http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/america-hates-newt-gingrich/326161

Well, I do not care for him either! 

However, I immediately began thinking of certain successful presidents who were not very likable, and of course Richard Nixon came to mind.  Here was a successful politician who lacked what is termed “charisma,” who lacked John F. Kennedy’s Irish charm and movie-star visage, and who personally seemed very difficult to appreciate.

After his loss to Kennedy, and then his loss in California for governor, Nixon seemed ever angrier, petulant, and simply washed up.  As we know, however, he won two national elections for the presidency, and was later ruined by his (apparently real) traits of being suspicious, vindictive, and arrogant.

So how did Nixon overcome his negative image?

First keep in mind that he was Eisenhower’s Vice-President, and Eisenhower was not seen as very charismatic at all: an historiometric analysis by Professor Ronald DeLuga showed Eisenhower ranking third last in charisma (above Carter and Ford).

Given that his presidency is often portrayed as deficient in purpose, rather inert, and not particularly inspiring, Eisenhower’s emergence in the bottom third of the rankings is not unanticipated. Eisenhower’s steady, but languid demeanor may augment his low charismatic ranking.

http://www.leader-values.com/Content/detail.asp?ContentDetailID=52

 

Nixon had also established himself as capable of handling the Russians, especially through the famous Kitchen Debate with Khrushchev. So what remained to be done?

In the 1966 Congressional elections Nixon campaigned rather relentlessly for Republican candidates, re-establishing his national reputation: his speaking skills were not bad, since he often came across as no-nonsense and highly competent.

To soften his image as humorless, he appeared on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (saying “Sock it to me!” in a self-satirizing way, as if he were Rich Little imitating Nixon).

His campaign (via Roger Ailes, of FOX Network fame) also attacked his “cold” image (their polling showed voters considered Hubert Humphrey a “warm personality”): they had him appear at “town halls” with a picked audience, and bought 10 hours of television time to broadcast Nixon speaking with “average Americans.”  But sparks had to fly now and then to show Nixon’s real nature, and to avoid making everything seem phony.  One example occurred at a show in Philadelphia, where an Afro-American radio host, no friend of Nixon by any means, was included on the panel to ask him combative questions.  Nixon handled the situation well, sticking to his guns, and was cheered by the Republican crowd.

Thus Nixon created any charisma he lacked naturally by the way his managers (Ailes is given much credit in a book by Kerwin Swint called Dark Genius): Nixon was highly motivated, understood his problem, and listened to people who knew more than he did about solving his problem.

And won the presidency twice, despite the seething hatred of the MSM!

So Newt has charisma problems with the press and – according to MSM polls – is “hated by America.”

Let’s assume these polls are correct: following Nixon’s example, what should Gingrich do?  My ideas are as follows:

First, Gingrich needs to stay positive about his agenda, an agenda extolling more freedom for Americans – and more money – by insisting on some sort of immediate reduction in the size and tax appetite of the federal government, along with a plan to avoid national bankruptcy by having the government do less meddling in the lives of its citizens.  Nixon’s town halls are now cliches: a new variation is needed, e.g. where Gingrich is sitting down with students, women, and other groups known to be less than impressed with him, and they should be genuinely hostile.

If Gingrich can play the teacher handling a disruptive class, persuading them with his humor and ideas, he will see his “likability” numbers rise.  The hostile audience will be disliked, and Gingrich – if he can be trained to stay cool and self-deprecating, and not to talk too much – will succeed like Nixon.

Second, the Mathematics of MAObama should be easy for Gingrich to explain: a poster with the national debt identified with the written number 16,000,000,000,000 on it would get the point across very simply!  In fact, using that number on billboards, running across the screen in TV ads, at movie theater previews, etc. could be a symbol of the campaign.  Gingrich the Historian can point out how many centuries it took for the national debt to hit 9 Trillion, and how many years it took for BIG BRObama to double it almost.

Third, his team would need to address the background of personal hypocrisy with an auto-da-fé moment: if Gingrich has found religion late in life, along with a wife 20 years younger, he needs to sell his metanoia quietly yet firmly, the way Nixon handled the openly hostile questions from the Philadelphia radio talk-show host.

Fourth, like Nixon, appearing on assorted shows – and not just Jay Leno or FOX News Sunday – to soften his image would not be a bad idea.

Certainly if Gingrich becomes the nominee, he will need to face the likability issue: other ideas besides the ones above will be necessary.  Is he flawed?  Oh yes!  But how flawed was Nixon?

In this case, nothing is impossible.  America can be persuaded to embrace Conservative ideas to save the country – and I mean save the country – from its own selfishness, short-sightedness, and bad judgment (i.e. electing spendthrift, nanny-state politicians of both parties), even with Gingrich at the top of the ticket.

I: So tell us how you were able to effect a U.S. withdrawal with no troops left behind to ensure stability in Iraq.

A: As you know, we have funneled money into Iraq to opponents of the Zionist Americans and their lackeys in the Iraqi government.  Since this is the Middle East, divide and conquer is an easy technique: Iraq is a collection of tribes all waiting to sharpen their knives on each other’s ribs!   We advised the Sadrites to use parliamentary procedures to ruin the Status of Forces Agreement, which our peace-loving friend Obama was happy to see go down to defeat.  We know that he must say cruel things about us now and then: we understand this.

But we know he wants us to dominate the Zionists: the SOFA dispute was a convenient ploy to allow friend Obama to withdraw his troops.

I: A ploy? Can you explain this?

A: We understand that he is no real friend of Israel (the conservatives in the Jewish press understand this, but fortunately for us many Jews with their Leftism are prevented from realizing this) and that he approves of me: how else to explain his silence when we suffered difficulties from those silly protests in June 2009?

So friend Obama ignores the advice of his own Pentagon to keep thousands of troops in Iraq because of a SOFA dispute about giving immunity from prosecution to U.S. troops!  This sounds like the Iraqis are being headstrong and arrogant.  But you see, no such immunity for the U.S. military exists, for example, in Qatar!  And that is a place where they take their, how do you say it, “R and R,” when they might need such immunity!

So, yes, it is a convenient ploy for fooling those who do not look past the surface.

I: What is this rumor about co-operation with Turkey to carve up Iraq?

A: Well, we have already co-operated in Kurdistan: you remember those incursions we made in June 2010?  To be sure, it was only a few miles deep into Iraq, but friend Obama did nothing, of course.  We Iranians and the Turks: we are still the outsiders ethnically, you see, when it comes to Arabic Islam.  This is why the Saudis dislike us so much: we are Shi’a Muslims, and speak Farsi (Persian).  They are Arabs and practice Salafi-Sunni Islam.

The Turks of course are not trusted by anyone!  They also are Sunnis, but the decades of liberalization have watered them down.  We will co-operate with both eyes open and knives in both hands: the last thing we both want is a Kurdistan with oil money, or an Iraq with oil money.

I: So…when do you invade Iraq?

A: The old cliche’ is “Timing is everything!”  If Iraq will  not fall, it at least will fail: the question is how.  We have a good number of Iraqi politicians in our pay.  We can hollow out Iraq from the inside, until our nuclear program is complete.

I: Why is Iraq connected to your nuclear program?

A: Iraq is our key to Israel.  With bases there – or at least overflight and refueling permission – we can achieve our dream of vaporizing the hated Jews!  This will give us dominance in the Islamic world, despite our not being Arabs.  The Saudis will be helpless before us.

But you see, if Iraq is our key to Israel, it is also Israel’s key to us!  Any Israeli plans to bomb our nuclear facilities would need Iraq’s permission to use their airspace.  Of course, Maliki seems hostile to Israel, and would not give any such permission.  With the U.S. gone, thanks to friend Obama, we know that our people in the Iraqi government will prevent any such permission from ever being given.

But Maliki may not give us access for an attack on Israel: such is the pride of independence!

I: So you are after the oilfields and some military bases: you do not want all of Iraq?

A: The Iranian Revolution must be spread, but it is not greedy!

I: And so…the timing?

A: We follow American politics closely.  Friend Obama’s days seem numbered, this is clear.  A decision to re-deploy thousands of Americans to Iraq could be done by a new president.   So any seizure of Kurdish areas will need to happen between late November 2012 and January 2013.  Any coup d’etat by our allies inside the Iraqi government would need to happen at the same time.  It is also possible that our people will simply be “elected” in the next Iraqi ballot.

(He winked at me oddly at this point.)

I: And Israel’s destruction?

A: That would be telling too much!

I: Please stare at the watch and answer the question!

A: Our scientists are working hard to complete a few nuclear devices: with Allah’s help, their holy work will be ready before 2013.  With America neutered militarily and economically after 4 years of friend Obama, that will be our goal.  The Americans will have no appetite for a war with us: they will not be able to afford a war with us.  We will cut off their oil from the Saudis and ruin both countries.

Israel will be a smoldering ember anyway: what good would it do the U.S. to attack us?  It would not bring Israel back  to life!  Americans will understand this, and will shrug and accept their new role as a neutered former superpower.   A new president, no matter how belligerent, will see how worthless and stupid it would be to challenge us.

I: Do you have any idea why Israel has not attacked your facilities yet?

A: Friend Obama does not support such an attack: the Israelis would need American aid for an act of war like that.  Obviously they do not have it.  The mechanics and politics of having Israeli warplanes flying over Saudi or Iraqi or Turkish airspace would be difficult for a warmonger like W. Bush!  But for a peace-lover and golfer like friend Obama, it is just of no interest.

At this point the watch stopped spinning, and Ahmadinejad jumped up and said he really needed a shave, but that, somehow, the timing was not quite right.

In 4 weeks, Ohioans will vote to preserve  or cancel a bill called Senate Bill 5, which limits the negotiating power of public-worker unions, so that costs for local governments can be brought down from the stratosphere.   Our Republican governor and Republican legislature (23-10 in the Senate, 58-40 in the House) passed this bill, which includes unions for police and fire departments: one can debate whether that was strategically wise.

Second, it is to the credit of Governor John Kasich and the Republicans in the legislature that they passed this bill.

Here is my lament:

Almost immediately, the unions (all of them, not just public sector) organized a “grass-roots” campaign to repeal Senate Bill 5 in a referendum.  A massive propaganda campaign was launched: misleading and even downright lying ads and claims sprouted everywhere.  Door-to-door petitions were circulated: organizers were seen at parks, rock concerts, spring festivals, and churches.  Even my own local Catholic Church was conned into announcing – from the pulpit! – that “Senate Bill 5 takes away all collective bargaining rights from the middle class,” a claim so outrageous that some people resigned from the parish immediately: the pastor published an apology in the bulletin a week later, saying he had misunderstood what the union-member parishioner had said (Ha!), but the damage was done.

Bumper stickers and yard signs popped up everywhere  to “Repeal 5!” in November.

Former Vice-President Cheney admitted in an interview this year that one of the W. Bush administration’s biggest errors, if not its #1 biggest error, was to stay silent in the face of all the lying, distorted charges screamed by the Left, not to bother countering point by point the Big Lies proclaimed, and simply to shrug and assume that the game was rigged by the media, and so it was not worth their while to enter such a debate.

Ohio Republicans have copied that mistaken strategy.  For months and months, as television and radio ads with Very Earnest Policemen and Firemen and Nurses almost cried on camera about the extremely unfair and even dangerous nature of Senate Bill 5, the Republicans responded with…silence.  Only in the last weeks have some ads finally appeared to counter the months and months of falsehoods and warped propaganda.

Things became worse.  In the summer, Republicans saw fit to vote for pay raises….for the legislative staff!!!

Staffers for both Republicans and Democrats in the Ohio Senate got pay raises this summer in the aftermath of state budget cuts and the passage of a law limiting public employee unions, state records show.

Payroll data reviewed by The Associated Press show 19 Senate caucus employees – not quite 20 percent of the staff – got pay hikes since July worth about $160,000 combined. Four employees – the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, finance director, and clerk – saw bumps of more than $8,000 a year each on salaries already around $100,000.

 

See:

http://www2.ohiovotes2011.com/news/2011/sep/07/ohio-senate-gave-pay-raises-after-state-cuts-ar-726802/

And so they handed the Democrat-Union coalition an ace.  It goes without saying that the Democrat minority in the legislature was quite happy to see this!  Now it is quite possible that the paper-pushing staff deserved a pay raise: but if we are asking the fire departments and police, whose jobs carry the daily risk of death, to pay more for their retirement and hospitalization, this pay-raise – during such a political campaign – was worse than unwise, it was just downright moronic!

It would have been better for the Republican-controlled legislature to vote themselves and their staff a 10% pay cut as proof of the seriousness of Ohio’s budgetary problems.

No, why would they do that???

And so, it is possible that Senate Bill 5 may still be preserved despite all these stupidities.  But right now, I am expecting the worst.

If the worst happens, let us hope that the defeat will be a huge warning to the national Republicans that they absolutely must respond – point by point – to the lies proclaimed by The Left.  They absolutely must go on the offensive with positive reasons why a Conservative solution is the right one: e.g. has anyone yet seen or heard an ad against BIG BRObama’s “Jobs” Bill with the simple counter-argument that if nearly $1,000,000,000,000 has not brought down unemployment at all, but has only darkened our economic future with more debt, how on earth will adding another $500,000,000,000 (and yes, let’s use those zeroes as part of our technique to open people’s eyes) suddenly solve anything?

Plus, like Caesar’s wife, Republicans must remain above reproach: weak candidates or incumbents touched by scandal need to be told good-bye.  Anything similar to the Ohio pay-raise stupidity during an austerity campaign needs to be avoided like the plague.

And if Senate Bill 5 is defeated, expect the result to be “nationalized” by the Dems and the MSM!

What will we tell them, when they see their Land of Liberty becoming less free, as it – unbelievably! – most willingly sells its future to the banks of Chinese Communists ?

To the ghosts of our most recently lost soldiers, what will we say, when they want to know why our president wants to “lead from behind” ? (And a more seriously meant Orwellian phrase cannot be found.)

What will we say to the men of D-Day, when they see an obese, petulant, gimme-gimme country, half of whom pay no taxes?

Our Treasury Secretary announces that a fourth of the country receives government checks; our Democrat president and his party want to spend over a trillion dollars per year more than the government receives; our Republicans timidly quake at opposing the constant nibbling of our freedoms and can only agree on slowing down the speed of our inevitable bankruptcy.

What will we say to our astronauts who have died in service, when they ask why we have allowed our manned space program to fade away, and why we now are hiring Russian rockets for our use, a development so improbable it would be laughable, if it were not so tragically sad?

What will we say to the ghosts of our soldiers lost throughout the ages, when they see that a majority of our children know little to nothing of their sacrifices, cannot even identify the century of the Civil War or the War of 1812, and are increasingly taught that many of our wars were immoral acts of aggression, and hear military service denigrated in general?

What will we tell them, when they hear that seeing the flag and participating in Fourth of July celebrations embarrasses a third of our population?

In one sense it is unfair to blame the situation completely on the present resident of the White House: this present atmosphere has not been created in just the last 30 months. The Downgrading of America has been a successful war of attrition waged by the Left over the last 40 years. However, the atmosphere’s propagandized approval by the Democrats and the mainstream press, and the deepening of its foundations, have never been so loudly and proudly proclaimed.

America is eating itself: I wrote a diary earlier with a quote from – improbably! – Warren Harding, who warned that “our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little.”

What we must do for our government, our culture, Our Country, is to wrest them away from those who do not believe in freedom and the preservation of God-given, inalienable rights, and who do not believe that people should succeed to the best of their abilities, but rather insist on mediocrity as a national guiding principle.

In History one sees many “turning points,” when a culture, a civilization, or even just a single individual, decided to take one path rather than the other. The present era is placing such a turning point before us: it goes beyond the present debate on national bankruptcy.

I believe more and more that we are seeing a choice between a future where America re-energizes itself and remains a “shining city on a hill,” and a future where the hill is dark and the city in decay.

Will we be telling the ghosts of our soldiers that we have decided to blow out the candles?

We contemplate the immediate task of putting our public household in order. We need a rigid and yet sane economy, combined with fiscal justice, and it must be attended by individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future.

 

(My emphasis above.)

They were written by a man spurned as a political disaster. He was mocked as a blowhard whose prose rambled incomprehensibly.

Judge for yourself:

Discouraging indebtedness confronts us… and these obligations must be provided for. No civilization can survive repudiation (of debt).
We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will. We can strike at (excessive) taxation, and we must. We must face the grim necessity, with full knowledge that the task is to be solved, and we must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature.

(My emphasis above.)

Inexorable laws of nature, such as “Nothing is free,” the First Principle of Economics, which is violated daily by the geniuses now in charge, and have been violated by assorted previous geniuses, Democrat and Republican.

Consider more of his economic advice:

I pray for sober thinking in behalf of the future of America. No worthwhile republic ever went the tragic way to destruction, which did not begin the downward course through luxury of life and extravagance of living. More, the simple living and thrifty people will be the first to recover … Herein is greater opportunity than lies in alliance, compact or supergovernment. It is America’s chance to lead in example and prove to the world the reign of reason in representative popular government where people think who assume to rule.

(My emphasis above.)

The man writing the lines which I am quoting was no genius: he believed himself to be a typical American, hard-working with specific talents which he developed as well as he could. Certainly, like all of us, he was not perfect, and made mistakes in politics.

Yet he won his last election with 60% of the popular vote!

He could be politically courageous, and had his own ideas on “fairness” which the present character in the White House might heed. Congress had passed an increase in veterans’ benefits by wide margins right before a mid-term election: he vetoed the bill because it would have been unfair to increase taxes on the rest of America at that time.

The people agreed! When he died, the press estimated that national mourning was greater than it had been for McKinley, and approached the level seen for Lincoln.

A final clue:

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully against world domination by military autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program, but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirements.

(My emphasis above.)

“…sustainment in triumphant nationality.” Such a phrase, with or without its neologism, would never be spoken today by Democrats and even some Republicans!

I offer these quotes as advice to the moral mice in the Republican Party now squeaking nationally and shivering in fear about stopping the Leviathans of Socialism and Surrender unleashed by the Democrats.

This man ended a national recession – one equal to ours, if not worse according to some historians – by insisting that Congress slash taxes AND government spending, along with its interference in the business world. However, he was not completely blind to capitalism’s problems, and did favor protective tariffs (within limits), “pump-priming” public works projects to stimulate the economy (within limits), and opposed child labor so much that he was willing to work for a constitutional amendment against it. He also opposed Southern racism as seen in the KKK, and opposed his predecessor’s overt national racism, who had fired Afro-Americans in certain government positions and replaced them with white Democrats.

To be sure, some of his appointees were corrupt, and after his death, the left-wing press – aided by Republican silence! – used their scandals (Teapot Dome was “small potatoes” according to one historian) to create a myth persisting to this day, i.e. that this man’s short presidency was the worst 2 years in American History.

When you read the speeches, the original documents, and the newspapers from the 1920′s, you wonder how Warren Harding could end up with such a legacy.

I would advise the Harvard graduate now in the White House to read how Warren Harding attacked the recession in the post-World-War-I era. However, I fear that FACTS – as they were for The New Republic and other leftist rags of the 1920′s attacking Harding after his death – are irrelevant to our “most intelligent president ever.”

Check these websites for the speeches (the 1921 Inaugural Address and the “Return to Normalcy” speech) and further analysis:

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres46.html

http://livefromthetrail.com/about-the-book/speeches/chapter-3/senator-warren-g-harding

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/may/04/00024/

Would he not be risking his own overthrow?

Such are the contradictions of the Middle East, but the Emir of Qatar is apparently willing to take the risk. From certain contacts in Alexandria, who are Coptic Christians and who are deathly afraid (if not downright certain) that the “democratic” revolution will be hijacked into the creation of a state hostile to Israel and Christianity, I have learned that the Emir of Qatar has been funneling as much as $50,000 to assorted protest leaders to lead the revolt toward a radical Islamic state.

Sceptical of my sources (they obviously could well be biased), I began digging into why the leader of a tiny country with no standing army and populated mainly by Bedouins, would be spending his money supporting Egyptian radical Islamists.

It turns that out precisely because he cannot be a major player in the traditional sense (militarily, or through population), the Emir is forced to express his ambitions in non-traditional ways.

In classic Middle Eastern form, Qatar has been playing footsy with both sides for years. After booting his father out of the palace while the “old man” was in Switzerland (“Extend your vacation permanently” was supposedly the message), the present Emir has been backing radical Islam through his support of the Muslim Brothers and through his financing of Al-Jazeera, the infamous pro-Islamofascist TV network started in the middle 1990′s. At the same time, he has allowed the U.S. to establish bases in Qatar: thus he receives protection from the U.S. while simultaneously working for its destruction, along with the Western Christian tradition in general.

Classic Middle Eastern politics indeed!

By supporting Al-Jazeera, the Emir buys a philosophical/theological influence across the Arab world. And through his banks, he is now also buying more direct influence! The Qatar Islamic Bank is the largest global network of banks compliant with Shari’a Law.

In 2008 it announced record profits of $1.6 Billion dollars. They have branches throughout the world, and have expanded greatly in the last 3-5 years. The government of Qatar is its largest shareholder.

None of that has to be especially sinister at all, except that one of the goals of the radical Islamists is the establishment of a parallel banking system following Shari’a law, in the hope of replacing Western capitalism.

SO… the odds that the Emir of Qatar is indeed attempting to buy a radical Islamist revolution in Egypt are extremely good.

And again the incompetence of the West, especially our State Department, in understanding the doublethink mindset of many Middle Eastern leaders is astonishing!

Unless of course certain leftist, anti-Jewish, “we should feel guilty about being Americans” elements in our government are happy with those developments!

Two especially good articles found in my research:

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=379&PID=0&IID=2971&TTL=Al_Jazeera_and_Qatar:_The_Muslim_Brothers’_Dark_Empire?

http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2010jun26_cover3.html

An excerpt from the editorial:

 

 

The administration even has a CitizenCorps.gov Web site. “Scientific analysis has shown that today’s threat is different” than the Cold War nuclear threat, the site’s “Planning for a Nuclear Detonation” section assures its readers .

The danger today is “potentially survivable for thousands, especially with adequate shelter and education,” it states. “Spending the first few hours in a good shelter, such as the center of a multi-story building, can keep radiation exposure at a non-lethal level.”

Another soothing reassurance is that a nuclear terrorist blast is a “much smaller explosion than the strategic thermonuclear weapons of the Cold War, though people within a few miles of the blast could still be killed or injured.” No kidding. You think?

“Breathing in fallout dust is only a minor concern,” the nuclear survival Web site says. “The good news is that fallout decays and radiation levels will decrease rapidly over the first few hours and days,” so “spending the first hour in an urban shelter such as a multi-story building can keep radiation exposures at a non-lethal level.”

For years, detente proponents joked that the only reason to “duck and cover” during a nuclear attack was to kiss your posterior goodbye. Now, instead of going all-out to prevent Islamofascist Iran from building a nuclear bomb, the Obama administration is telling the American people: don’t be fatalistic. The “good news” is that nuclear terrorism is “more survivable” than you think.

And so why this change of attitude?

Given the hostility of the Left and of BIG BRObama himself (e.g. read his books) toward America, toward American History, toward American exceptionalism, toward American capitalist and religious culture, I fear there is only answer.

They must believe that America is not worth reducing this threat to zero, or at least as low as possible. It is possible they consciously or subconsciously believe that – for the sake of fairness – America needs to be hit with a nuclear weapon, so that it can receive payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that it can receive payback for developing missiles and nuclear warheads to protect itself from Russian and Chinese Communism (who really were peace-loving, according to the Left), so that it can be paid back for supporting Israel against peace-loving, freedom-loving Islamic states, so that it can be paid back for African slavery, so that it can be paid back for harming the environment, so that it can be paid back for stealing the whole country from the Native Americans, so that it can be paid back for whatever ill The Left imagines we are guilty of!

And so this most questionable administration will apparently do nothing beyond mouth-flapping to stop Iran, North Korea, or any other rogue state from developing nuclear bombs, states which have openly expressed their desire to hit us and other countries allied with us with nuclear weapons. It wants to disarm America (recall BIG BRObama’s infamous speech about his intentions on weapon programs of the future: see the link below) and tie our hands with worthless treaties, like START, which History has shown the Russians and Chinese will instantly violate, while screaming that the U.S. needs to adhere to it.

See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU4sVQV3Lhk/

http://www.redstate.com/ausonius/2010/12/05/why-treaties-with-the-russians-are-worthless/

WASHINGTON (AP) — Golf-loving Rep. John Boehner (BAY’-nur) says playing 18 holes with someone is a good way to get to that person. That might be hint from the House speaker-in-waiting to fellow golfer President Barack Obama.

Boehner is about an eight-handicap golfer and when asked on CBS’ “60 Minutes” about being better than the president, Boehner said, “He understands that.”

Aides say Boehner doesn’t have much time for the game lately, and the Ohio Republican says he’s never had an invitation to play with Obama.

Boehner says the two have talked a number of times about playing, but it just hasn’t happened yet.

Boehner says that on the course, “You can’t be somebody that you’re not, because all of you shows up.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” might be the philosophy at work here.

On the other hand…

Does anyone sense that Boehner (a fellow Ohioan whom I would like to trust) just might be succumbing to the old temptation of wanting to be pals with the elite people at the top, since as a future Speaker he will be the newest member of the club?  He seems a little too eager to elicit an invitation, which – thank heavens in my opinion! – has not yet arrived!

One thinks of Gingrich with Pelosi worrying about climate change.  And of Bush Senior getting all warm and fuzzy about Billy Jeff Clinton.  And of McCain and his fellow RINO’s joining Dems and sabotaging the Conservative agenda for progress in America.  How exactly have Conservatives and America profited from these associations?

If Boehner wants to see who the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue really is, he should read the man’s books.  He should pay attention to the man’s speeches: the infamous Cairo Speech would be a good place to start.  Or maybe the one written (at least in part) by Mort Zuckerman.  Or maybe the one tippy-toeing around Iran’s nuclear weapons program and idly dreaming about a disarmed world, a speech which so perplexed French President Sarkozy.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial of September 29, 2009:

“I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

We thought we’d never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America’s Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.

But let us be charitable: maybe Boehner will stand up and be counted and oppose the socialist agenda of the Dems. Maybe he wants to play golf with MAObama to show and verify privately that from the Republican point of view there can be no compromise with the twin evils of pusillanimity and socialism.

Yet even that would be a mistake: for it gives the impression that nothing has changed in Washington, that the elites still stick together, that they are “buddy-buddy” no matter which side they supposedly represent.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a golf game really is just a golf game, and not a symbol of anything deeper.

But not this time.

I would think if Boehner wants “to get to” the present occupant of the White House, he should confine himself to applying pressure by standing firm for what voters want: reduced taxation and reduced regulation thereby bringing about reduced government interference in our lives and those of our children.

And by refusing any and all invitations to play golf or basketball with a certain man whose initials are B.H.O.

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is somewhat mistitled, because a majority of the pages concern in fact Byzantine History, the story of an empire which persisted with difficulty for over a thousand years (Rome falls in 410: Constantinople in 1453).  How exactly does an empire “decline”…for a thousand years?!   The answer is that the Byzantines had periods of resurgence, even if long-term they were doomed.

Byzantine diplomacy was one of their reasons for surviving against such great odds: Arabs, Turks, Slavs, Crusaders, Italian city-states all sharpening their knives against this Greek state.  And this diplomacy was usually predicated on the assumption that treaties and political agreements were instruments of survival: breaking them at any time, even entering into them with no intention of keeping the agreement, was morally justified.

The Russians, themselves surrounded by Tatars, Swedes, Ottoman Turks, learned this lesson well.  While the more Westernizing czars later on became more trustworthy in international diplomacy, there are assorted examples of classic “Byzantine diplomacy” (e.g. Czar Alexander’s allying with Napoleon while simultaneously talking with the British about the future).

With Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists we return to more classic amoral Byzantine diplomacy.  There is a case to be made that Lenin and Stalin followed two German philosophers in their careers: Marx and Nietzsche, the latter with his ideas on the amoral Übermensch being combined with Marx’s akimbo morality for class warfare.

One of the classic observations about the West’s dealings with dictators in the 20th century (and today) is that our high-minded politicians treat murderous tyrants…as if they were high-minded Western politicians.  (Besides Chamberlain’s dealings with Hitler, one remembers with a shiver W. Bush’s claim to see Putin’s re-assuring soul.  Or our present resident of the White House expecting egotistically expecting every tyrant to roll over and play dead for him.)  This attitude has led the West to be continuously shocked and disappointed as soon as treaty violations are discovered:  the SALT II treaty was DOA, because one violation was known fairly early (i.e. Russian troops in Cuba), and one could assume therefore that others existed, and so the Senate never ratified it.

President Reagan nevertheless offered to honor the treaty, if the Soviet Russians agreed to follow it also.  And as could have been predicted, he needed to reveal in the middle 1980′s that the Soviet Russians had violated the agreement.

And so Communism may be somewhat gone in Russia, and a limited freedom is now present: but has anything changed?  For over 20 years America and the West have been expecting the Russian government to become as Westernized and trustworthy as themselves.  This has demonstrably not happened, and it has not happened because the Russian-Communist heritage of international deception has been transferred to Vladimir Putin’s shadow dictatorship.

How exactly is Putin a free-thinking Westerner?

And so again we see the liberals in the West becoming all warm and fuzzy about START and other such agreements.  Why?  Did they not pay attention in History class?  Or are they just so optimistic that this time will be different ?

So, keep talking with the Russians, and keep signing agreements with them: but please stop being shocked when you discover that the Russians…have stayed Russians.

Have you wondered if your life, out of several tens of billions of humans who have ever lived, will make a difference, or has any kind of importance?  As a member of RedState, you undoubtedly have wondered about this question with a more religious flavor in your thoughts than members of certain other sites.  You most probably believe that Divinity of some sort exists, that it somehow takes notice of you, and that therefore you play some sort of role in the ongoing History of the Universe.

Keep that last idea in mind!

Perhaps you have written comments here at RedState, and nobody responded.  Perhaps you have written diaries, and they were never commented upon, never recommended, and seemed to have dropped off the list rather quickly by the end of the day.  Let us assume that your comments or your diary were in fact highly insightful and full of inspiring ideas.  And so you become discouraged or even angry that your voice was not heard.

I am here to tell you that you still made a difference, that you helped to improve America and thereby the world, even if not one person read your writing! 

How is this possible?  Because by participating here at RedState you are contributing to an Atmosphere of Righteousness.

Physicists have been wondering about tiny “quantum effects,” i.e. the actions of subatomic particles, and whether they might be involved in human consciousness.  Some scientists have theorized that the quantum world may be how we influence each other.  A good amount of nonsense by non-scientists is available on this topic: true or not, what has been obvious to any student of the human condition is that good examples of behavior tend to be spread slowly, and that bad examples spread quickly. 

“Senators are good men, but the Senate is a beast” was a Roman slogan whose truth no one doubted.  Normally good people could suddenly agree to the stupidest actions under the malign influence of a few.  More recently the Broken Windows Theory (formulated c. 30 years ago by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling), wherein people clean up deteriorated neighborhoods and create an atmosphere of order and cleanliness, was famously used in New York City during the Giuliani years to reduce crime.  This idea has worked in other crime-filled cities as well.

The point here is that RedState is an important fixer of broken windows in America, a creator of an ideational atmosphere where the virtues of personal freedom, personal responsibility, and familial and national duty dominate socialist tenets on reducing those virtues to create a mediocre and nearly robotized world of “Fairness” and “Security,” and where government subtly hijacks the role of a religion. 

When you participate here at RedState, either as a writer of comments or diaries or as a reader, you contribute to the creation of a moral atmosphere echoing, symbolically at least, the words “Let there be light” of the original creation.

And so let us assume that a new visitor to RedState skims through the pages, and notices all these diaries, and all these comments, and your writing is among them.  The visitor reads nothing you wrote (and perhaps neither did anybody else).  No matter!  By adding your words here, simply by having a box with your name and a title on it in the lists, you have participated in the act of creation, and have added a few raindrops to the shower nourishing the desert in an attempt to stop the Sands of Leftism.

If your writing has quality, all the better!

And so yes, as Wisdom has shown throughout the ages, the one small act can have repercussions larger than the act itself.  Your one vote for freedom, your essay on Candidate X, and your perusal of the RedState website, are all important for the preservation of a free, moral, and creative atmosphere in America.

The planet will still rotate and revolve, whether you vote or not, whether you participate at RedState or not.  In a few billion years, we are told, the planet will not exist, absorbed by a swelling, dying sun.  But will the story of the human race be slightly better – or slightly worse – because of your life’s contributions?