Forget about outdated commitments entered into at the start of the Cold War: what strategic U.S. interests are being served today by the continued defense of a country which continually undercuts our efforts at protection? Sure, Kim Jong-un would destroy the South Korean economy and enslave its people through the expansion of the national gulag which is the North Korean worker’s paradise, but how would America suffer by the North’s absorption of the South?
It’s not like we couldn’t get along without anything manufactured by Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo or any other South Korean conglomerate, all of which compete with domestically produced goods.
Consider the following scenario: Trump calls the Blue House and informs Moon, given his continued coddling of Kim, the U.S. no longer feels welcome in his country, nor do we deem it advisable to waste limited national defense funds protecting a nation who can’t differentiate between friend and foe.
Trump then publicly announces a timeline for withdrawing our forces, while making it crystal clear to the NoKos (and the Chicoms), while we’re leaving their ungrateful countrymen south of the 38th parallel to their own devices, we’re reinforcing, in the strongest terms possible, our unwavering commitment to the defense of Taiwan, Japan and other eastern Asian nations who ask for our protection.
More importantly, since the NoKos have no remotely legitimate territorial aspirations outside the Korean Peninsula, any attack, military incursion or missile launch, test or otherwise, made against or over these nations will be considered an attack against the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response.
It’s a win-win, at least for the U.S. After all, we save untold billions bringing home troops tasked with the thankless job of protecting South Korea, while eliminating a serious point of friction in the Far East. The NoKos would have a free hand in the South, impotently isolated by Red China in the north along the Yalu and on the other three sides by waters neither their troops nor artillery can cross. And with any future ballistic missile firings over our allies subject to immediate military retaliation, to hell with the South Koreans.
What’s not to like?
Speaking of things not to like, here’s Stilton Jarlsberg’s hilarious take on the First Marxists’ latest act of fraud, waste and abuse…not only of government funds, but in this case, of good taste:
Rogues Gallery
Oh, you just knew we had to share our take on the preposterous new portraits of Barry and Michelle. And we’ve got to admit that we’re having a grand time watching effete Leftists struggling to explain why these alleged works of art are swoon-worthy.
Barry’s is hilariously surreal and lacks only a unicorn to properly depict the self-obsessed fantasy world he lived in. Seriously, it practically screams “this man has no contact with reality.”
We do, however, like the fact that the vines are already growing over his legs – giving us hope that he will eventually disappear entirely.
Michelle’s portrait is just flat out, laughably hideousand deserves a non-traditional display.
Although it wasn’t our intent, we actually improved her wretched portrait by adding the colorful crayon illustrations. The actual painting looks like the work of a not-very-talented school kid who still got a C+ for “trying very, very hard.”
The portrait is astonishingly amateurish, lifeless, and flat – although we actually agree with the artist’s decision to give Michelle’s painting no background. After all, what background did we ever get on the woman herself, other than that she had no pride in America until Obama elbowed his way into our national nightmares and, per her laughably self-centered university “thesis,” that shejust plain doesn’t like white folks.
Perhaps it’s just the influence of Valentine’s Day, but we actually find our hearts warmed by these ghastly portraits…because they’re exactly what the subjects deserved.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, as the meme which accompanies our Quote of the Day at the top of page details, by all accounts the Parkland, FL massacre is yet another instance where authorities, though forewarned, failed to prevent another public school slaughter.
And though the following video was made in 2012, the conclusions expressed therein remain just as valid today (click on the “watch this video on YouTube” link to access it) as they were five years ago:
In a related item, writing at Townhall.com, Lawrence Meyers suggests…
“I’m a small government guy, however, it’s sadly apparent that the United States of America is paralyzed with political indecision over something the State of Israel figured out more than 40 years ago: all schools should have mandated security features and active shooter protocols.
The horrific scene in Parkland, and the upsetting videos broadcast from the school during the shooting, should be the final straw. The kids should not have been hiding and screaming, they should have been in the midst of a pre-determined security protocol.
President Trump, if the Department of Education can force Americans to deal with the disaster of Common Core, it can certainly issue a federal mandate regarding school security.The time is now.
…In 1974, Israel endured the Ma’alot Massacre in which “Palestinian” terrorists took 115 people hostage at Netiv Meir Elementary School. Twenty-two children and three others were killed and 68 injured. Israel now requires schools with 100 or more students to have a guard posted. The civilian police force handles the entire security system of all schools from kindergarten through college. The Ministry of Education funds shelters and fences, reinforces school buses, and hires and trains guards.
Guards don’t just stand around. They check everyone entering, and engage threats.
And yeah, they’ve got guns. The lawful purposes for carrying guns are very clear: protect school personnel and students, create a sense of security, deter the ill-intentioned, and provide self-defense.
Common sense. Except to the illogical dullards who claim that “adding guns to schools won’t fix anything” and are fixated on the NRA and the ridiculous notions that gun laws magically stop criminals and crazy people from obtaining one of the 300 million guns in our country.
But more to the point, Israel’s Police Community & Civil Guard Department have a preventative care program that encourages safe behavior and offers violence protection strategies in normal situations. Yet students are also trained in how to respond to an active shooter situation.
…Because right now, America is the deer-in-headlights. Gun control debates are a distraction and impractical, and criminals ignore laws anyway. Crazy people are obviously not being dealt with properly – students at Parkland even predicted this would happen.
The only solution is for America to toughen up. We have a pugilist for a president, and that is long overdue. Now its time for President Trump to fight for our children by wielding government power in the proper manner, to do something that any reasoned American would agree with.
Instead of handing out participation trophies, let’s make our kids into the self-reliant, pro-active defenders of themselves and others…”
Next up, writing at Townhall.com, Ben Shapiro observes how, when it comes to what America’s getting from its MSM…
This Isn’t Normal
“It became necessary to destroy the country to save it!”
You’ve heard the phrase over and over again: “This isn’t normal.” We’ve heard it about President Trump’s rhetoric, and his Twitter usage. We’ve heard it about his attacks on the media, and we’ve heard it about his legislative ignorance. We’ve heard it about his running commentary on the Mueller investigation, and we’ve heard it about his bizarre stream-of-consciousness interviews.
There’s some truth to all of this. Trump has said some incredibly awful things (e.g. his comments on Charlottesville, Virginia, and Haitians). He’s not a predictable, stable genius. All of this “non-normality,” however, has resulted in…a relatively normal situation.The economy’s booming. We’re on more solid foreign-policy ground than we were when President Obama was in office — by a long shot. The Constitution hasn’t been torn asunder. The structures of government are still in place. Trump may be toxic rhetorically, but his presidency hasn’t annihilated the norms that govern our society.
The same can’t be said, however, of the media institutions that seem so consumed with saving the republic from the specter of Trump. Like self-appointed superheroes so intent on stopping an alien monster that they end up destroying the entire city, our media are so focused on stopping Trump that they end up undermining both their credibility and faith in American institutions.
Take, for example, the media’s coverage of North Korea at the Winter Olympics. Suddenly, the worst regime on the planet has been transformed into a cute exhibit from “It’s a Small World.”Those women in red forced to smile and cheer on cue? Just an example of the brilliance of revolutionary North Korean “juche” ideology. Kim Jong Un’s sister, a member of the inner cabinet of a regime that imprisons thousands of dissenters and shoots those who don’t properly worship the Dear Respected? She’s an example of Marxist humility and stellar diplomacy. (Akin, we can only assume, to Barry and Moochie!)
It’s not just the media.This week, we learned that former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former Vice President Joe Biden and former President Obama held a last-minute meeting at the White House to discuss the possibility of Trump-Russia collusion. At that meeting, Rice wrote in an email, Obama reportedly asked whether there was any reason “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.” That means that Obama asked his top staff, including the FBI, whether he could hide intelligence information from the incoming Trump team.
That amounts to a massive breach in the constitutional structure. The FBI is not an independent agency. It is part of the executive branch. The incoming Trump administration was duly elected by the American people and had every right to see all intelligence information coming from the FBI and the CIA. Yet it was the supposedly normal Obama White House exploring means of preventing that transparency.
Trump isn’t a normal president. But the threat to our institutions doesn’t reside only at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — or even primarily there. It resides with those who are willing to side with any enemy and violate every rule in order to stop the supposed threat of Trump.
Then there’s this from NRO, as David French reports…
“…The third story is a tad dated, at least by the absurd speeds of modern news cycles. I’d like to bring you back to the ancient days of last month, when James Damore filed a comprehensive lawsuit against Google, arguably the most powerful corporation in the world, alleging the existence of a social-justice culture that a Brown student would envy. According to Damore, Google was a place where its managers would punish mainstream conservative thoughtat the same time that it hosted a talk on “living as a plural being” by a person who identified as a “yellow-scale wingless dragonkin.”
So to those who say that extremism is confined to campus, Google itself replies: Dragonkin, yes; conservatives, no.
I’ve written about this before, but one of the most useful frameworks for understanding the culture war is the “Overton window.” Developed by the late Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, it simply refers to the acceptable range of political discourse on any given topic. It’s perhaps the ultimate expression of the triumph of culture over politics.If you can move the range of acceptable discourse to the left or right, you can “win” even if your party loses.
Let’s take two different examples — one on the left, the other on the right. It’s beyond dispute that the Left has decisively moved the Overton window on gay marriage. Consider the fact that a mere 22 years ago, a Democratic president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, designed specifically to blunt the newly emerging gay-marriage movement. The bill passed the House 342–67 and passed the Senate 85–14.
By 2015, the Obama administration was openly questioning whether religious colleges could keep their tax exemptions if they declined to sanction gay couples. In 2018, the Supreme Court is considering whether a baker can be legally compelled to use his artistic talent to help celebrate a gay wedding.
But lest anyone think that the Left always wins cultural battles, let’s consider gun rights. This chart, from David Kopel, shows the change in gun laws from 1986 to 2014. In 1986, less than 10 percent of the American population had “shall issue” access to concealed-carry permits. By 2014?The change was staggering:
Since 2014, gun rights have only accelerated.As our own Charlie Cooke has demonstrated, “constitutional carry” — where there is no requirement of a state permit to carry a lawfully owned firearm — is on its way to becoming the law of the land in most of the geographic area of the United States and applicable to up to 41 percent of the population.
This is an astounding transformation, every bit as breathtaking in its own right as the change in marriage law. In most states, the Overton window moved to the right, and it’s still moving right.
We can do this issue by issue, but an issue-based focus obscures a larger and far more significant reality. We’re no longer fighting about “the” Overton window. Our differences have grown so profound that “the” window has broken. We’ve got two windows now. One for red. One for blue.
Since 1994 the Pew Research Center has been studying political polarization in the United States, and you can watch the two windows form right in front of your eyes. Here are two images that show the difference between the political positions of the “median Republican” and “median Democrat” in the “general public” in 1994 and in 2017:
And this brings us back to the three stories that started this piece. There is a difference, I believe, between progressives and conservatives.Given their control of the academy, legacy media, and Hollywood — along with their intense geographical concentration in large, urban enclaves — progressives are not only racing further to the left, they’re also deceiving themselves about their cultural strength.
They think they’re “winning” when they’ve really moved mainly themselves. The other window either remains unmoved or moves right in response.Arguments on the far-left side of the blue Overton window (like campus temper tantrums) are greeted with complete incredulity and open mockery on the right.
In fact, even progressiveconventional wisdom (such as the notion that a man can become a woman) is at best on the far-left edge of the Republican Overton window.At best.Similarly, I’d challenge a Republican to walk into a Brooklyn coffee shop and find a single person who didn’t think you were a violent bigot for believing that Caitlyn Jenner is still a man and that the Second Amendment alone grants you the right to carry a weapon.
We may have exhausted all the “why Trump won” arguments, so I won’t go there. But I will say that the notion that one Overton community will govern the other is increasingly infuriating and even terrifying to the losers of national political contests. That’s why — even if control in narrowly divided houses of Congress changes hands — true “waves” will be hard to find.As the midterms move closer, that’s a key reason why the margin in the generic congressional ballot keeps narrowing. For Republicans, it’s one thing to express anger or contempt at either a free-spending GOP establishment or a chaotic Trump administration. It’s quite another thing to stand by and let the dragonkin rule.“
Which gives us renewed hope for the outcome of the 2018 elections…The Donald’s incessant tweets to the contrary notwithstanding.
Since we’re on the subject of renewed hope, we next present this rather timely expose by Bruce Bawer, courtesy of PJMedia, detailing…
“When British Prime Minister Theresa May gave her traditional New Year’s speech on December 31, one line — actually, just one word — jumped out at me. May spoke of the importance of “taking a balanced approach to government spending, so we get our debt falling but can also invest in the things that matter — our schools, our police and our precious NHS.”
Yes, “precious.” She actually described the National Health Service as precious!
Now, one might easily forgive her for describing, say, Britain’s finest doctors and nurses as — oh, I don’t know — how about “treasured”? Or for using such language to celebrate modern medicine — robot surgery, wonder drugs, cutting-edge diagnostic technology.
But no: Theresa May was talking about a government bureaucracy. It struck me as both ridiculous and scary — a perfect example of the statist mentality at its most perverse.
I already knew that the Brits have been brainwashed for generations into thinking their NHS is some kind of miracle. (Recall, for example, the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, which climaxed in a bizarre tribute to the NHS.) But May’s use of the word “precious” was a new one to me.
Curious, I did a bit of Googling. I discovered that May is far from the first person to speak of the NHS in this way.In 2011, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham warned of “David Cameron’s determination to turn our precious NHS into a U.S.-style commercial system.” A January 2015 column in The Sun was headlined: “Stop sticking the knife into our precious NHS.” Last March, Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon urged Scotsmen to vote SNP if they wanted “a government that’s committed to our precious NHS.”
There’s a lot more where that came from. Plus plenty of references to “our beloved NHS.”
One is reminded of the closing sentence of 1984: “He loved Big Brother.”
It’s sad enough to see this sort of thing in a Nordic social democracy. It’s even sadder to see it in the home of Magna Carta, a country that, in 1940-41, stood alone in a life-or-death war against totalitarianism. Of course, this whole socialist mess started right after the war ended, with the Brits unceremoniously dumping the century’s great hero of freedom, Winston Churchill, and installing in his place a Labour government that, bucking the advice of doctors, took control of the kingdom’s health-care system.
Even at its most successful, a welfare state doesn’t exist to give life meaning — it’s no more than a means to an end. But in socialist countries, the rhetoric of politicians and state-subsidized media inevitably transforms it into something resembling a religion.So it is with the NHS in Britain.
What makes this NHS-worship especially grotesque is that the NHS,far from being successful, is a world-class disaster…”
Why British politicians kowtow to the NHSshould be obvious: with 1.8 million members in a nation of 65.5 million, the NHS is the single, biggest employer in Great Britain, representing some 1.5% of the population who can be depended upon to vote their own self-interest every election.
Which is why Progressives are so desirous of single-payer healthcare in the U.S. Assuming the same percentage of population as a potential voting bloc, socialized healthcare workers in the United States would provide Dimocrats a minimum of some 5,000,000 additional votes.
When added to the potential illegal immigrant vote, Progressives’ machinations begin to make sense!
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
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