "loaded" with accurate articulation of a correct perspective on the liberal leftists, who as he also says "mock" and "taunt" the ideas of those they oppose at every opportunity!

Sadly, the media find this "mocking" and "taunting" so sensational and entertaining, even "newsworthy" to the point of intentionally misleading the public, who respond to their polls with the "conventional wisdom" they learned from said media.

Unfortunately, the vicious "news" cycle compounds the falsity of the snearing and smearing! These leftists become celebrity "opinion leaders" who succeed in suffocating debate through the extreme prejudice of "Political Correctness!" They rule our institutions with false premises based on false promise, in spite of the democratic process!

I also enjoyed his statement about the time before "appeasement" became a pejoritive term. The left continually change the language and keep moving the goal posts through this same preversion of the "process!"

How many examples have each of you seen, even at the local level, from the school district meetings to the council/board meetings of this "taunting" and "mocking," smearing and queering of common sense and right thinking individuals proposals to stifel and suffocate opposing views? How often have you seen it succeed?

2003 will be a momentous year, and those who want to comment on its events would do well to prepare to do so by reading the second volume in William Manchester's biography of Churchill, "Alone."
From amazon.com:

Freedom's Greatest Defender, Hitler's Greatest Enemy!, May 2, 2002

Reviewer: dougrhon (see more about me) from Rego Park, New York USA

Most people today know Winston Churchill at the great British Prime Minister of WWII. But Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister and had a public career spanning more than forty years. In this excellent book [Alone, Volume TWO] which is part biography, part history, William Manchester focuses on the period of 1932-1940 when Churchill was out of power, an outcast in his own party and universally derided as a warmongering relic. Churchill referred to these years as his "wilderness years" and they are among the most fascinating of his life because the years of Churchill's political exile coincide with the rise of Hitler and the growth of Germany from defeated power to world menace.
Indeed, as Manchester chronicles, Churchill's return from the wilderness was intimately connected to the rise of Hitler because Churchill's relentless public opposition to Hitlerism and British policy towards Germany throughout the thirties is what led to his continuing exile while this same stalwartness preserved him from the mark of shame that infected the rest of the British elite when the policy of appeasement collapsed in 1939...