The Week Trump Lost

The election is not over yet. In fact, it is still more than four months away. Still, I have a strong feeling that when the post-mortems of the 2020 election are written, it will be this week that marked a turning point for Donald Trump. To paraphrase the old song from “Hee Haw,” this week has been one in which “if it weren’t for bad news, the president would have no news at all.”

Even though President Trump has consistently trailed in polling, this week it got worse with Joe Biden opening up a double-digit lead in many polls. The Real Clear Politics polling average currently stands at 9.4 points and the president has not led in a poll since February. The last time he tied Biden in a poll was in April.

The damage is not limited to national polling. Biden is opening up wider leads in swing states and even red states are becoming competitive. That Trump trails in all seven swing states is not new. What is new is that Biden leads in the only recent polling in Georgia and Texas. While many are skeptical of polls, the Trump campaign is taking them seriously enough to begin buying ads in normally deep-red Georgia.

The Trumpian implosion in the polls is not out of the blue. In fact, it is amazing that it has taken this long. Rather, the decline is driven by Trump’s inadequate response to a multitude of crises. Joe Biden’s increasing lead is mirrored by Donald Trump’s rapidly dropping job approval. From a high of 47 percent in mid-March per the Real Clear Politics average, Trump’s approval has dropped to 41.6 percent. This represents a net disapproval of more than 14 points.

After more than three years in office, the president’s re-election hopes are being sunk by his incompetent handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the resulting economic crisis, and the race riots and protests sweeping the nation. While the minds of many anti-Trump voters have been made up for months, if not years, the new factor is that Trump’s base seems to be splintering. Two key Trump demographics, seniors and evangelicals, seem to be softening in their support of the president. To make matters worse, polling shows moderates and independents are swinging away from Trump and towards Biden.

Part of the reason for the growing dissatisfaction with Trump is his response to the riots and civil unrest that has gripped the country for a month now. Some of it is also due to the worsening pandemic.

A few weeks ago, it seemed that the curve was being flattened and the worst was behind us. That was before many states tried to get back to normal and thousands of people took to the streets. Now, 48 states are reporting increasing numbers of new cases and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is warning that the “window is closing for us to take action and get this under control.” Getting the pandemic under control has been made more difficult by the president’s insistence on getting back to normal and his supporters’ ridicule of masks and other mitigation strategies.

If all that wasn’t enough, two new scandals erupted about President Trump this week. The first may grow to be the most serious threat to his presidency since the revelations of the Ukraine quid pro quo. In this new scandal, a New York Times report revealed that the Trump Administration knew for months that Russia had offered Taliban fighters a bounty to kill US and allied soldiers in Afghanistan and did nothing.

The White House has denied that President Trump and Vice President Pence were briefed on the intelligence, but this defense, that members of the Trump Administration did not do their jobs, does not bolster the Administration’s credibility. Not responding to alleged Russian targeting of American soldiers undercuts the president’s tough-guy image and makes him seem indecisive and incompetent at best.

The bigger question is why the Adminstration is still mostly silent. NPR notes that the White House does not dispute the substance of the intelligence assessment’s claim, only that Trump and Pence were aware of it. Whether he has known about the bounties for months or merely days, Trump has yet to criticize Putin’s Russia for its actions.

The second scandal, which broke Sunday morning, was president Trump’s retweet of a video in which an elderly Trump supporter in Florida can be seen yelling, “White power.” Trump commented, “Thank you to the great people of The Villages” on the retweet, which has uncharacteristically been deleted. The original tweet with the video is linked below.

The “White Power” retweet is yet another in a long series of unforced errors by President Trump. The retweet is just one more example of Mr. Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip impulsivity coming back to bite him. Retweeting a “white power” salute would never be good for a president but today’s racial tensions make the mistake all the more devastating.

The mounting bad news is threatening to fracture the Republican Party’s support for Trump. Charles Gasparino, a Fox Business panelist, tweeted this morning that “GOP operatives” are not-quite-openly talking about the possibility that the president could drop out before the election if “his poll numbers don’t rebound.” While it would be hard for me to believe that Trump would decide to bow out, it is possible that Republicans could decide to cut their losses and concentrate on preserving their Senate majority by distancing themselves from Trump.

With the election four months away, there is still time for a shakeup in the race, but, after four years of Trump, it is increasingly clear that what you see is what you get. There are still some faithful souls who believe that Donald Trump can become presidential and rise to the occasion. That isn’t going to happen. If the election remains a referendum on Donald Trump, Republicans are in for a bad night.

Much has been made of Joe Biden’s disappearance, but even though Sleepy Joe is a deeply flawed candidate himself, he is smart enough to follow the old military maxim, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.” So, don’t look for Biden on the campaign trail as long as Trump keeps stepping on his own toes. And that might be a while. November, even. Donald Trump just can’t help himself and he won’t listen to people who could help him.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Did We Just Surrender To The Taliban?

The Trump Administration and the Taliban have announced the long-awaited signing a peace deal in Afghanistan this morning. Under the terms of the agreement, all US troops are to be withdrawn in 14 months.

Per Politico, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told reporters at a joint declaration in Kabul with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we are finally making substantial progress toward ending our nation’s longest war. Today’s release of the Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States marks a pivotal moment in the peace process.”

Per the report, the hinges on the Taliban meeting several major commitments. These include breaking with al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups, and maintaining the reduction in violence seen over the last week as well as negotiating a separate power-sharing agreement and cease-fire with the Afghan government. If the conditions are met, the US will make an initial troop reduction from about 13,000 to 8,600 soldiers.

On March 10, the Taliban, called the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in the agreement, will begin negotiations with the Afghan government. On that date, the US will also review its sanctions on the Taliban with the aim of eliminating them by August 27. If the Taliban meets its commitments, the US would withdraw all of its troops within 14 months.

While most Americans are understandably tired of the 19-year war, in its rush to declare victory and leave, the Trump Administration seems to be making the same mistakes that the Obama Administration made in leaving Iraq. Back in 2011, just ahead of presidential elections, Barack Obama unilaterally withdrew American forces from Iraq. The Obama Administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed an American contigency force to stay in the country. Three years later, American combat soldiers were back in Iraq to fight a growing ISIS insurgency.

If President Trump goes through with his plan to abandon our Afghan allies, it seems likely that Obama’s experience will be repeated. The Taliban will behave just long enough for the last American troops to leave and then restart their war against the government. The peace agreement represents less an end to the war than an intermission.

“Should the Taliban fail to honor their commitments, they will forfeit their chance to sit with fellow Afghans and deliberate on the future of their country,” Esper said. “Moreover, the United States would not hesitate to nullify the agreement.”

However, the Taliban undoubtedly understands that Esper’s threat is hollow. If the US withdraws, there is very little chance that either Donald Trump or any of the Democratic candidates would order them back in, no matter what the Taliban does.

Those who argue that it is high time to bring the troops home should remember that it was the same Taliban who provided their country to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to train for the September 11 attacks. There seems to be no evidence whatsoever that the Taliban would not resume these activities given the chance, not to mention killing and enslaving their own population.

While American nation-building in Afghanistan has been less than completely successful, we have succeeded at our most basic aim, that of carrying the war to our enemies and denying them a base from which to attack us. Whatever else you can say about our venture in Afghanistan, the US military has been successful at denying the jihadists a sovereign base of operations.

At this point, I’m skeptical that the Taliban will meet the objectives set forth by the Trump Administration. Even that might not keep American soldiers in the country, however. The president obviously wants to bring the troops home no matter the cost.

And while any loss of American life is tragic, the cost of staying in Afghanistan has been relatively low in recent years. In 2019, only 22 American soldiers were killed there, a far lower tally than just a few years ago. Financially, the presence in Afghanistan cost $52 billion in 2019, about once percent of the federal budget. This is less than the Coronavirus package currently being considered by Congress and far less than the economic impact of the September 11 attacks.

Withdrawing American troops doesn’t end wars. It just hangs our allies out to dry and leaves them at the mercy of our common enemies. We have seen that time and again from Vietnam to Syria.

George Orwell famously said, “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” Several American presidents from Nixon to Obama have found that statement to be true. President Trump may be about to learn the same lesson.

Originally published on The Resurgent

SOTU: How Trump's Foreign Policy Is Obama-esque

President Trump’s State of the Union message last night certainly had its moments. There were the obligatory calls for unity, horn tooting about the strong economy, recognition of outstanding Americans, and even a few chants of “USA! USA!” Amid the boilerplate, however, the most disturbing aspect of the State of the Union was a return to Donald Trump’s isolationist tendencies and advocacy of a foreign policy that would not seem out of place in the Obama Administration.

In a speech that led off by saying, “Victory is winning for our country,” the president quickly turned to his plans to extricate the United States from Syria and Afghanistan without ensuring victory.  

“When I took office, ISIS controlled more than 20,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria, just two years ago,” Trump said. “Today, we have liberated virtually all of that territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty monsters. Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.”

“In Afghanistan, my Administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban,” Trump added. “As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism.”

While he referenced victory over ISIS in Syria, there seems to be no question that there will be no victory in Afghanistan under President Trump. Even in Syria, the prospect of bringing troops home goes against the advice of President Trump’s military leaders and national security advisors.

In fact, the reason that the United State is in Syria in the first place is because President Obama ignored similar strategic advice and ordered a precipitous and unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. As American soldiers left, Iranian militias and ISIS guerillas filled the void. In a matter of years, ISIS had gained control of a large chunk of Iraq and Syria and the US was forced to redeploy troops to slow the refugee crisis as well as prevent the terrorist group from having both a sanctuary and a source of income from captured oil wells.

In Afghanistan, the proposed surrender is even more blatant. Five years ago, Republicans blasted Obama for negotiating with the Taliban, the very organization that had given Osama bin Laden protection after the September 11 attacks. Obama’s talk of withdrawal dates was said to encourage the enemy to bide his time and wait until America’s abandonment of its allies in the Afghan government was complete. Last night, President Trump proposed exactly the same policy that Republicans criticized Obama for advocating.

The main argument against keeping troops in Afghanistan and Syria is that the War On Terror has gone on for a long time and people are tired of it. Those points are true, but it is also true that America has fought a number of other long wars, most of them forgotten. America was in Vietnam for 20 years, the Philippine insurrection following the Spanish-American War lasted 14 years, and there were numerous actions in Central America and the Caribbean that required US troops to be deployed for decades. Insurgencies can be defeated, but doing so takes a long time.

Critics also point to the cost of the wars, but spending in Afghanistan and Syria pales in comparison to entitlement spending and military spending seems to be money well spent. There has not been a significant terror attack in the US since 9/11/2001 even though Europe has suffered a number of serious attacks in that time. The cost of occupation, in terms of both blood and treasure, is almost certainly less than the cost of giving Osama bin Laden’s proteges room to plot against America.

In one of the most ironic moments of the speech, shortly after calling for withdrawal from the Middle East, President Trump recognized several American WWII veterans who had liberated Jewish prisoners of the Nazis. This recognition that America military might is a force for good in the world that prevents far more innocent deaths than it causes contrasted sharply with the defeatist strategy that could once again unleash genocidal killing and spark another refugee crisis in the Middle East. Incidentally, the US still has soldiers in Germany 74 years after the end of WWII.

As with Obama’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, there are other countries who are willing to fill the vacuum that would be left by Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran borders Afghanistan and has client groups in Iraq and Syria. The removal of US influence in Iraq and Syria would leave Iran with unimpeded lines of supply and communication all the way to the Israeli border. This is a disturbing possibility given Iran’s stated goal of destroying the Jewish state.

Russia has also expanded its role in Syria and the Middle East. Beginning with forces to help stabilize the Assad regime in Syria, Vladimir Putin is regaining the Soviet Union’s old footholds in the Arab countries of the Middle East, positioning himself as a more dependable partner than the United States.

China is also seeking a broader role in the Middle East as American influence there wanes. Although China doesn’t have a military role in the region so far, they are interested in the area for its resources and as a market for their products.

Along similar lines, President Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty is another retreat from American world leadership that plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The 1986 treaty negotiated by President Reagan eliminated medium-range nuclear missiles. The Trump Administration complains that Russia has violated the treaty, but junking the agreement entirely means that Russia is not constrained at all in developing new medium-range weapons. The United States will be forced to develop its own weapons as a result and a new arms race will ensue.  

The worst part about President Trump’s isolationist turn is that foreign policy is the area where Congress has the least oversight of the president. If the president advocates bad domestic legislation, it is a simple matter for Congress to block it or amend it to make it better. However, there is little that Congress can do stop the commander-in-chief from ignoring his generals and ordering the troops home. The president can also easily end many treaties and there is very little that Congress can do to repair the damage. Congress’ only real tool to rein in the president is impeachment.

George Orwell famously said, “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” President Trump seems to be taking a page from President Obama’s strategy in deciding that it is better to lose in Afghanistan and Syria than spend time on ensuring a lasting victory. Overall, President Trump, like President Obama, seems to think that the world is a better place if America stays home. I’m not sure how that makes either America or the rest of the world great again.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Obama vs. Bush

In the campaign for his re-election, President Obama often points to the fact that the country was in a deep recession when he took office. Obama’s reasoning is that the country was in such a dreadful state in 2008 that it is taking much longer than he originally thought to restore it to prosperity.

It can be instructive to look at the results of the policies of both President Bush and President Obama and compare them side by side. One common criticism of President Obama is his administration’s spending habits. When he recently claimed that “Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years,” CNS News and many other outlets fact checked the claim and found it to be untrue. In fact, a chart from USgovernmentspending.com shows that, as a percentage of GDP, President Obama’s spending is at a higher level than at any other time in our history except World War II. While spending did increase slowly under most of George W. Bush’s tenure, it was only in 2008, when TARP was enacted, that it jumped sharply.

A closer look shows that, according to figures from the Tax Policy Center, President Bush ran a deficit for all but the first year of his administration. As a percentage of GDP, Bush’s average deficit was about 2 percent. In dollars, Bush averaged deficits of about $251 billion per year. In contrast, in President Obama’s three years, he has averaged deficits of more than nine percent. In each year of his administration, the federal deficit has been more than $1 trillion. Obama’s average deficit in dollars was $1.33 trillion.

When viewing the data from the Tax Policy Center, it is easy to see why deficits increased so rapidly under President Obama. Even as President Obama was increasing federal spending with his various attempts at stimulus, tax revenues were falling due to the recession. Since spending increased at the same time that the government was taking in less money, the difference had to be made up in borrowing.

Borrowing leads to an increasing federal debt. It is true that the debt increased dramatically under George W. Bush. On January 1, 2001, just before President Bush took office, the federal debt stood at $5.6 trillion according to U.S. Treasury figures. When he left office on January 20, 2009, the debt stood at $10.6 trillion, an increase of almost five trillion dollars. As of June 1, 2012, the federal debt was at $15.7 trillion, an increase of $5.1 trillion. The federal debt has increased by as much under President Obama in three years as it did under Bush in eight. CNS News noted in October 2011 that President Obama had added more debt than all other presidents from George Washington to George Herbert Walker Bush.

The difference is even more stark if the election of 2006 is considered to be the dividing line. In 2006, Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. At the beginning of 2007, as the new Democrats took office, the debt was at $8.6 trillion, which means that three trillion dollars was amassed by President Bush and congressional Republicans. It also means that a staggering $7.1 trillion was borrowed by the Democrats from 2007 through 2012. A chart from USgovernmentspending.com illustrates how radically government spending increased after 2006, when Senator Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi assumed control of Congress.

Democrats argue that deficit spending was needed to combat the 2008 recession, but what did taxpayers get for their money? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment averaged 5.26 percent during the Bush years. The average during the Obama years was 9.26 percent.

Even more telling is the fact that the Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate, the percentage of Americans working, has declined from 67.2 percent in January 2001 to 65.7 in January 2009 and to 63.8 percent in May 2012. According to Multpl.com, the U.S. population increased in each of those years, from 285 million in 2001 to 306 million in 2009. The U.S. population now stands at 313 million according to the U.S. Census. This means that fewer total Americans are working now than when President Obama took office even though the population has increased by 7 million. When President Bush left office 20.1 million Americans were working. Today only 19.9 million are in spite of a population growth of seven million.

Even though the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, five months into Obama’s presidency and three years ago, the economy and the job markets have not recovered. By many measures, the economy is worse today than it was three years ago. The Federal Reserve announced last week that American wealth had decreased by 40 percent between 2007 and 2011. Home prices, which crashed in 2008, have not recovered and continue to decline in many markets. The Wall St. Journal reports that economists are “increasingly pessimistic” and more are predicting that the stagnant recovery will turn into another recession.

Foreign policy was an area where President Bush faced intense criticism. The 9/11 attacks, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, were the defining events of his time in office. President Obama campaigned against the wars and Bush policies such as the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Three years later, the prison there remains open. Many leftists decried Bush’s “illegal wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan even though he sought and obtained congressional approval. President Obama did not notify Congress or seek approval before intervening in Libya.

In fact, Obama has quietly adopted a defense policy that is similar to that of President Bush. Perhaps the biggest difference is George W. Bush’s policy of capturing and interrogating terrorists where Obama primarily targets them from afar with drones. Obama’s personal involvement in targeting terrorists is reminiscent of President Lyndon Johnson’s personal involvement in selecting targets – and placing others off limits - during the Vietnam War. Obama did remove all but a token force of U.S. troops from Iraq, but American forces remain in Afghanistan. Perhaps this, along with his reluctance to embrace uprisings in Muslim countries, is why many Arab countries have an even more negative view of the United States under Obama than they did under President Bush according to Pew Global.

With respect to Iran, President Obama’s record is mixed. Obama resisted toughening sanctions on Iran until he was mandated by Congress. Obama also continued Bush’s program of cyber attacks against the Iranian nuclear program, but leaks from his administration detailing these and other intelligence matters have hurt U.S. interests. Breaches of security from the administration may have led to the life sentence for treason of Shakil Afridi, a doctor in Pakistan who helped the CIA determine bin Laden’s location.

Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of the Obama era was the president’s failure to capitalize on the 2009 Green Revolution uprising in Iran. A secret memo obtained by the Washington Examiner reveals that leaders of the dissidents had requested American help in toppling the regime. President Obama failed to act and, as a result, the Iranian government is growing ever closer to becoming a nuclear power.

President Obama’s greatest triumph, foreign policy or domestic, was undoubtedly the killing of Osama bin Laden, yet if Obama had his way the programs that generated much of the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s whereabouts would have been closed down years ago. As Real Clear Politics explains, the enhanced interrogation techniques used during the Bush Administration uncovered much of the intelligence that led to bin Laden. Obama should get credit for issuing the order to attack, but President Bush should also get credit for making the attack possible.

Liberals charge that Bush’s defense and war spending is what led to the massive federal debt. A chart from USgovernmentspending.com does show that defense spending in total dollars increased under President Bush, but it has also continued to increase under President Obama. However, between 2002 and 2008, defense spending as a percentage of GDP remained between four and five percent under President Bush. Total defense dollars and defense spending as a percentage of GDP both increased under President Obama. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, defense spending makes up 20 percent of the federal budget and is dwarfed by Social Security, Medicare, other safety net programs and interest on the federal debt, which together account for 60 percent of the budget.

As Americans head to the polls this November, President Obama is unlikely to ask, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” as President Reagan famously did in 1984. Three years after the official end of the Great Recession, President Obama and his policies deserve the blame for the lack of recovery. Obama has yet to offer any new tactic that has not been tried previously without success. On foreign policy, Obama’s position has evolved, but he has displayed little desire to take strong and decisive action, resulting in many missed opportunities.

Read this article on Examiner.com:

Questions for Ron Paul

Last year, the Atlanta Conservative Examiner published an article that asked several questions of supporters of Barack Obama. While well-intentioned and honestly seeking the liberal perspective on a number of issues, the response was underwhelming. Perhaps this was because there are no good answers to the questions asked.

In a similar vein, here are several questions for Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul and his supporters. Judging from the large response that typically comes from any article mentioning Ron Paul (especially when it mentions him critically), the Paul supporters are likely to have more to say in his defense than the Obama supporters did.

First, Ron Paul makes a point of saying that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional on the grounds that the Constitution gives only Congress the power to “coin Money, [and] regulate the Value thereof….” (Article I Section 8). If this interpretation is correct, then why is it that Congress established the first private central bank, the Bank of the United States, within a few years of the ratification of the Constitution? At that point, many of the framers of the Constitution were still in Congress.

The Bank of the United States was a private company. The bill establishing it was signed into law in 1791 by none other than George Washington. After the bank’s charter expired in 1811, Congress created the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. This bank existed until 1841. At 99 years old, the Federal Reserve is the longest lasting central bank in U.S. history, but it was far from the first.

Also along economic lines, Ron Paul advocates a gold standard, which leads to another question. Paul blames fiat money and the Federal Reserve for the current economic unpleasantness, but even when the U.S. was on a gold standard the business cycle led to periods of economic depression. In fact the Federal Reserve and the gold standard coexisted for decades. The gold standard did not prevent the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in U.S. history.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and the United States stayed on the gold standard until 1973. In 1933, President Roosevelt made it illegal for Americans to own gold and required them to sell their gold to the Federal Reserve at a price set by the government, but technically the dollar was still linked to gold. Roosevelt’s executive order remained in effect until the 1960s and 1970s when it was repealed piecemeal.

In the past, linking the value of the dollar to the value of gold did not prevent the boom and bust cycle. A federal gold standard did not prevent the government from manipulating the value of the dollar. Why does Paul believe that a new gold standard would be any different? Further, U.S. production of gold is declining. Would a gold standard remove the influence of unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve only to replace it with a dependency on gold miners, bankers, and bureaucrats in countries like China and Russia for economic growth?

A third question involves Paul’s assertions that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war (Article I Section 8), but stops short of requiring a declaration of war. The same section gives Congress the power to “define and punish… offences against the law of nations,” arguably the power to intervene on behalf of victims of crimes against humanity, and to “provide for the common defense,” a general term that could be construed to include pre-emptive war against a hostile nation believed to be developing WMDs.

As Max Boot notes in his book, “The Savage Wars of Peace,” declared wars have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. One of the first undeclared wars occurred during the administration of none other than Thomas Jefferson against the Barbary pirates. This conflict is memorialized in the line of the Marine hymn that references the “shores of Tripoli.”

In the 20^th century, U.S. forces, almost always the Marines, essentially invaded and governed several Central American and Caribbean nations. For almost 20 years prior to WWII, the Marines ruled Haiti. Long undeclared interventions also occurred in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, not to mention Panama. After the U.S.S Greer, an American destroyer, was fired upon by a German U-boat, President Roosevelt essentially launched an undeclared war against the Germans in the Atlantic more than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not begin with a formal declaration of war, President Bush did seek and receive the approval of Congress (President Obama’s intervention in Libya is another matter). How can Paul really consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illegal when both interventions were approved by Congress with Paul himself having voted to approve military action in Afghanistan?

Finally, why does Ron Paul oppose the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)? Did Paul not read Section 1021 paragraph (e) which reads “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States?” Similarly, Section 1022 paragraph (b) (1) says, “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.”

Since the law plainly does not allow the indefinite detention of Americans but Paul opposes it anyway, does this mean that Paul opposes indefinite detention of foreign terrorists captured abroad? These are the people who the law allows the military to detain indefinitely. There are Americans who believe that these foreign-born, foreign-captured, non-U.S. citizens should be entitled to a day in American courts. Is Paul among this group?

If Paul thinks that foreign terrorists should have habeas corpus rights and access to U.S. courts, it would be the first time that prisoners of war (actually unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions) captured in combat outside the country have been granted access to the judicial system. Even German POWs housed in prison camps within the United States itself during WWII were not accorded constitutional rights due to American citizens. No one would have dreamed of allowing captured Nazis to challenge their detention in American courts.

Hopefully, Rep. Paul or his supporters will answer these questions and help to clear up some of the apparent inconsistencies in Ron Paul’s political platform.

This article was originally published on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/questions-for-ron-paul

ACLU: Ron Paul is more progressive than Obama

Ron Paul supporters claim that Rep. Paul is the only candidate who represents a change from what they see as the almost identical policies of Presidents Obama and Bush. A closer look reveals that just the opposite is true. Not only are the policies of President Obama starkly different from those of President Bush on most issues, but the platform of Rep. Paul is almost identical to that of President Obama in many key areas. A new report card by the American Civil Liberties Union, Liberty Watch 2012, ranks Paul higher than Obama on a host of progressive and anti-war issues.

The area where President Obama and Ron Paul are the most alike is on foreign policy. Both seem to share the conviction that the United States is to blame for many of the world’s problems. Obama said in 2009 that “America has shown arrogance.” In many other statements, he has made clear his belief that the U.S. does not have the moral authority to lead the world. In a similar vein, Ron Paul stated in a 2007 presidential debate on Fox News that the 9/11 attacks were “blowback” from U.S. interference in Middle Eastern politics.

Both Paul and Obama opposed the War on Terror. In 2001, Paul voted for the Authorization to Use Military Force (H.J.R. 64) in Afghanistan, but the next year he voted against the authorization to use force against Iraq (H.J.R. 114). More recently, Paul has called for an end to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and would like to have the U.S. exit from the U.N.

For his part, President Obama also originally supported the war in Afghanistan while opposing the war in Iraq. In 2002, just prior to the congressional vote on Iraq, in a video on CNS News Obama said, “… After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars.  ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

A central part of Obama’s 2008 platform was the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. At the end of 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq on Obama’s orders. He is currently withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan with the last American soldier scheduled to leave in 2014 according to the New York Times. At the same time, Obama has stepped up drone attacks on terrorists, a policy which Ron Paul has criticized.

On the issue of gay rights, Ron Paul also shares similarities with President Obama. Paul was not in Congress in 1996 when Georgia’s Bob Barr (then a Republican, but now a Libertarian) sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act and President Clinton signed it into law. He did state on Fox News that he opposes a federal marriage amendment on the grounds that marriage is a religious and state issue and that the federal government should not be involved, although he did co-sponsor the Marriage Protection Act, which never became law. Paul was one of only 15 Republicans to vote for the repeal of “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell.”

President Obama has called the Defense of Marriage Act “unconstitutional” and instructed Attorney General Holder not to defend the law against legal challenges. Obama signed the repeal of “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” into law, and under his authority the Pentagon permitted military chaplains to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State has said that U.S. policy is that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”

On a number of issues, Ron Paul is even farther to the left than President Obama. President Obama recently rebuffed a petition to legalize marijuana. Ron Paul advocates an end to the drug war, which he claims is rooted in racism. In a 2011 debate on Fox News, Paul also defended the legalization of prostitution. Paul would end all foreign aid. Paul voted against the PATRIOT Act. President Obama reauthorized the law in May 2011.

Ron Paul has criticized President Obama for the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was a senior recruiter and theological leader of al Qaeda. Paul believes that Awlaki should have been given due process, even though he was beyond the reach of the American legal system in Yemen when he was killed in 2011.

Paul is also the only candidate of either party who does not believe that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to world peace. On December 30, 2011, Paul told ABC News that “they [the Iranians] don’t threaten our national security,” in spite of the recent revelations of an Iranian plot to plant a bomb in a Washington, D.C. restaurant. President Obama has called a nuclear Iran “unacceptable” and pursued sanctions as a means of isolating that country. Ron Paul calls these sanctions an “act of war.”

Rep. Paul and President Obama travel on two different ideological roads, but they often reach the same destination. Often Paul is farther down the road than Obama. Perhaps that explains why more members of Occupy Atlanta favored Ron Paul than Obama.

 

Read this article on Examiner.com:

 

http://www.examiner.com/elections-2012-in-atlanta/aclu-ron-paul-is-more-progressive-than-obama

More 9/11 myths

In memory of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the casualties in the war against the terrorists since then, the Atlanta Conservative Examiner is addressing some of the conspiracies surrounding 9/11 in the hope that sanity will prevail and that Americans can once against unite against a very real and common enemy instead of wasting time and resources chasing phantoms. Six Georgians died in the attacks, eight Georgians died in Afghanistan and 124 Georgians were killed in Iraq. Let us honor their memory and the sacrifice of the thousands of other Americans and Georgians who served or were wounded in action by fighting the real enemy: Al Qaeda and radical Islam.

After the recent Atlanta Conservative Examiner article, “the truth about the September 11 attacks,” there was a lot of feedback, both from conspiracy believers and skeptics. Conspiracy believers pointed out several conspiracies that were not addressed in the article. Some of these other theories and claims will be addressed here.

A potentially explosive claim made by one conspiracy site is that the cockpit door on American 77, the flight that hit the Pentagon, was monitored on the flight data recorder and that this data showed the door was never opened. The site claims that the FDR data was obtained from the NTSB under the Freedom of Information Act and that the cockpit door parameter shows that the door did not open in flight. The site claims that this information was discovered eight years after the fact by an Australian researcher.

This claim cannot be closely examined because the link on the site’s page that purports to allow a download of the FDR data is a dead link. As a professional pilot, I can say that it is unlikely that the cockpit door was monitored on the FDR. Prior to 9/11, cockpit doors were not hardened as they are today and it is unlikely that they were monitored.

An acquaintance who worked in the training department at Delta Air Lines before and after 9/11 agrees that cockpit doors were probably not monitored. He suspects that the monitoring parameter on the FDR, if it actually existed at all, may have represented an electric mechanism that allowed the pilots to unlock the cockpit door without getting out of their seats. This mechanism could be monitored, but the door could also be opened manually.

He also notes that the sound of the door opening might have been picked up on the cockpit voice recorder. Unfortunately, CVRs only record for about 30 minutes. Additionally, according to the NTSB report, the CVR was extensively damaged and the magnetic tape inside was “fused into a solid block of charred plastic.” A photo of the CVR shows the damage from the crash.

Another claim is that Marvin Bush, brother to President Bush, was in charge of security at the World Trade Center on 9/11. This claim is easily disproved. The real head of security for the WTC was John O’Neill, a retired FBI agent. O’Neill was killed in the attacks. Ultimately, the WTC was owned by the Port Authority of N.Y. and N.J. so the Port Authority Police were responsible for security.

911myths.com goes further to debunk the Marvin Bush claim. Bush’s company, Securacom (later called Stratesec), did have a contract to help

install security systems in the WTC after the 1993 bombing. This contract ended in 1998 according the company’s SEC filings. Bush left the company in 2000, and despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Wirt Walker, the firm’s current head, is a Bush relative. Even if Bush’s company had been actively working at the WTC on 9/11, it would be irrelevant since the towers were attacked from the outside by airliners. Additionally, the mere presence of a Bush family member is not evidence of any crime or conspiracy.

The conpiricists charge that the WTC must have been destroyed by explosive charges, claiming that it was the first time in history that a steel building collapsed from a fire. In particular, they point to Building 7, which was not struck by an airliner, and the fact that the buildings seemed to fall straight down, rather than to the side. In reality, no steel skyscraper had ever been hit by an airliner before. No steel-framed buildings had ever been left to burn for six hours without firefighting.

Charles Zimmerman, a Ga. Tech educated Structural Engineer, explains what happened: “Under normal temperatures, the bolted connections of the beams to girders or columns are simple shear connections and do not induce any significant tension in the bolts. However, under much higher sustained temperatures, the steel beams begin to sag like a cable, which introduces tension forces into the bolts in addition to the shear forces for which they were designed, causing brittle failures of the connections. If it is a girder connection to a column, it may cause an entire bay of floor beams to collapse onto the next lower level. The impact load of a floor collapsing onto the floor below is a dynamic load and is a much greater force than just its weight, because it is a moving load. This creates a collapse mechanism called "pancaking" which can continue all the way down the building with one floor collapsing onto the floor below, causing it to collapse, and so forth. While the loss of floors at some levels of a building reduces loads on the columns that once supported them, it also increases their unbraced lengths, which weakens their strength and their ability to support the floors above the removed floors. So the columns begin to fail at the levels [where] floors are lost and the entire building above begins to collapse.”

Zimmerman continues: “Where the fire was located on WTC 7, there were a number of collection girders and trusses to allow more open spaces uninterrupted by columns at lower levels, such that the failure of one of these collection elements due to the heat of the fire made it more vulnerable to progressive collapse. The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was likewise vulnerable to progressive collapse for this reason, but from blast rather than fire loads.”

With respect to the failure of the Air Force to intercept the airliners, Col. Marc Sasseville, one of the first fighter pilots launched on 9/11, recently told his story in the Wall Street Journal. Sasseville was given the authority to shoot down threatening aircraft. The problem was that his aircraft, launched on short notice, had no missiles and carried only training ammunition. Sasseville decided that if he had to, he would try to disable a hijacked aircraft by crashing his fighter into it.

Additionally, there was not enough time to perform an intercept in most cases. According to the 9/11 Commission report (pp.32-33), in the case of American Flight 11, the first place to be hijacked and the first to crash into the WTC, there were only 27 minutes between the notification of the hijacking and the crash. United Flight 75, the second plane to hit the WTC, crashed 11 minutes after the hijacking was discovered. American Flight 77 went the longest between discovery of the hijacking and crashing at 32 minutes, but NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) was only notified by the FAA three minutes prior to the crash at the Pentagon. United Flight 93 was discovered to have been hijacked 29 minutes before it crashed. NEADS was not notified by the FAA until after the crash. On all except UAL 175, the transponders were turned off by the hijackers, making it more difficult to track the planes. On UAL 175, the hijackers evidently tried to turn off the transponder, but only succeeded in changing it to a different code.

Another claim made on some sites is that the phone calls from the hijacked aircraft could not have happened because that technology had not been invented on 9/11. The reality is that phones were installed on airliners as early as the 1980s. As the planes flew lower to approach their targets, even personal cell phones may been able to make calls.

There are further holes in the 9/11 conspiracies as well. Apparently no one has developed a rational motive for anyone except al Qaeda to have carried out the attacks. If it was as an excuse to attack Iraq, then why blame Osama bin Laden, attack Afghanistan, and then wait 18 months to invade Iraq? Claims that it was to provide a rationale for cracking down on civil liberties or installing a U.S. dictatorship have been proven false by events. Likewise, no New World Order has arisen from the ashes of the WTC. Theories about Israel’s involvement seem similarly fanciful.

Osama bin Laden admitted to the attacks in a video message in 2004. Al Qaeda had a history of attacking American targets that included the 1993 WTC bombing, bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In a prelude to the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda agents assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001. This was meant to enable the Taliban to crush the Northern Alliance and prevent U.S. aid against the Afghan overlords. Conpiricists typically ignore these facts or else claim that they are hoaxes, as they do to anything that does not fit their narrow worldview.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the reasoning of the conpiricists is the existence of the conspiracies themselves. Would a government or entity that would sacrifice 3,000 people allow its actions to be made public? It seems more likely that such an organization would squelch the publication of books and movies that exposed their nefarious deeds and make the authors quietly disappear. Perhaps Alex Jones and his fellow conspiracy mongers should watch out.

Read the rest of this article on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/more-9-11-myths-cockpit-doors-marvin-bush-and-building-7

Lessons from 1938

An abandoned stimulus sign is symbolic of the failure of Obama's economic agenda.

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free,
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.

-Irving Berlin, introduction to “God Bless America”

Composer Irving Berlin penned those words as an introduction to the patriotic song “God Bless America” in 1938.  In that year, Americans surely felt the need for God’s blessings. 

As Berlin noted, war clouds were gathering across both oceans that lapped at America’s shores.  Beyond the Atlantic, Adolf Hitler has assumed power in Nazi Germany and began to rebuild the German military in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.  That year Germany annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland as other European leaders followed a policy of appeasement.  Kristallnacht, a night of coordinated attacks and pogroms against German Jews also took place in 1938.

To the west, across the Pacific, Japan was also violating the London Naval Treaty which restricted the number of warships in its Navy.  Japan had already captured Manchuria and Shanghai in China and was attempting to conquer the rest of the country.  In 1938, Japan announced its intention to form a New Order for East Asia and to dominate the region.

By 1938, Josef Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a police state.  In power since the death of Lenin in 1922, Stalin had already purged the Soviet Union not only of his enemies and foreign immigrants (including thousands of Americans who had fled the Great Depression), but many of his allies and innocent people as well.  Stalin’s policies also led to massive crop failures and famines that killed hundreds of thousands more.

In 1938, the situation at home was not well for the United States either.  The Great Depression had begun in 1929 and had worsened under the watch of President Franklin Roosevelt.  By 1938, Roosevelt’s policies of tax increases, high levels of government spending, and more regulation on business had turned a slow recovery into a second recession within the depression.  The country’s economic difficulties spurred strict immigration laws and an isolationist foreign policy.

In many ways, the world and America of 2011 strongly resembles the world and America of 1938.  Hostile dictatorships are rising around the world as our federal government attempts to legislate its way out of an economic crisis that was caused in part by reckless legislation in the first place. 

The most obvious threats are in the Middle East.  President Ahmadinejad of Iran is nearing the end of a nearly decade long push to develop nuclear weapons.  Iran recently unveiled underground missile silos that reportedly accommodate medium- and long-range nuclear missiles that could possibly reach Israel or beyond to Europe… or possibly even the United States.

There is little doubt of Iran’s hostility to the United States.  In June 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that Iran is renewing arms shipments to Shiite terror groups in Iraq as American soldiers prepare to withdraw.  Gates attributes forty percent of U.S. troop deaths over the past ten months to the Iranian arms shipments. 

After the breakup of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, the Russian Empire is now resurgent under Vladimir Putin.  Putin has reversed many of Russia’s democratic reforms and killed and imprisoned dissidents and journalists, both at home and abroad.  In a case worthy of a James Bond film, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent living in exile in the U.K., was poisoned with a radioactive substance.  It is widely suspected that Litvinenko was murdered on Putin’s orders.

Putin and Ahmadinejad (www.kremlin.ru)

Putin has also leaned on other countries.  He has attempted to strong-arm the Ukraine and has cut off the flow of gas through pipelines from Russia.  Putin’s Russia is also suspected of using poison to try to assassinate Viktor Yushchenko, then a Ukrainian presidential candidate.  The poison left Yushchenko’s face scarred, but he survived and is president of the Ukraine today. 

More overtly, Putin’s Russia invaded the central Asian country of Georgia in 2008.  Russia captured two disputed areas in Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and occupies them to this day.  Putin, who was director of the Federal Security Bureau, the successor agency to the K.G.B., is also widely considered to be largely responsible for the brutal Second Chechen War.  Under Putin, Russia has also been beaming slickly produced propaganda to the U.S. via the RT television network.

Like the Americans of 1938, the Americans of 2011 have become increasingly isolationist.  The Americans of the 1930s had not been at war for the past decade, but they had witnessed a twenty-five year occupation of Haiti, a twenty-one year occupation of Nicaragua, a sixteen year occupation of Cuba, and numerous other interventions in Central America as well as having troops in harm’s way in China.

As in our own age, war weariness likely combined with poor economic conditions to cause many Americans to embrace and isolationist view.  The America First Committee was made up of many prominent Americans who believed that the U.S. should stay out of foreign wars.  The isolationists opposed even sending military aid to the countries fighting Hitler, believing that America was safe from foreign attack.  The America First Committee was disbanded four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but their actions left the U.S. military woefully unprepared for war and emboldened aggressor nations.

Today, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped much of America’s strength.  After 9/11, most Americans supported a broad war against the terrorists and believed that failure to take military action was a bigger risk than doing nothing.  Now, after the death of Osama bin Laden, almost three-quarters of Americans support President Obama’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving the country ripe for a Taliban resurgence.  Americans now oppose the war in Iraq by a two-to-one margin, even though leaving might mean that Iran could gain control of a large portion of Persian Gulf oil fields.

Like the isolationism of yesteryear, today’s antiwar sentiment is largely because of the poor economy.  Although the current recession is not as bad as the Great Depression, it is one of the worst recessions of the last half-century.  Like the Great Depression, it is likely that the strong and swift government action taken to prop up the economy has made matters worse.  Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s treasury secretary and trusted advisor, told Congress in 1939 that “after eight years of this [Roosevelt] Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started….  And an enormous debt to boot!”

Even though President Obama and the Democrats promised that the stimulus and a myriad of other government programs would cure the economy, the recovery has been slow.  Even worse, recent economic indicators show that a double-dip recession is becoming more likely.  For many Americans, the best that can be expected is “the new normal:” high unemployment, lower wages, and economic stagnation.   

In Georgia, the unemployment rate has been consistently above the national average during the economic crisis.  That remains true, even though Georgia unemployment has declined slightly over the last few months while national unemployment rose.

There are two lessons to learn from the America of 1938.  The first is that, as President Reagan put it, when it comes to the economy, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”  The attempts to control the economy by President Obama, and earlier by President Roosevelt, create uncertainty and discourage businesses from growing and investing.  Increased regulation limits the ability of businesses to grow and become profitable.  Higher taxes mean that businesses have less money with which to grow and invest.  All of this means fewer jobs and economic stagnation. 

Second, America should learn that it is a force for good in the world.  In fact, it is one of the only, and certainly the largest, such force in the world.  When America focuses its attention inward, dictators and despots rise up and take control of their nations or assault their neighbors.  Appeasement works for no one except the aggressor.  As Edmund Burke said, “All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men [or a good nation] to do nothing.”

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