A few things that have been going through my mind for the last week or so:
Since when did having military service under your belt (politically speaking) make one an expert on all things military? Since when did one's positions politically become unassailable due to military service? The answer to the questions are...they don't. However, for the last few years, having military service in one's resume has come to mean that one's political positions are unassailable. The silliness of staking this claim amazes me. Sure, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) has a right to say whatever he wants about the war in Iraq. But the legitimacy of his critiques are no more and no less legitimate than anyone elses. Ditto John Kerry. They have a right to speak out in any way they so wish, as ridiculously as they wish, but their military experience adds little heft to their opinions. It also shouldn't preclude those who see their opinions, who lack the same military and combat experience, from saying that they're wrong, or that their integrity is without question. Consider this man's resume:
After beginning his career as a teacher and a coach, he joined the U.S. Navy and became one of the most highly decorated pilots in the Vietnam War. As the first fighter ace of the war, he was nominated for the Medal of Honor, received the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, fifteen Air Medals, the Purple Heart, and several other decorations.
Some military record, eh? The above excerpt was from the biography of now-disgraced Pennslyvania Congressman Duke Cunningham (R). Is Duke Cunningham above reproach?
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During the DNC in '04, I was cringing at the ridiculously fatuous military posturing of John Kerry. There's little doubt that his service was honorable (although some of his former colleagues in the Navy would disagree), and there is little doubt that his opportunistic behavior was absolutely disgusting once he came back to the States, culminating in his mostly apocryphal and slanderous testimony in front of the Senate in '71. Just to remind, Kerry claimed that American forces in Vietnam "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, [blew] up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside." (It was later revealed that many of these events were conveyed to Kerry from bogus sources, and it is questionable that Kerry witnesses any of these acts himself.)But let's assume that the preceding excerpt from John Kerry's Senate testimony was correct. Why, then, would John Kerry stand up in front of the entire DNC, and by extension all of America, and proclaim, "I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty!"
I'm still trying to figure why, if John Kerry himself admitted that he's a "war criminal", he would make such a militaristic spectacle out of his nomination. If John Kerry was "reporting for duty", does that mean he was reporting for duty to "cut off ears, cut off heads...and shoot cattle and dogs for fun"?
I guess it doesn't matter at this point. Kerry is a busted flush, and the closest that he'll ever get to the White House is if he is either invited to it, driving by it, or becomes a cabinet member in a Democratic presidency.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has been showing his true colors as of late, threatening to cut off gas to Ukraine if they don't pay significantly higher prices for it. (Price gauging would be the word to use.) Me thinks that he's not too happy to see an emerging democracy in Ukraine, much less Georgia. There is little doubt in my mind that Putin, old KGB officer that he is, is aiming to reconstitute some semblance of the old Soviet empire. It might not be as strictly dogmatic ideologically as the USSR, mind, but the man certainly has imperial ambitions to take back the pieces of what was once traditionally Russian imperial territory, which would include Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, among others.
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One of the biggest misconceptions of American history is that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies got America out of the Great Depression. The numbers don't support this theory in the least. If anything, it elongated it, and the only thing that pulled the United States (and the world, for that matter) out of the Great Depression was, ironically, the Second World War. Herbert Hoover can take lion's share of the blame for precipitating the Great Depression, but not for the reasons that Lefties would like you to think. Modern day leftist thought likes to depict Hoover as a "do-nothing". If only! Hoover, despite being a Republican, was no conservative. Calvin Coolidge, who employed him in his cabinet for political reasons, once said of Hoover: "That man offered me unsolicited advice for six years....all of it bad ." Hoover was a social engineer, a socialist in the classic sense. When the economy took a hit after the Crash of '29, Hoover started meddling with the economy to get it back on track. As is always the case when government gets involved in the commercial aspects of America, it didn't work. Hoover's Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon gave Hoover the best piece of advice that unfortunately was never used. "Liquidate, labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate...purge the rotteness from the economy". Historian Paul Johnson postulates that "by allowing the Depression to let rip, unsound business would quickly have been bankrupted and the sound would've survived. Wages would have fallen to their natural level". Instead of agreeing with Mellon, Hoover did just the opposite: he raised taxes on the highest bracket from 25% to 63% (!?!), he approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, which ignited a trade war with the rest of the world and turned the Depression into an international malady, and of course, went on a bender with social programs. By the time Hoover left office in 1933, unemployment was over 30%. Not that Roosevelt was any better. Unemployment never went below 18% on his watch, and there was still little to no GDP growth. At one point Roosevelt's agricultural policies included paying farmers for CUTTING BACK on production or for producing nothing at all. By decreasing supply, Roosevelt postulated, he would raise produce prices. As for the existing surplus, he had, in the midst of the Great Depression mind you, had ten million acres of cotton destroyed and six million pigs slaughtered. Agriculture secretary (and Soviet spy, by the way) Henry Wallace called it "cleaning up the wreckage from the old days of unbalanced production". Unbelievable.
In 1974, New Dealer and Roosevelt Administration official Rexford Tugwell said, "We didn't admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started".
If only Calvin Coolidge had run in 1928, we could've avoided all of this. Coolidge was the last true laissez-faire president America has had. Coolidge and his oft-slandered predecessor, Warren Harding, went through a similar economic downturn in 1920-21. (Coolidge was Harding's VP.) Instead of jumping into the U.S. economy with both feet and screwing up the works as Hoover and Roosevelt did, they did nothing, save cutting government spending. The net result was the greatest economic upsurge in American history up 'til that point, the "Roaring 20's". Far from being the gluttonous, profligate era that Lefties depict it to be, with little to no enjoyment of wealth beyond an elite few, the 20's saw personal savings of Americans quadruple, and 11 million new homeowners spring up. The wealth was far more widely distributed than leftist historians would have you believe.
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"Nothing is easier than the expenditure of public money. It doesn't appear to belong to anyone. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody."
-Calvin Coolidge
(How I wish every politician on both sides of the aisle would remember this!)
Enjoy your weekend, readers.
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