Can Americans Face Reality? Test Yourself! Read about Today’s Detroit !

“Great civilizations are not murdered.  They commit suicie!”   Arnold Toynbee

Somewhere along the line the American system of teaching decency has collapsed.  You figure out the reasons.   But after you have read this plaintive about 2011 American profile.   The following article was sent to my by Prager fan, Steve Anderson.   The author is   journalist, ”Frosty” Wooldridge.

“For 15 years, from the mid 1970′s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan. I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs, and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses, and school yards. Trash everywhere! 

Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it, and ignored it.  Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps!

With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10, and in one case, one woman birthed 24 children as reported by the Detroit Free Press, all on American taxpayer dollars.

A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ flourish in Detroit. If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.

Mayor Coleman Young, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in America, outside of Richard Daley in Chicago, rode Detroit down to its knees…  He set the benchmark for cronyism, incompetence, and arrogance. As a black man, he said, “I am the MFIC.” The IC meant “in charge”.

You can figure out the rest. Detroit became a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.

As a United Van Lines truck driver for my summer job from teaching math and science, I loaded hundreds of American families into my van for a new life in another city or state. 

Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000.  Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan , but most work in Detroit. As the whites moved out, the Muslims moved in.

As the crimes became more violent, the whites fled. Finally, unlawful Mexicans moved in at a torrid pace. Detroit suffers so much shoplifting that grocery stores no longer operate in many inner city locations. You could cut the racial tension in the air with a knife! 

Detroit may be one of our best examples of multiculturalism: pure dislike, and total separation from America .

Today, you hear Muslim calls to worship over the city like a new American Baghdad with hundreds of Islamic mosques in Michigan , paid for by Saudi Arabia oil money.  High school flunk out rates reached 76 percent last June, according to NBC’s Brian Williams.  Classrooms resemble more foreign countries than America .  English?  Few speak it!  The city features a 50 percent illiteracy rate and growing.

Unemployment hit 28.9 percent in 2009 as the auto industry vacated the city. In Time Magazine’s October 4, 2009, “The Tragedy of Detroit: How a great city fell, and how it can rise again,” I choked on the writer’s description of what happened. “If Detroit had been ravaged by a hurricane, and submerged by a ravenous flood, we’d know a lot more about it,” said Daniel Okrent.  “If drought, and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we’d see it on the evening news every night.”

Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it, if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice.

But Detroit , once our fourth largest city, now 11th, and slipping rapidly, has had no such luck.  Its disaster has long been a slow unwinding that seemed to remove it from the rest of the country. 

Even the death rattle that in the past year emanated from its signature industry brought more attention to the auto executives than to the people of the city, who had for so long been victimized by their dreadful decision making.” 

As Coleman Young’s corruption brought the city to its knees, no amount of federal dollars could save the incredible payoffs, kick backs, and illegality permeating his administration. I witnessed the city’s death from the seat of my 18-wheeler tractor trailer because I moved people out of every sector of decaying Detroit . 

“By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit ‘s treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services,” Okrent said. “The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers’ union to reject a philanthropist’s offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit , the unemployment rate is 28.9%.

That’s worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.” At the end of Okrent’s  report, and he will write a dozen more about Detroit, he said, “That’s because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city’s collapse, it’s also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century. If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can’t find a way to get up, what does that say about our future?” 

As you read in my book review of Chris Steiner’s book, “$20 Per Gallon”, the auto industry won’t come back. Immigration will keep pouring more, and more uneducated third world immigrants from the Middle East into Detroit, thus creating a beachhead for Islamic hegemony in America. If 50 percent illiteracy continues, we will see more homegrown terrorists spawned out of the Muslim ghettos of Detroit. Illiteracy plus Islam equals walking human bombs. 

You have already seen it in Madrid, Spain; London, England and Paris, France with train bombings, subway bombings and riots. As their numbers grow, so will their power to enact their barbaric Sharia Law that negates republican forms of government, first amendment rights, and subjugates women to the lowest rungs on the human ladder. We will see more honor killings by upset husbands, fathers, and brothers that demand subjugation by their daughters, sisters and wives. Muslims prefer beheadings of women to scare the hell out of any other members of their sect from straying. Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country, and way of life. 

I PRAY EVERYONE THAT READS THIS REALIZES THAT IF WE DON’T STAND UP, AND SCREAM AT WASHINGTON, AND OUR STATE, CITY, AND LOCAL LEADERS THIS IS WHAT AWAITS THE REST OF AMERICA.  IF YOU FOLLOW THE NEWS AT ALL YOU KNOW THIS HAS HAPPENED IN ENGLAND, AND FRANCE AND SPAIN.

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

 

                                      — Benjamin Franklin

 

Two U.S. Immingrations Agents Shot, One Killed, in Mexico

(article by Johns Sexton at HotAir):

“The two agents were working in Mexico and were traveling outside Mexico City when they were stopped by gunmen at an unauthorized highway checkpoint: The police in San Luis Potosí State said the attack occurred on a main highway about midway between Mexico City, the capital, and Monterrey, the same highway where, a month ago, a group of armed men clashed with the federal police in a running battle that left five presumed criminals dead… American and Mexican authorities have warned that roads throughout the area are rife with false checkpoints run by drug cartel gunmen, and recent victims have not been limited to rivals. This week, a senior police intelligence official was found dead in his burning armored car in Monterrey. On Jan. 26, two American missionaries — Sam and Nancy Davis — were ambushed on a highway between Reynosa and Monterrey. Ms. Davis was killed. It’s not just the scale of the killing going on in Mexico that is worrisome, it’s the acceleration of the problem: Mexico registered 15,273 gangland killings in 2010, a 58 percent increase over the previous year, and estimates the number of drug-war deaths since Calderon took office in December 2006 at more than 34,000. We’ve been fighting a shooting war in Iraq since 2003 and the death toll there is just over three times that amount.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz Reviews the Major Hasan-Fort Hood Fiasco

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

at the Wall Street Journal

“Every branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood massacre. Not a single one mentioned radical Islam.

“In a month of momentous change, it was easy to overlook the significance of another revolutionary event. Who would have believed that in the space of a few weeks the leaders of the three major European powers would publicly denounce multiculturalism and declare, in so many words, that it was a proven disaster and a threat to society?

One after another they announced their findings—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. Multicultural values had not only led to segregated communities: They had, Mr. Cameron noted, imposed policies of blind toleration that had helped nurture radical Islam’s terrorist cells.

There can be no underestimating the in-so-many-words aspect of these renunciations. This was multiculturalism they were talking about—the unofficial established religion of the universities, the faith whose requirements have shaped every aspect of cultural, economic and political life in Western democracies for the last 50 years. Still, they were out there—words coolly specific, their target clear.

They came at a fitting moment, just as Americans had been handed a report providing the fullest disclosures so far about the multiculturalist zeal that had driven Army and medical school superiors to smooth Nidal Malik Hasan’s rocky way through training, promote him, and, despite blatant evidence of his unfitness, raise not a single concern. Maj. Hasan, U.S. Army psychiatrist, would be assigned to Fort Hood where, in November 2009, he opened fire, killing 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian employee, and wounding 32 others.

Associated Press

Maj. Hasan at the Bell County Jail after his shooting spree at Fort Hood.

In this report, titled “A Ticking Time Bomb” and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan’s skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense’s official report on the Foot Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan’s well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator’s ties to radical Islam. Even today, “A Ticking Time Bomb,” co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn’t specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

For the superiors in charge of Hasan’s training at Walter Reed and his two years at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the taboo was of a more complicated order—one that required elaborately inventive analyses through which Hasan’s stated beliefs, ominous pronouncements, and evident unconcern with standards of behavior required of an officer could all be represented as singular virtues, proof of his exceptional value to the Army. It could not have been easy. Still, they managed.

They did so despite Hasan’s astounding trail of performances, each more telling than the next. To fulfill Walter Reed’s academic requirement for a presentation on a psychiatric theme, Hasan proffered a draft consisting almost entirely of wisdom from the Quran arguing for the painful punishment and liquidation of non-Muslims. Hasan evidently viewed the Quranic verses as a sufficient presentation—a view his superior didn’t share, given its lack of any mention of a psychiatric theme. When that guide warned him the presentation was “not scholarly” and might prevent his graduation, Hasan revised. The finished product was not much different. Still, Hasan was allowed to graduate.

He went on to his medical fellowship, where he soon delivered another class lecture, this one on the Islamist theme that the West, in particular the U.S military, had mounted a war on Islam. The presentation brimmed with views sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, the motives of the 9/11 perpetrators, and suicide bombers. It so infuriated his classmates that their outraged eruptions caused the instructor to end the presentation.

There would be more of the same to come. One classmate witness told investigators that Hasan sought every possible opportunity to share his radical Islamist sympathies. His highest obligation, he told classmates, wasn’t to the Constitution, which he had sworn to protect and defend, but to his religion.

His Islamist sympathies would attract the interest of the FBI, which soon picked up on this U.S Army major’s contacts with a terrorist suspect, unnamed in the Senate report. The agency would, however, have no continuing great interest in Hasan. Among other reasons, its agents had seen the impressive evaluation reports characterizing Hasan as an authority on Islam—one whose work even had “extraordinary potential to inform national policy and military strategy,” as one of his superiors put it in his officer evaluation report.

The same Hasan who set off silent alarms in his supervisors—the Psychiatric Residency Program Director at Walter Reed was one of them—would garner only plaudits in the official written evaluations at the time. He was commended in these as a “star officer,” one focused on “illuminating the role of culture and Islamic faith within the Global War on Terrorism.” One supervisor testified, “His unique interests have captured the interest and attention of peers and mentors alike.” No single word of criticism or doubt about Hasan ever made its way into any of his evaluations.

Some of those enthusiastic testaments strongly suggested that the writers were themselves at least partly persuaded of their reasoning. In magical thinking, safety and good come to those who obey taboos, and in the multiculturalist world, there is no taboo more powerful than the one that forbids acknowledgment of realities not in keeping with the progressive vision. In the world of the politically correct—which can apparently include places where psychiatrists are taught—magical thinking reigns.

A resident who didn’t represent the diversity value that Hasan did as a Muslim would have faced serious consequences had he behaved half as disturbingly. Here was a world in which Hasan was untouchable, in which all that was grim and disturbing in him was transformed. He was a consistently mediocre performer, ranking in the lowest 25% of his class, but to his evaluators, he was an officer of unique talents.

He was a star not simply because he was a Muslim, but because he was a special kind—the sort who posed, in his flaunting of jihadist sympathies, the most extreme test of liberal toleration. Exactly the kind the progressive heart finds irresistible.

A decision as to whether Maj. Hasan will go to trial—it would be before a military court-martial —should be forthcoming next month. He stands charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder, committed when he turned his laser equipped semi-automatic on members of the military at the Soldier Readiness Center. The likelihood is that the trial will go forward. If it does, the forces of multiculturalist piety, which played so central a role in advancing this Army major and concealing the menace he posed, will be the invisible presence on trial with him.”

Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, is the author of “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times” (Free Press, 2003).

Christie to Washington to Emphasize Need for Honesty and Reality in Government

Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is set to take Washington by storm on Wednesday, as his captivatingly confrontational style and straight-talking charm will be on full display during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Although Christie has issued more than a few dramatic denials of any interest in exploring a presidential run in 2012, “The Question” continues to follow the first-term governor wherever he goes, and his visit to the nation’s capital will surely be no exception.

Washington political observers tend to assume that Christie’s espoused lack of interest in mounting a White House run is merely the tactic of yet another savvy politician, but perhaps Christie really is what he says he is: a popular governor who is concerned about the nation’s financial health but is perfectly content to remain in New Jersey for the time being.

“I believe him when he closed the door on running, but the problem is we have a tripwire media where everything is covered through the presidential prism, which is unfair,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy said. “Why is he giving a national speech? He’s got a unique style of dealing with the spending crisis in Trenton that he hopes will catch on with other governors, so I think he is trying to be an evangelist for his style, which has been effective at a time when it’s needed. So maybe it’s not about him.”

In an uncommonly fluid field of GOP presidential contenders, Christie’s emphatic rebuffs against the White House chatter have made him all the more attractive in the eyes of his legions of adoring fans nationwide, who greet him with rock star-worthy reverence whenever he speaks out of state.

Christie notched a strong fourth-place finish in last weekend’s CPAC presidential straw poll, despite not even attending the conservative gathering in Washington, D.C. But back home, Christie is more than holding his own in a state where politicians are about as popular as the traffic on the Jersey Turnpike.

In a new Farleigh Dickinson University poll released on Wednesday, 51 percent of New Jersey voters approved of the way Christie was handling his job, while only 39 percent disapproved.

“People in the state are very clear that he is focused on the state, and I think that they’re surprised by the national attention,” Farleigh Dickinson political science professor Peter Woolley said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that he’s distracted by the national attention or that he is in any way shortchanging the conversation in New Jersey.”

According to a Christie aide, the governor will meet with the New Jersey congressional delegation and attend a trade meeting at the White House, in addition to his AEI speech on Wednesday. The aide said that Christie’s Washington trip was scheduled in order for him to share with a wider audience, including governors of other states from both parties, his experiences in dealing with New Jersey’s fiscal crisis.

In a preview of his speech that was provided to Politico, Christie indicated that he planned to go into detail over his war with the teachers’ union in New Jersey-a topic that always provides fertile ground for him to show off his take-no-prisoners persona.

Seton Hall University political science department chair Matthew Hale said that Republicans in New Jersey are sometimes as infatuated with Christie as many grassroots conservatives in other states often are but added that New Jersey residents who see him more frequently also get a glimpse at both sides of the coin.

“One of the raps that you’ll hear against Governor Christie all the time is that he’s a bully-that he rams things through and doesn’t care or listen to what anyone else says,” Hale said. “When that happens the first couple times around, it’s kind of refreshing. It’s a politician who doesn’t care about politics. Over time though, that can wear kind of thin. So the guy who stands up for his convictions and does what he wants can also turn into the guy who beats everybody up.”

Hale noted that there are many teachers and public sector employees who reside in New Jersey and tend to be particularly emphatic in their anti-Christie views. In general though, Hale said that Christie is perceived in the state as a leader who is focused on the tall tasks in front of him in Trenton, despite the obvious allure of a bigger stage.

“I think he’s committed to New Jersey,” Hale said. “He likes to view himself as this regular guy that wants to do the best that he can for his home state, and he’s got a lot of Jersey pride. He’s said that in his State of the State a couple of times-that he wants to bring that Jersey pride back. So I do think that part’s real. I also think the limelight and the rock star quality-anybody’s got to be affected by that.”

//

Scott Conroy covers the White House for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at sconroy@realclearpolitics.com.

Street Scenes of Irani Protests……Regime Demands Executions!

Tehran, Iran (CNN) — Iranian lawmakers denounced Monday’s protests in Tehran and called for the execution of two opposition leaders for inciting the demonstrations, Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Tuesday.

Members of the Iranian parliament issued fiery chants against opposition leaders and former presidential candidates Mehdi Karrubi and Mir Hossein Moussavi.

Press TV aired video Tuesday of lawmakers chanting “Moussavi, Karrubi … execute them.”

Lawmakers also named former President Mohammad Khatami in some of the death chants.

The calls for the leaders’ executions come after a particularly deadly month in Iran. At least 66 people were executed in January, according to Iranian media reports. Most of the executions were reportedly carried out for drug offenses, although at least three involved political prisoners, a U.N. statement said.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay expressed alarm earlier this month over the number of executions.

Brutality and hypocrisy in Iran

Could Iran be the next Egypt?

 

Iranian leaders have praised Egypt’s revolution, but Monday when protesters in Iran took to the streets the government cracked down hard.

Last week, the Iranian government rounded up activists after Karrubi and Moussavi called for supporters to gather at Azadi Square — the site of mass protests by Iran’s opposition movement after the disputed 2009 presidential elections.

Despite the security crackdown, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Tehran Monday.

Patrolling security forces battled protesters with batons and tear gas for much of the day.

The massive crowd was largely cleared from the city’s streets by nightfall and the main squares near Tehran University remained free of police, security forces or protesters.

Dozens of demonstrators were detained during Monday’s protests, while videos posted on the showed others had been chased and beaten.

One person was shot and killed during the protests, according to Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency. Several others were injured and listed in serious condition as a result of the shooting, which the Iranian government blamed on “agitators and seditionists.”

The official Islamic Republic News Agency reported that nine security force members were among those injured in the protests, which the country’s deputy police chief called “illegal gatherings … directed from America, England and Israel.”

“The hands of sedition leaders are drenched in blood and they should answer for these actions,” Ahmad Reza Radan said, according to IRNA.

Video uploaded to YouTube showed throngs of demonstrators marching, burning posters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and in one instance beating a man who appeared to try to remove a poster from the hands of protesters.

Other YouTube video showed police in riot gear pursuing dozens of people running away from the baton-wielding officers.

Other videos show similar protests going on in other cities in Iran such as Shiraz and Isfahan.

CNN cannot independently verify the authenticity of the videos and witnesses declined to be named for fear of retribution.

Reporting from Iran proved extremely difficult Monday — foreign journalists were denied visas, accredited journalists living in the country were restricted from covering the demonstrations and internet speeds slowed to a crawl in an apparent attempt to both limit protest organizing and restrict information from being transmitted out of the country.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, released a statement Tuesday urging Iranian officials to “fully respect and protect the rights of their citizens, including freedom of expression and the right to assemble peacefully.”

The article  was compiled by CNN staff .

Comment:   I am sure the Iranian officials are listening.

Dick Morris: The Damage Obama Has Done!

The mainstream media does not cover the full extent of the damage the Obama Administration has inflicted on this country. Even FOX News often doesn’t have the time to go into sufficient depth to explain what is happening.

From our friend Ruth S. King comes a chart which all of us should read and absorb, sobering though it may be:

	January 2009	Today	% chg	Source
Avg. retail price/gallon gas in U.S.	$1.83	$3.104	69.6%	1
Crude oil, European Brent (barrel)	$43.48	$99.02	127.7%	2
Crude oil, West TX Inter. (barrel)	$38.74	$91.38	135.9%	2
Gold: London (per troy oz.)	$853.25	$1,369.50	60.5%	2
Corn, No.2 yellow, Central IL	$3.56	$6.33	78.1%	2
Soybeans, No. 1 yellow, IL	$9.66	$13.75	42.3%	2
Sugar, cane, raw, world, lb. fob	$13.37	$35.39	164.7%	2
Unemployment rate, non-farm, overall	7.6%	9.4%	23.7%	3
Unemployment rate, blacks	12.6%	15.8%	25.4%	3
Number of unemployed	11,616,000	14,485,000	24.7%	3
Number of fed. employees, ex. military (curr = 12/10 prelim)	2,779,000	2,840,000	2.2%	3
Real median household income (2008 v 2009)	$50,112	$49,777	-0.7%	4
Number of food stamp recipients (curr = 10/10)	31,983,716	43,200,878	35.1%	5
Number of unemployment benefit recipients (curr = 12/10)	7,526,598	9,193,838	22.2%	6
Number of long-term unemployed	2,600,000	6,400,000	146.2%	3
Poverty rate, individuals (2008 v 2009)	13.2%	14.3%	8.3%	4
People in poverty in U.S. (2008 v 2009)	39,800,000	43,600,000	9.5%	4
U.S. rank in Economic Freedom World Rankings	5	9	n/a	10
Present Situation Index (curr = 12/10)	29.9	23.5	-21.4%	11
Failed banks (curr = 2010 + 2011 to date)	140	164	17.1%	12
U.S. dollar versus Japanese yen exchange rate	89.76	82.03	-8.6%	2
U.S. money supply, M1, in billions (curr = 12/10 prelim)	1,575.1	1,865.7	18.4%	13
U.S. money supply, M2, in billions (curr = 12/10 prelim)	8,310.9	8,852.3	6.5%	13
National debt, in trillions	$10.627	$14.052	32.2%	14

Just take this last item: In the last two years we have accumulated national debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as during the rest of our entire nation’s history. Over 27 times as fast! Metaphorically, speaking, if you are driving in the right lane doing 65 MPH and a car rockets past you in the left lane 27 times faster . . . it would be doing 1,755 MPH!

Sources:
(1) U.S. Energy Information Administration; (2) Wall Street Journal; (3) Bureau of Labor Statistics; (4) Census Bureau; (5) USDA; (6) U.S. Dept. of Labor; (7) FHFA; (8) Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller; (9) RealtyTrac; (10) Heritage Foundation and WSJ; (11) The Conference Board; (12) FDIC; (13) Federal Reserve; (14) U.S. TreasuryIn our new book, Revolt! (Due out March 1 – you can pre-order autographed copies now at DickMorris.com) we explain how Obama has wrecked our economy and chart a path to reverse the damage and defeat him in 2012.

These numbers make it crystal clear how crucial these two tasks really are!

Comment:  “Experts expect the value of the dollar to fall even further.”    A pleasant not to pass along to our Dennis Prager friends.

Dennis Prager Visits Vietnam……..Recalls the Evils of Communism

The following  Dennis Prager article is from Townhall.com.

“It was difficult to control my emotions — specifically, my anger — during my visit to Vietnam last week. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people — their intelligence, love of life, dignity and hard work — the more rage I felt for the communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to ask one of the communist bosses who run Vietnam that question. “Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?” There is no good answer. There are only a lie and a truth, and the truth is not good. The lie is the response offered by the Vietnamese communists and which was repeated, like virtually all communist lies, by the world’s non-communist left. It was (and continues to be) taught in virtually every Western university and was and continues to be spread by virtually every news medium on the planet: The Vietnam communists, i.e., the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, were merely fighting for national independence against foreign control of their country. First, they fought the French, then the Japanese and then the Americans.

 American baby boomers will remember being told over and over that Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam’s George Washington, that he loved the American Constitution, after which he modeled his own, and wanted nothing more than Vietnamese independence. Here is the truth: Every communist dictator in the world has been a megalomaniacal, cult of personality, power hungry, bloodthirsty thug. Ho Chi Minh was no different. He murdered his opponents, tortured only God knows how many innocent Vietnamese, threatened millions into fighting for him — yes, for him and his blood soaked Vietnamese Communist Party, backed by the greatest murderer of all time, Mao Zedong. But the moral idiots in America chanted “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh” at antiwar rallies, and they depicted America as the real murderers of Vietnamese — “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

The Vietnamese communists were not fighting America for Vietnamese independence. America was never interested in controlling the Vietnamese people, and there is a perfect parallel to prove this: the Korean War. Did America fight the Korean communists in order to control Korea? Or did 37,000 Americans die in Korea so that Koreans could be free? Who was (and remains) a freer human being — a Korean living under Korean communist rule in North Korea or a Korean living in that part of Korea where America defeated the Korean communists? And who was a freer human being in Vietnam — those who lived in non-communist South Vietnam (with all its flaws) or those who lived under Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh’s communists in North Vietnam? America fights to liberate countries, not to rule over them. It was the Vietnamese Communist Party, not America, that was interested in controlling the Vietnamese people. But the lie was spread so widely and so effectively that most of the world — except American supporters of the war and the Vietnamese boat people and other Vietnamese who yearned for liberty — believed that America was fighting for tin, tungsten and the wholly fictitious “American empire” while the Vietnamese communists were fighting for Vietnamese freedom.

I went to the “Vietnam War Remnants Museum” — the Communist Party’s three-floor exhibit of anti-American photos. Nothing surprised me — not the absence of a single word critical of the communist North Vietnamese or of the Viet Cong; not a word about the widespread threats on the lives of anyone who did not fight for the communists; not a word about those who risked their lives to escape by boat, preferring to risk dying by drowning, being eaten by sharks or being tortured or gang-raped by pirates, rather than to live under the communists who “liberated” South Vietnam. Equally unsurprising is that there is little difference between the history of the Vietnam War as told by the Communist Party of Vietnam and what just about any college student will be told in just about any college by just about any professor in America, Europe, Asia or Latin America. I will end with the subject with which I began — the Vietnamese. It is impossible to visit Vietnam and not be impressed by the people. I hope I live to see the day when the people of Vietnam, freed from the communist lies that still permeate their daily lives, understand that every Vietnamese death in the war against America was a wasted life, one more of the 140 million human sacrifices on the altar of the most bloodthirsty false god in history: communism.”

Comment:  It is my strong belief that Progressivism progresses to Marxism inevitably.  The Progressive American believes in developing a State  which will provide for them the goodies they deserve.  “What can the State do for me…..as Dennis Prager often repeats.   Progressivism is void of of defining, expressing, and teaching the moral good, which as Ronald Reagan chided, is not carried generation to generation through the human  blood stream.  

For nearly seventy years Soviet Communism was wedded to the ideal of conquering the world through persuasion, subterfuge, or war, whateve would best determine its success. 

This dogma today is a fundamental tenet of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jihadi Islamist to convert the world to those who “love death as much as westerners love life”.

Dick Morris: “Obama’s Budget Bluff”

“The Obama Administration and its acolytes on the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission are propagating the myth that it is Social Security and Medicare that are driving the deficit over $1.5 trillion. Discretionary spending, they plead, is but a tiny part of the budget, not much worth fooling with.

The reality, as we explain Revolt!

— our new book due out on March 1 – this formulation is a myth! The fact is that this deficit has been caused by a rapid runup in discretionary, non-defense spending and in welfare entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps. The key to cutting spending and slashing the deficit is not to focus on Social Security or Medicare, but on the real culprits – discretionary spending and welfare entitlements.

The following chart, taken from Revolt!

, illustrates this key point:

 

INCREASES IN SPENDING UNDER OBAMA
Category	2008	2010	% Incr
Welfare	$260	$400	54%
Domestic	$485	$682	41%
Medicare	$456	$528	16%
Social Security	$612	$700	14%
Defense	$612	$690	11%
Source: US Government

Obama and the Democrats are playing a game (the same one they played in the 1990s before Bill Clinton called their bluff). By pretending that the most politically popular programs – Social Security and Medicare — cause the deficit, they insulate the whole array of less popular government programs from cuts. They hide appropriations for EPA, PBS, highway construction, the Department of Education and like behind Social Security and Medicare reform.

But it is the core spending on the bureaucracy itself that is driving this deficit, increasing by $200 billion in the two Obama years. And it is Medicaid and food stamps and other welfare entitlements, up by $140 billion that are also culprits.

In the past two years, we have added 80,000 federal workers, 11 million food stamp recipients and $50 billion in Medicaid costs under Obama.

When baby boomers start to retire in greater numbers later in the decade, we will need to focus on Social Security and Medicare, but now lets cut the core federal discretionary and welfare spending that is at the root of our burgeoning deficit.

In Revolt!, we list the very specific budget cuts in discretionary spending that make the most sense. Here are a few of them:

• Save $30 billion a year by freezing new highway construction for three years. Keep spending what is needed for maintenance and safety.
• Save $4 billion by making passengers and airlines pay for airport improvements rather than using tax money
• Save $4 billion a year by cutting climate research and energy loan guarantees
• Save $500 million a year by rolling back the cost of Congress to 2008 levels.
• Save $12 billion a year by eliminating Obama’s pork barrel programs – National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund and the Build America bonds.
• Save $3 billion a year by a 20% cut in diplomatic missions and foreign service staff
• Save $12 billion a year by cutting farm subsidies to the largest ten percent of US farms
• Save $4 billion by tying federal pension COLAs to price inflation not wage inflation.
• Save $7 billion a year by eliminating Obama’s proposed increases in the Dept of Education.
• Save $1 billion a year by eliminating the Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities and ending PBS subsidies.
• Save $5 billion a year by making no new Section 8 rent subsidy commitments.

Revolt! itemizes many other proposed cuts. It is not hard to bring the deficit down to less than 4% of GDP by 2014 by cutting discretionary and welfare entitlement spending.

Its just that liberals don’t want to do it.”

Wuss Obama’s America Has U.S. Air Force Cargo Confiscated

By TAOS TURNER

Argentina’s relations with the U.S. took a sharp turn for the worse Monday as the country continued to hold military equipment it confiscated last week from a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane sent as part of a training course for local police.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, called on Argentina to return the property without delay.

“It’s absolutely necessary that they immediately return that material. It makes no sense for it to have been confiscated this way. This material was intended for a joint exercise in training people to rescue hostages,” Mr. Valenzuela said Monday on CNN en Espanol.

Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman quickly rebutted Mr. Valenzuela and called on the U.S. to apologize for violating Argentine law.

“I told him, ‘Arturo, we have to be careful about this. The laws are made to be followed here and in the U.S. We all need to follow them,’” Mr. Timerman said on CNN en Espanol.

Mr. Timerman accused the U.S. of using the plane to smuggle undeclared firearms, surveillance equipment and “various doses of morphine” into the country for ulterior motives.

He also said that U.S. officials have refused to offer any explanation about the seized material, something State Department officials adamantly deny.

“They refuse to collaborate with us,” he said, adding that Argentina has lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. government and will return the cargo only after investigators say they no longer need it.

Mr. Timerman personally supervised the seizure of the cargo at Argentina’s Ezeiza International Airport as perplexed U.S. officials looked on.

A State Department official familiar with the seizure told Dow Jones Newswires most of the material, which was intended for use in a hostage-rescue course, had been properly declared and previously approved by Argentine authorities.

The only thing that hadn’t been declared was the medication confiscated at the airport, said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicate nature of the issue.

The medication, including morphine, is part of a first aid kit belonging to an Army medic who participates in the training courses, the official said. The course uses real weapons and live-fire exercises, making it imperative to have medication available in an emergency, the official said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington at a Monday afternoon briefing the U.S. government is “disturbed” about the seizure, and continues to seek explanations from the Argentine government.

Meanwhile, State Department officials say they have tried repeatedly to explain the matter but that Mr. Timerman won’t listen.

Relations between Argentina and the U.S. have deteriorated rapidly since U.S. President Barack Obama said in January that he would visit El Salvador, Brazil and Chile next month, skipping Argentina.

Argentine officials reportedly considered Mr. Obama’s decision an affront, especially after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez in December blocked a bid by some South American nations to formally condemn U.S. policy amid the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables scandal.

The leaked cables contained unflattering comments about several Latin American leaders, including Ms. Fernandez.

But analysts say Argentina’s anti-U.S. rhetoric may be as related to domestic politics as it is to frustration with the U.S. Some see this as a move by Mr. Timerman and Ms. Fernandez to win votes ahead of next October’s presidential election.

“They’re trying to lure the left with this anti-U.S. position and traditionally this has worked in Argentina,” Emilio Cardenas, Argentina’s widely respected former ambassador to the United Nations, told Dow Jones Newswires. “It seems to me that this is mostly an electoral move used by someone who does very little as a foreign minister and a lot as pro-government journalist.”

Mr. Timerman, who is highly critical of Argentina’s media, is a former journalist. He spends much of his day bashing journalists, opposition politicians and critics via Twitter.

The U.S. training team that arrived with the C-17 includes eight special forces officers from Fort Brag, North Carolina, and the medic. As the team is also an emergency response unit, it travels with whatever equipment it would need to respond on the fly, the State Department official said.

The U.S. provided a similar training course in August 2009 and tried to repeat it in August 2010. At the time, the Air Force sent another flight to Argentina to prepare for the course, but the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires sent it back to the U.S. after discovering that its contents did not match what was ordered for the course.

Earlier this month, Mr. Timerman insinuated that a U.S.-sponsored police training program in El Salvador, the International Law Enforcement Academy, was teaching torture tactics to members of the City of Buenos Aires police force.

The critique was seen as a dig at Mayor Mauricio Macri, who has said he plans to run for president in October.

Meanwhile, city officials and local police noted that Argentina’s federal government itself has been sending people to the training program for years.

In January, Mr. Timerman hinted that the U.S. had tried to sell weapons to Argentina and suggested that Mr. Obama may be avoiding Argentina because the South American nation doesn’t kowtow to its foreign-policy requests.

Mr. Timerman said relations between the countries are “fluid,” but that there are lines with the U.S. that Argentina “should not cross” in areas like arms purchases, military cooperation and free trade. 

Article found at Drudge Report.

—Ken Parks and Scott L. Greenberg contributed to this article.