The Left Sees Almost Everyone As Stupid

The left is absolutely certain that people in general are too ignorant and stupid to know what's good for them. As a result, the government needs to establish guidelines for taking care of the otherwise clueless populace. The irony of leftist certainty on this is that the left shows itself to be clueless and stupid when it takes one size fits all governmental action intended to take care of everybody. What happens is that the government action makes things worse. Obamacare is an example of how it all works. Once the government program fails, leftists want credit for their good intentions and a follow on program to fix the unintended consequences of their previous programs. The cycle repeats until the government impoverishes the people to the point that there are not enough resources to pay for the programs.

While this is a gross oversimplification, it's still essentially true that Rome fell because the people got used to the government handling everything for them instead of doing things for themselves. Bread and circuses both bankrupt the government and corrupt the people. In the meantime, patronage and handouts buy votes. This cycle needs to be broken in 2016 or we are going to live through the bloody failure of Pax Americana.  

Garner Arrest About Revenue, Not Racism

The Eric Garner arrest was about revenue. It was a cigarette tax enforcement crackdown. The outcome had nothing to do with race and everything to do with big expensive nanny state government. Liberals want big expensive government and want the police to enforce tax collection. However, they also need to play the race card whenever they can because that's all they have left as far as getting votes. Liberal results for minorities are bad schools and crime ridden neighborhoods. Bankrupt Detroit is the Liberal endgame, the end result of a generation of one party control of city government. Minority voters need to be distracted from the bad outcomes by constant racism allegations. The police are tired of being ordered to enforce tax laws and then being thrown under the bus when they do. The supervising police sergeant on the scene of the Garner arrest was a black woman. This is ignored because of the Liberal need to see racism everywhere. Liberals were quick to blame the Gabby Giffords shooting on Sarah Palin, but are outraged when New York police blame the murder of two cops on Mayor Bill de Blasio using the same logic with a lot more justification. Liberals are being destroyed by their own internal inconsistencies.

Recriminations Are Required on Vietnam War

I really can't stand the casual assumption that we were the bad guys in Vietnam. We left all of Indochina to its fate in 1975. The victorious Communists killed about 2 million Cambodians, and hundreds of thousands of other ethnic groups. Two million Vietnamese fled in leaky boats. There had never been any such mass exodus from Vietnam before. Ten to a hundred times more people died after we left than died during the war. I was in Air Force ROTC from 1968-1972 and on active duty from 1972-1976. In college arguments, I always said that if we lost there would be a bloodbath. It was obvious after the Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong left several mass graves of thousands of men, women and children that they executed. The Vietnamese knew about it, but it was not widely reported in the US. Anybody who took the time to look into it could have easily predicted the subsequent mayhem. Here it is 40 years later and the anti-war left has yet to even notice the havoc they unleashed, let alone apologize for it. The willful ignorance is so bad that our Secretary of State, who testified under oath to Congress that Americans commonly committed war crimes in Vietnam, gets a pass for his obvious perjury and is appointed to the highest level cabinet level post in the federal government.

What about war crimes in Vietnam?  The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group was a Pentagon task force set up to investigate.  They found 320 substantiated cases. At the height of the war, there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. This number of war crimes were a low productivity hour or two for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  American war crimes were hardly as common as John Kerry testified they were.  He lied.

I think that the post WWII policy of trying to contain communism made the Vietnam War almost unavoidable. I agree that the stated objectives of Kennedy and Johnson did not include stopping the killing that accompanied any communist takeover of any country. However, the anti-war protesters loudly proclaimed that they wanted to stop the killing as one of their major slogans. I heard them loud and clear, up close and personal. They claimed that the killing would stop if the US withdrew from Southeast Asia. The actual outcome did not match their stated goals at all. Worse, the "Peace Movement" didn't even bother to look to see the damage the withdrawal actually did. They patted themselves on the back for making "peace" and went on to their next causes with enthusiasm. They took no notice of the fact that they facilitated massive slaughter. When peacenicks look back, it's with nostalgia for the righteousness of their cause.  They are oblivious to their actual results.  And they are running US foreign policy today with the same disastrous results in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria.

Vietnam War Crimes Working Group link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_Crimes_Working_Group

Liberal Smugness Unwaranted

I love the author's smugness in this article.  Liberal policies, both foreign and domestic, have resulted in multiple "man-made disasters."  Obamacare probably canceled more insurance than it granted.  Liberals proved they can't set up a web site.  The Libyan intervention went so well that 4 Americans were killed in Benghazi, but at this point what does it matter?  There has been no global warming in the last 15 years and a group of scientists studying global warming in Antarctica had their boat trapped in ice and had to be evacuated by helicopter.  We spent over a trillion bucks in "stimulus," but all it purchased was enough votes to reelect our Community Organizer in Chief.  Our unemployment rate is falling only because so many job seekers have given up.  Our red line on poison gas in Syria was erased after it was crossed.  We are negotiating with the Iranian mullahs, but we have scared other Middle Eastern countries so much that the Saudis and Israelis are becoming chummy in self defense.  If the Iranians get the bomb, and it's clear that the Smartest President Ever is not going to stop them, then we have a high risk of nuclear, or at least general war between the Israelis, Saudis, Kurds and Gulf States on one side, and the Iranians, Syrian Alawites and Hezbollah on the other.   We bugged out of Iraq so fast that now Al Qaeda is in control of Fallujah again.  We are set to bug out of Afghanistan and leave Al Qaeda and it's affiliates in charge there too.  So while liberals move from disaster to disaster with enthusiasm, the only problem worth talking about is aging red necks in the Republican Party who rightly think the government is too big, too broke and begging for more terrorism from jihadists.  It would seem that red necks like me are too ignorant to appreciate the glories of the One We All Were Waiting For.  By the way, why is the Tea Party racist by definition while Al Sharpton, who actually cheered on a race riot, is not?

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/22/the_real_problem_with_the_american_right_aging_white_radicals/

Unexamined Academic Assumptions

Thomas Sowell had a great article this week on unexamined academic assumptions.  It really spoke to me.  The reason I have a BS in Math and MS in Statistics is because I wouldn't buy into the liberal mindset in Economics class.  I avoided soft subjects, like History, because I would not use Hegel's Dialectic to analyze historical events.  Also, when I was in college during the Viet Nam War, professors taught war was by definition futile.  I thought the professors were nuts to think that "war never solved anything."  It sure solved Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, not to mention Rome's Carthage problems.  I read history for fun now, but knowing too much makes me uncomfortable listening to people who believe the government is more efficient than private enterprise in running things like health care.  If I object that historically governments are usually very bad at running almost everything, the resulting argument provides a lot more heat than light.  Leftism in higher education is at least partially the result of draft deferments granted to the baby boomers who stayed in college to avoid Viet Nam.  I find the liberals who look down on my education generally have never had any of their assumptions questioned.  They think everybody knows liberals are the good guys, and folks like me are ignorant rednecks.  This attitude does not make for informed dialogue.  So I think Dr. Sowell's article matches my general experience with average "liberally" educated citizens. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347003/academias-unexamined-assumptions