What about that anti-war propaganda?

MSNBC, CNN, and the other Democrat media are pushing an anti-war propaganda reminiscent of their propaganda against Bush pere's war on Iraq.

At that time we were warned that Iraq's was the third or fourth most formidable military in the world and an attack on that country would involve massive casualties and material losses on our side at best and bog us down like Vietnam in prolonged warfare ending in failure at worst.

When Bush pulled the trigger, Schwarzkopf crushed the Iraqi forces in less than two weeks.

This time we are being told we cannot do anything at all of a military nature about North Korea because of two things.

First, the NKs would launch a massive artillery attack on Seoul generating hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilian deaths right off the bat.

Second, the NKs would respond by launching a general war for the peninsula, a war that would be even more horrific in its results than the historic Korean War.

Though dreadful, neither of these results would involve a North Korean nuke hitting a US city.

Would they not be preferable to that, for the US, if not for anyone living on the peninsula?

But in any case is it so sure those two things would happen?

So the US military would not or could not preemptively destroy the NK artillery threatening Seoul?

So the NKs really are stupid enough to put the survival of their regime in gravest danger and put at risk massive numbers of their own civilian population merely out of pique that we had destroyed their nuclear program or taken limited action to coerce them to abandon it?

So the economically starved NK regime can field conventional forces more potent and dangerous to our own - our own combined with the SK forces and (if the war lasted long enough) forces from Japan or other East Asian allies - than could Iraq, back in the day, an Iraq we were told by the antiwar propaganda of that time would possibly even defeat our forces?

Well . . . .

None of which is to say The Duce should roll the dice.

But if he doesn't will America at last seriously consider abandoning our military commitments to defend SK and perhaps Japan against NK?

Or will we claim to be willing to defend SK and Japan even at the price of an NK nuke attack on our cities, even though we were so obviously unwilling to risk anything to keep defense of those countries safe for our cities?

If you were a South Korean or a Japanese, would you believe such assurances?

That's different from the question would you pretend to believe such assurances?

And, by the way, did appeasement convince Hitler he ought not to fight everybody else in Europe?

Or did it only allow him to better prepare for a war he intended to fight, all along?

Michael Connelly

Throughout his police career, Detective Hieronymus Bosch was an angry, violent man constantly at war with his own department and the world, as well as with crime.

He began to mellow toward the end, and since his forced retirement he has become far more humanly sympathetic as a private investigator in his sixties or perhaps even slightly older.

Though I will not yet say he has become likable.

I have just begun to read Connelly's Mickey Haller series, and so far Bosch's brother by another father is a total discredit to the legal system.

Still, in my estimation, the novels of both series have been wholly absorbing.

Monumental issues

Wiki loves monuments

Everyone deplored the recent destruction of ancient Buddhist and Roman religious monuments and ruins that had stood for long in Islamic lands by Muslim zealots.

Though it was the site of horrific abuses of slaves, animals, and religious minorities - notably, Christians in particular - , pretty much everyone would deplore any proposal to destroy the Roman Colosseum on that or any account.

Most of us would find it odd for the Republicans of France, Germany, or Italy to demand statues of and other monuments celebrating past French, German, or Italian princes or monarchs, or to or of their past monarchies, be torn down on that account.

The Versailles Palace?

The Brandenburg Gate?

Mad Ludwig's castle in Bavaria?

Even of monarchs who resisted republicanism, or those deposed by republicans.

But everyone approved when Europeans throughout the Eastern Bloc tore down monuments celebrating Lenin, Marx, and Communism.

Nearly everyone today approves retrospectively the destruction of monuments celebrating Nazi and Fascist leaders, or Nazism, or Fascism in the immediate aftermath of World War Two.

Only the most hardened of the politically correct deplore the destruction by the Spanish conquerors of Aztec temples and monuments involved in the practise of human sacrifice.

Is it that we generally oppose destruction of monuments to politically or culturally dead causes or belief systems, no matter how deplorable they may have been, but approve destruction of monuments to wicked causes or belief systems we regard as all too much still alive?

Abolish US congressional districts

Elect house members statewide, either individually (though simultaneously) as we do senators or through a system of proportional representation, the parties running opposing lists.

Nothing seems to require that all states handle the matter in the same way, so individual states could change their practises according to their lights.

So much for gerrymandering.

Wisconsin voter hopes Supreme Court will revolutionize map drawing

About America First

White nationalist Ann Coulter expressly links America First as a national defense policy to America First as white nationalist immigration policy.

Peace through border security

During the campaign, Little Marco dismissed as unrealistic Trump’s proposed temporary suspension of Muslim immigration to our country — including the more than 2 million Muslims we’ve taken in just since 9/11. 

Instead, Rubio proposed we do something achievable, like remake the entire Middle East with wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.

Trump, and only Trump, promised to put our country first and protect our interests when it came to immigration and foreign wars. 

He didn’t care that political correctness dictated putting America’s interests dead last.

But since becoming president, instead of draining the swamp, the swamp seems to have drained Trump. 

His agenda has been drowned out by the agenda of Washington’s Uni-Party.

That’s why all we ever hear about is tax cuts and war (unless Trump is speaking to one of his 30,000-person focus groups).

Rather than actually being like Reagan and winning the war we’re in, Trump has decided to continue Obama’s unconstitutional “executive amnesty” — opposition to which gave the GOP stunning victories in 2014 and 2016. 

This week, he grabbed the hot poker of Afghanistan, allowing ecstatic Democrats to scratch that disaster off Obama’s Greatest Hits list. 

Now, it’s Trump’s war.

I don’t know why Trump would surround himself with people who oppose his agenda, but on Tuesday night he heard again from the people who see him as our country’s last hope. 

He should listen to them.

Actually, it was GW who gave us both the major and continuing wars in the Middle East and not Obama, first the one in Afghanistan and then the one in Iraq that has metastasized into Syria, slices of Turkey, and through ISIS to other Muslim areas of the world.

O just got himself stuck with the tar baby much as Bozo has now done, both of them buying the argument that we cannot allow the Taliban safety in, much less control of, Afghanistan, nor can we allow al-Qaeda safety anywhere, nor can we allow any organization that conducts or has conducted terrorism against the Occident safety anywhere.

Partly this is owing to the idea that control of or safe harbor in a country would make it easier for these folks to lay hands on nukes with which to threaten or strike the Occident.

Partly it is owing to the idea that Israel must be defended by the Occident.

And in both cases it is owing to the idea that the Occident must be defended and indeed led by the US.

Buchananites - though not AC right here - generally reply that the Occident can take care of itself without us, and of Israel as well if it so wishes, and that we in America are threatened by these folks and their friends only because of our wars against them.

More broadly, they say, their hostility toward us is a reflection of our global cultural and ideological imperialism that openly seeks to destroy their traditional Muslim ways in their own lands, which we ought in prudence to abandon.

Forcing drivers licenses for women and gay rights on Mecca, for example, only pokes the hornets' nest.

If the isolationist side of this argument is accepted then in the wake of 9/11 GW should have settled for punitive strikes in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and Taliban military installations instead of seeking regime change along with the utter destruction of that organization, and he should have let Iraq alone, altogether.

And then he should have backed away from the entire region.

But if the globalist side is right then so was GW.

As for the Buchananite argument against Muslims coming to the US that Muslims living or sojourning here pose a threat, it overlooks their own claim that the threat is due to our meddling in Muslim parts of the world and would evaporate if we stopped that.

If it's going to evaporate, whence the imperative need to block Muslims coming here?

Oh, and it's no accident that Buchananites, starting with their eponymous if perhaps merely notional leader, generally counsel acceptance of proliferation as inevitable.

Their view is that acceptance of proliferation coupled with American withdrawal from globalism would actually be considerably safer for the US than continued globalism coupled with anti-proliferation.

Time is running out. NK and the diminishing tenability of globalism.

If the idea is to stop NK getting a deliverable bomb the clock is at about five minutes to midnight.

Diplomacy and sanctions are not working and will not work.

If there is a military move to be made the time is here or almost here.

Trump calls North Korea 'dangerous' and 'great threat' after overnight nuclear test

MSNBC live now says official sources say evidence is consistent with the NK claim what they have now is a totally successful test of a hydrogen bomb.

In a very short time it will be time to get used to being in NK's nuclear crosshairs, if we don't take a military option that heads that off.

And then we will all have to think again about whether Trump's campaign position that we ought to drop our alliances with SK and Japan and let them get nukes, if they want, to defend themselves, was all that crazy.

The alternative is to let Seoul and Tokyo hide behind Chicago and Saint Louis, making our own cities targets of NK nukes in case of a new war on the peninsula.

Which is more and which is less acceptable?

Throughout all this, and reaching all the way back to the 2016 campaign, it has emerged that the policy of the Dems at MSNBC and CNN is every bit as globalist as the most hard-core neo-cons in DC, with even the peaceniks among them joining in the vigorous bashing of Bozo's America First initiatives by Hillary's neocon and globalist allies.

These media libs have been all along, and are today as well, supporting all of our Cold War alliances, vigorous expansion of NATO, and continued anti-proliferation.

The difference - the crucial difference - being that the commitment of MSNBC and CNN is to nothing but bluff, while the commitment of the neocons, though perhaps also ultimately questionable, is at least in some surface respects more genuine.

As evidence I cite the neocon calls for US arms for Ukrainian forces fighting a small but hot war with Russia, greater deployment of US forces to NATO countries on Russia's very border, and military action against NK.

So there are really three alternatives, as far as the military side of globalism goes.

Republican/neocon interventionist: Continue and expand our Cold War alliances with public promises and the real intention of going to war to defend our allies.

Democratic/liberal interventionist: Continue and expand our Cold War alliances with public promises but no real intention of going to war to defend our allies.

Buchananite/Bannonite/peacenik/isolationist/erstwhile left anti-imperialist: Publicly renounce our Cold War alliances and back away.

Asked less than an hour ago by a reporter whether the US would be taking military action against NK Trump replied "We'll see".

In my opinion, the rise of a nuclear NK and the further proliferation of nukes to other "Axis of nuts" regimes as dangerous, crazy, and inimical as they are provides increasing power to the main argument against continued American globalism, real or faux.

Continued American globalism at best limits the threat posed to us by proliferating and escalating regional conflicts, nuclear or not, only by increasing the threat of a global thermonuclear war having the US among its first targets.

More and more as the nuclear club comes to include ever more irresponsible and threatening regimes, that will not seem like or be a good trade.

Particularly given the obvious truth that regional conflicts do not inevitably involve us, or anyone at all, in anything remotely like global general war, anyway.

Politicians and pundits pointing to the two World Wars and to the Cold War as refutations of withdrawal from globalism are totally full of wild blueberry muffins.

GOP fissures again over DACA

On this little slice of immigration policy and the controversies thereover, Bozo has become in yet another way an unreliable Buchananite.

Carlson on GOP Opposition to DACA Rollback: They Show More Affinity for Obama Policies Than Trump’s

Carlson on GOP Opposition to DACA Rollback: ‘Republicans have repeatedly shown their campaign pledges were lies’

It Begins: 18 Republicans Fall in Line to Oppose Trump’s Elimination of DACA

GOP leaders add their voices to the chorus calling for DACA program to stay

These are the WSJ type, establishment, and largely pro-immigration DC GOP leadership against whom Trump ran hard regarding all things immigration related, and with whom his relations have lately been worse than chilly.

But that was then and this is now.

Trump, the last Bannonite in the White House, has revealed himself too much an empty barrel, a blowhard opportunist, to make a reliable paladin for this or, as we have more and more seen, anything else.

During a brief appearance in the Oval Office, Trump responded to shouted questions from reporters by saying he would decide the issue soon. 

During his campaign, Trump had repeatedly referred to DACA as an “unconstitutional executive amnesty” and had pledged to end it on his first day in office.

Instead, the Department of Homeland Security has issued an estimated 200,000 new work permits or renewals since Trump took office. 

The president has wavered between his desire to appear tough on immigration enforcement and his personal empathy for the dreamers, according to aides.

“We love the dreamers,” Trump told reporters Friday. “We think the dreamers are terrific.”

Anti-antifa madness

Did the feds class them as a terrorist group?

A congeries of terrorist groups (do the feds track congeries?)

Yastreblyansky reports that it's just another propaganda lie.

The Breitbart type right is trumpeting their altogether fictitious success in both painting the antifas as left-wing equivalents of the neo-Nazi right and associating them with Democrats as the nazis and their kind have associated themselves with the Republicans (in no small measure by invitation).

For some reason, some of them think Nancy Pelosi's recent denunciation of some antifa violence in California amounted to a surrender to their propaganda that Dems have been slow to condemn the antifas, their response to Dem and media charges Trump and the Republicans are soft on nazi and other right wing violence.

In the face of that, Yastreblyansky first denies that the alt.left - recall that use of the term was part of The Duce's initial moral equivalence peddling in relation to Charlottesville - "is really a thing" and goes on to question the thinghood of antifa.

But it is.

The hypocrisy of antifa

Jonathan Turley.

OITNB

The new season is brilliant, as were its earlier ones, but the show's politics are perhaps even more annoying than they were from the beginning.

On the other hand, when the show isn't preaching PC sermons straight from Zinn it pretty much undercuts that same propaganda.

The incontrovertible fact is that the prisoners are depicted as belonging in prison, on the whole.

Every one, of every race.

Including the many who let their sense of social - and not always racial - grievance lead them to repeated foolish self-sabotaging and outright criminal choices.

A lesson that seems to have escaped so many, in particular, is that that others were born with tremendous advantages of wealth and position far beyond your own appears a reason to do less than you reasonably can for yourself - to refuse to "compete in a rigged game" - only to a fool.

That prison is just chock full of such fools.

Too, to hear the black prisoners tell the story you'd think they were the only ones in that place, that there were no white women there, at all, or Asians, or Hispanics.

And nobody white was ever as lowborn as themselves.

Not even the self-destructive, ignorant, and stupid hillbilly girl in the next bunk.

Harvey. My wife sums it up.

We were comparing the performances of Pence and Trump so far in Texas, where Pence in shirtsleeves spoke with survivors who had lost everything, commiserating and promising help while Trump joined the governor and other officials to take a victory lap for the great job everybody was doing.

As I started to remind her of Pence's position on money for Sandy, saying he was a complete hypocrite, she overrode me, saying very firmly "I know. But Pence knows how to pretend" to care.

Update, 09032017.

In response to criticism, Trump and Melania have spent several days in Texas doing all sorts of commiseration-like things, from empathetic chatting with people who lost their homes to dishing out breakfast in a food line at a shelter.

He has also urged the Congress to quickly authorize five billion to cover current and ongoing FEMA and other Harvey expenses.

And he has made rather lavish promises (as has Pence, and as have many GOPsters in Congress) of an eventual, much larger aid package.