VIDEO – ADMIRAL JAMES LYONS (RET) ON THE 30 YR HISTORY LEADING UP TO BENGHAZI
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Archive for the ‘President Ronald Reagan’ Category
TWO MISERABLE DECADES – THE 70’S AND THE 00’S
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)
Two Miserable Decades
Don’t worry, it was even worse in the 1970s. Or was it?
Jonathan V. Last
September 30, 2013, Vol. 19, No. 04
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Everyday life wasn’t much better than economic life. Terrorism first came into vogue in the 1970s. Sometimes it was a thuggish hijacking, with criminals commandeering an airplane and demanding passage to Cuba. Sometimes it was deadly, like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nobody much remembers it today, but in March 1977 Muslim radicals with machine guns and machetes marched into the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, just five blocks north of the White House, and took 100 workers hostage. They herded the hostages onto the roof, where one was killed and two others were shot over the course of a standoff that lasted two days. Simultaneously, affiliated terrorists took over D.C. city hall, where future mayor Marion Barry was shot and a radio reporter was shot and killed.
The B’nai B’rith incident was soon lost in the wash of small-scale attacks and bombings from Islamic extremists, Black Power radicals, and student leftists that punctuated life in the ’70s—none of which seems to have left much of an impact. One prelude to the ’70s did have lasting consequences. During the “long, hot summers” of 1964-68, 329 “important” riots took place in 257 U.S. cities, according to Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s authoritative America in Black and White, with a toll of some 300 dead, 8,000 injured, and 60,000 arrested. The riots in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, Newark, and, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., were only the most famous. These eruptions helped drive the middle class out of urban cores in the ’70s, sending cities into decline and making the new underclass permanent.
Violent crime was almost nonexistent in the 1950s, but by 1973 it was rampant,
Happy times are all alike, nestled in the comfortable batting of peace, growth, and stability. Every unhappy time is unhappy in its own way.
America has been blessed because, since the end of the Great Depression, our nation has experienced only two periods of deep discontent that lasted a decade or more. The first was the 1970s. We are living through the second today. Which was worse?
The popular mind often misremembers the past. For instance, these days the 1950s are held out as a time deserving special scorn. Stories set in the Eisenhower era are often shot through with contempt for the racism, sexism, hypocrisy, and dissatisfaction of American life. But this is revisionism; by many measures—wages, unemployment, home sales, marital stability, births, savings rates, upward mobility—the ’50s were an idyll.
What’s more, the happy times of the 1950s stretched into the 1960s. So long that “The ’60s” as we remember them—Woodstock, long hair, free love—didn’t really get underway until 1967 and continued well into the 1970s. That’s one of the central insights of David Frum’s wonderful book about the ’70s, How We Got Here. His other insight is that whatever people want to believe about the ’50s and ’60s, the stretch from 1967 to 1979 was a rarely mitigated disaster.
Many people remember the headlines from the 1970s: the shooting war in Vietnam and the quiet but existential threat of the larger Cold War; a president nearly impeached; oil shocks that forced people to stand in line for gasoline. But the problems in America were both broader and deeper.
The economics of the 1970s, for example, were brutal. In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since the mid-1950s. (The postwar average has been about 5 percent.) By 1975 unemployment had more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. While people were working less, so was their money, as inflation ate into the value of the dollar. In the 1960s, the inflation rate rose above 2 percent only twice—until 1968. At which point it began steadily increasing, reaching 11 percent in 1974, 9.1 percent in 1975, and 11.3 percent in 1979. To understand the effect this financial terror had on the national psyche, consider how often inflation fears have recurred during the last 30 years—even though inflation hasn’t topped 6 percent since 1982. (more…)
VIDEO – PRESIDENT REAGAN AND A SOLDIER’S PLEDGE
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013THREE-AND-A-HALF MORE YEARS OF OBAMA !
Thursday, September 12th, 2013
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September 11, 2013
Three-and-a-half More Years of Obama!
By J.R. Dunn
So the Syria “crisis” is reaching its culmination. Syria’s WMD’s are likely to be placed under the control of its patron, Russia, perhaps even with the cooperation of other disinterested, responsible states such as Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The world’s only superpower, for its part, will loiter on the curb outside, asking hurried questions while the big boys come and go, stepping aside quickly to avoid being shoved into the gutter by their bodyguards.
This situation is the sole handiwork of Mr. Barack H. Obama, successor in office to Washington, Lincoln, Truman, and Reagan. Pondering the better part of a day, I can think of no previous episode to compare it with. It has similarities to the isolationism of the 1920s, with the United States reduced to irrelevance on the global fringes, but that was a deliberate result of policy, while this… this product of ineptness coupled with ideology, is something you can scarcely put a name to.
There are three-and-a-half years of agony lying ahead. It won’t be pleasant, but there is a saving grace. Barack Obama and his childishness, incompetence, and fanatical fixation on dead political ideas constitute the apotheosis of a longer-term conundrum, that of a liberal/left that has infiltrated this country’s institutions to a point that state power and interference with individual liberties increases steadily no matter who is in office.
Obama offers us a chance to reject all that decisively. I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full. I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion. I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders.
We’re talking tragedy and retribution, in the absolute Greek sense — the Furies howling at midnight. Maybe that’s what it takes to cleanse this nation of this doctrinal pestilence. I want to see every Row A voter reduced to remorse. I want to see their noses rubbed in it. I want to hear each victim of this regime cry out to heaven for vengeance. If all this comes to pass, we may even see Democrats, fearful for their own political hides, wanting to be rid of him.
But if Obama were impeached, none of this would happen. Instead the focus would shift to Congress and the GOP, who then would be blamed for everything that occurs, no matter who — likely Smilin’ Joe Biden — inhabits the Oval Office. When the disasters come — and they will (most of them are on track at this moment and can’t be turned around except through drastic action which Obama and all other visible Democrats are incapable of) — they will be dumped into the laps of the Republicans. No other group in modern history has proven more adept at shifting blame than the liberal left, just as no other political party has proven more apt to stumble into the spotlight at the worst possible moment than the GOP. (more…)
THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD PRESIDENCY
Sunday, August 18th, 2013
COMMENTARY
The Citizen of the World Presidency
In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected. Aside from making it clear he was not George W. Bush and would get out of Iraq, the rest read like liberal boilerplate: “We have seen the consequences of a foreign policy based on a flawed ideology….The conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002….This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place.” In 2008, he visited Berlin and told an enraptured crowd: “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world…the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.”
In Obama’s fifth year as president, it is increasingly clear these vague phrases were not mere rhetoric. They did, in fact, accurately reflect Obama’s thinking about America’s role in the world and foreshadow the goals of the foreign policy he has been implementing and will be pursuing for three more years. Obama’s foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront. It is a foreign policy structured not to influence events in Russia or China or Africa or the Middle East but to serve as a bulwark “against the habits” of American activism and global leadership. It was his purpose to change those habits, and to inculcate new habits—ones in which, in every matter of foreign policy except for the pursuit of al-Qaeda, the United States restrains itself.
I
In the beginning came “engagement.” In his first State of the Union speech in February 2009, Obama told us that “in words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun.” A few days later he delivered a speech about the Iraq war and said again that “we are launching a new era of engagement with the world.” There would now be “comprehensive American engagement across the region.” In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2009, he repeated the phrase: “We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect….We have sought, in word and deed, a new era of engagement with the world.” (more…)
HERITAGE VIDEO – PROJECT FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE – SENATOR KELLY AYOTTE
Monday, August 5th, 2013THREE ARTICLES ON THE LIFE OF MARGARET THATCHER
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
- April 9, 2013
The World-Changing
Margaret Thatcher
Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence.
By PAUL JOHNSON – A Historian
Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. “Thatcherism” was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.
CorbisRonald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House in June 1982.
Her origins were humble. Born Oct. 13, 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Alfred Roberts was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was prominent in local government and a man of decided economic and political views. Thatcher later claimed her views had been shaped by gurus like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, but these were clearly the icing on a cake baked in her childhood by Councillor Roberts. This was a blend of Adam Smith and the Ten Commandments, the three most important elements being hard work, telling the truth, and paying bills on time. (more…)
VIDEO – MARGARET THATCHER – THE ‘IRON LADY’
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013OUR POPULIST PRESIDENT
Monday, April 8th, 2013
- March 28, 2013
Looking for Leadership
A disordered world devoid of U.S. leadership is not going to produce peace and prosperity.
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By DANIEL HENNINGER
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE : Populism is a full-time job. The payoff is the possibility of accumulating great political power. But a populist movement led by an American president runs two big risks. It alienates the other U.S. party. And it ignores the rest of the world, for which a busy populist has little time or interest. Barack Obama is in the red zone with both risks.
The upwelling of support for the new pope, Francis, was about more than the Catholic Church. It reflected a felt need that what the secular world could use now, but does not have, is leadership. It is a yearning born of experience: When poorly led, the world tends toward disorder.
The one we’ve got just now looks to be coming under an unhealthy amount of negative pressure all at once—from the Middle East to the South China Sea to the Korean peninsula, atop a never-ending European financial crisis and a building fiscal crisis in the U.S. Scan the political horizon for a significant head of state willing or able to lead in this moment and you will see no one.
President Obama, for reasons of policy and personality, is inclined not to step forward, but to step back. Germany’s Angela Merkel presides over a great nation whose people have little stomach to lead anything ever again. In Tony Blair and David Cameron, Britain has had two recent prime ministers who’ve been eloquent on the goals of world leadership; but persistent national economic drift diminishes their authority, as it does Japan’s.
Hopes for a leadership role from post-Soviet Russia have vanished amid what looks to be Vladimir Putin‘s genetic authoritarianism. Last week, Mr. Putin without irony rolled out uniformed men on horseback to greet new President Xi Jinping of China, the latest head of the world’s oldest Communist party. Patching cracks in the party’s legitimacy occupies the best energies of what one may loosely call China’s leadership. (more…)
REPUBLICANS – START FIGHTING BACK AND GET OVER THE 2012 LOSS
Saturday, April 6th, 2013
- March 29, 2013
Liz Cheney: Republicans, Get Over the 2012
Loss—and Start Fighting Back
Those who counsel that the GOP should move left are wrongheaded or Democrats, or both.
By LIZ CHENEY Ms. Cheney is chairman of Keep America Safe, a nonprofit organization focused on national security issues and education. She was a principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the George W. Bush administration
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
—Ronald Reagan, March 30, 1961
President Reagan’s words, spoken 52 years ago this weekend, still ring true, with one modification. If we don’t defend our freedoms now against the onslaught of President Obama’s policies, we won’t have to wait until our sunset years for American freedom to be a distant memory.
These days Washington careens from crisis to crisis, most of them manufactured. The Obama White House and its allies are engaged in the kind of sky-is-falling melodrama normally reserved for the lives of teenage girls. (As the mother of teenage girls, I speak with authority on this, though the comparison does a disservice to teenagers.) With our attention diverted by each fiscal cliff or sequestration drama, we are at risk of missing the real threats to the republic.
President Obama is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The national debt, which he is intent on increasing, has passed $16 trillion. He believes that more government borrowing and spending are the solution to every problem. He seems unaware that the free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system devised by man.
Perhaps his ignorance of that fact explains his hostility toward the private sector. In one of his autobiographies, the president writes that he felt “like a spy behind enemy lines” during his brief stint working for private industry. (more…)