I was impressed with Ed Crane’s comment in a WSJ op-ed on Ron Paul that the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world on defense–in essence defense of the western world! ”…an overreaching military presence around the world is inconsistent with small, constitutional government at home. The massive cost of these interventions, in treasure and blood, highlights what a mistake they are, as sensible people on the left and right recognized from the beginning. Of course we want a strong military capable of defending the United States, but our current expenditures equal what the rest of the world spends, which makes little sense. It is futile to try to be the world’s policeman…”

My point is that to the extent we overspend on defense, Europe doesn’t need to spend. Their taxes to the extent paid go to increase statist expansions and welfare in countries like Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain.

To top that off, our Fed seems to think it legitimate to help finance Europe’s profligate ways. Jerry O’Driscoll exposes Bernanke’s covert effort to bail out the ECB in his recent WSJ op-ed highlighted in our blog. This is clearly ultra vires, beyond the legal power of the Fed and against what its chairman has publicly stated.

In effect we have given Europe the leeway to expand its welfare state beyond its capacity to pay for that expansion. Our president who has no concept of economics admires the European model and seeks to expand our own welfare state beyond its capacity to pay for the expansion. His statist stimulus expenditures were nothing more than payments to increase the size and scope of government. His Obamacare takeover of medicine is nothing more than an unsustainable entitlement addition to the already unsustainable entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

We have enabled Europe’s welfare/statist addiction at a time when we can’t afford our own addiction. That latter addiction is theft from our grandchildren. Immorality par excellence! It must stop!

Is the State Department again in control of the Defense Department? Seems that we were late, perhaps fatally, entering in this relatively simple action. This because Obama has determined to relinquish U.S. leadership in the world, something this country has had since Bretton Woods. Henceforth under Obama’s non-leadership role, all matters of disagreement, violent or otherwise, will be referred to some super-national body, the UN, NATO, the World Court, even the Commission on Human Rights with all its rogue membership! We now stand for nothing and now defer to others who stand for less! If Peral Harbor were to occur today, to which of these international agencies would he refer the matter?

So now we have a State Department that has left no easy exit to what we have termed an illegitimate dictator responsible for terror, indeed terror against the United States. No country will take him or his henchmen. We have left them no out except to fight and slaughter to the bitter end. This is the height of stupidity. To cap that, we have a Defense Department that will not target him, blow the son-of-a-bitch to smithereens. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

Is there a legal problem, or a moral problem with assassination? If war is the violent societal conflict consequent on the breakdown of diplomacy or alternative dispute resolution, then we must assure ourselves that those methods have been exhausted. Seems that’s the case here and the UN has authorized in broad enough terms, enforcement of the no-fly zone.

In truth, targeting Gaddafi is the most humane method to end the engagement. No command and control, no flying tanks! Sir Thomas Moore, patron saint of attorneys, argued as much as illustrated in this OSU synopsis:

“As early as 1516, Thomas More proposed that the assassination of political leaders could be useful both as a tool of statecraft and “as a means of sparing ordinary citizens the hardships of war for which their leaders were responsible.” This proposal of tyrannicide, while perhaps a bit shocking in its boldness, rightfully deserves consideration in an era in which the traditional state expression of power, war, now threatens to be more catastrophic than ever before.”

So I submit, we should target Gaddafi and company as precisely as morally possible and save innumerable human lives and suffering.

In short he wants to hide behind others. So, it’s not his fault. It never will be his fault because he won’t make a hard decision. He the perfect picture of a Hamlet wringing his hands and unable to decide. What can one expect of a Chicago politician who has never had any responsibility. A community organizer who learned effective rabble rousing but little else. A state legislator who voted “present” more often than Aye or Nay. A senator seldom present for a vote. A president who takes polls before taking a position. No wonder the Democrat powerhouses wanted him, public unions, trial lawyers, Wall Street, all of them know he’s easily controlled.

So our empty suited leader will stand by and watch Gadhafi massacre his own people and while tragic it won’t be his fault. After all he did bluster a bit and went to all those international organizations! Now it can be effectively argued that what happens in Lybia is immaterial to our strategic interest. What’s happening in Bahrain and Saudi is certainly  more critical to our strategic interests. But the humanitarian cost in Lybia will be horrific. He will turn a blind eye and deaf ear. He is the “peace in our time” Neville Chamberlain of today.

Well, what’s the problem with that? After all, we can’t be the world’s policeman. We are bankrupt ourselves. The problem is both moral and practical in nature. Moral in that it is wrong to standby and watch an illegitimate dictator murder his citizens when we have the ability to stop the massacre. It’s the equivalent of watching Hitler freely executing the Holocaust. We are the only nation capable of leading, because before Obama in modern times we have had that position and because of the indecisiveness and ineffectiveness of international organizations. Our abdication is morally wrong.

The practical nature of the problem is that our abdication of leadership creates a vacuum. As nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. The vacuum will be filled by every two bit dictator with any ambition. In this case Gadhafi. And while Gadhafi is a minor player and really more of a European problem, Kim Jong II isn’t; nor is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So the moral wrong begets a major security risk.

As today’s WSJ editorial concludes: “Lybia today is what the world without U.S. leadership looks like.”

Here’s the link: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20101129_dispatch_wikileaks_and_irans_nuclear_program

There were plenty of good memorials posted today. Some will bring tears, like “Remembering Patrick Sullivan” by  Jack Dumphy who tells of a brother naming his kids “Mary Patrick and Shane Patrice.” You get the picture.

But the one that impressed me most is less poignant and more accusatory, more an indictment of our progressive, politically correct, and invincibly naive ignorance.  Andrew McCarthy’s NRO post “Imagining Islam” is a wake up call to all sensible Americans, no all sensible Westerners.

Andy posits a fantasy Islam that is secular and moderate. This religion is dedicated to human rights, against slavery, modern and tolerant of other religions and cultures. Arguably such a religion would have condemned the murderous killing of innocents that preceded and followed those of the WTC. It would have issued those condemnations loudly and en masse for at least the last nine years.

But for the last nine years we have heard nothing but silence.

“What excruciating truths have we yet failed to grasp on this ninth anniversary of 9/11? The first is that such an Islam does not exist. The second is that, despite this fact, American foreign and domestic policy continues to proceed as though it does exist — and as though it were the only real Islam. That is, nine years after Islamists made their commitment to our destruction as unmistakable as possible, nine years after the non-occurrence of all the wonderful things that would certainly have happened if the Islam of our dreams were the Islam of our reality, our national-security strategy is still steeped in fiction.”

Hussein Obama has put America on a foreign policy of “self delusion.” We no longer wage a “war on terror” but instead engage in sporadic “overseas contingency operations.” If we avoid saying whom we are fighting and why, we soon forget. Our president, our commander in chief, goes through the Arab world bowing and appeasing. He fights our natural allies and weakens our defenses. He now tolerates a nuclear Iran whose president shouts “Death to America!”  He has our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan pursuing “nation building” with Shria law! This the law that stones women and kills homosexuals and bans religious minorities.

In the U.S. we defend the Islamists monument to the 911 slaughter at ground zero proffered by an imam paid by the U.S. State Department. This part of the religion of peace intends to take over our country not by violence but by out populating us and enacting Shria law as it is now doing in Europe.

But the violent wing of this fantasy religion of peace is still alive and healthy: “At home, even as al-Qaeda continues its efforts to reprise 9/11, a network of Islamist organizations — coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood and financially backed by our friends, the Saudis — proceeds with what it calls its “grand jihad” to eliminate and destroy Western civilization by sabotage. This is not a secret. The Brotherhood’s internal memoranda were seized by the FBI. They boldly announce these claims in black and white. Two years ago, the Justice Department aptly labeled the constituent organizations — including the Islamic Society of North America and the Council onAmerican Islamic Relations — as unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing case in which several of their partners were convicted of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. Today, those Islamist organizations are right back in business, with an open door to “engaging” government policymakers, as if nothing ever happened. In our imagination, they’re moderates, too.”

Hussein Obama’s policies weaken us. By failing to recognize our enemy and the values it seeks to impose, we eventually fail to recognize our own values and will soon lose them, to our regret.

This is not a case of “loose lips sink ships;” this an intentional broadcast of secret information while the country is at war. The military traitor should get military justice.

But the rub is the self important Julian Assnage and his co-conspirators in the New York Time, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, the so-called responsible press. In the NYT case, it’s printing all the news “fit to print”

As Tony Blankley points out in his “Wiki Espionage” post their conduct is a clear violation of the Espionage Act (Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 794). Opposition to the war cannot justify treason.

“If Mr. Assange had perpetrated this outrage against Russia, inevitably there would be a news report a few month later announcing the death of Mr. Assange and his loved ones (should he have any) because of an unlikely street accident. Thank goodness we live in nation of laws — not of executive actions.

“But the rule of law will not last long if the law is not used to avenge grievous wrongs committed against our nation.

“It is the high duty of our government not to let Mr. Assange walk free (assuming the evidence in court of his espionage is as convincing as the news accounts suggest). Let the federal prosecutions proceed — wiki, wiki.”

The conceit, self aggrandizement, and above-the-law attitude of the NYT is appalling.

“My working assumption is that the financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007…has accelerated a fundamental shift in the economic balance of power. Even before the crisis, Jim O’Neill and his team at Goldman Sachs were forecasting that China’s gross domestic product would exceed that of the United States in 2027 at half past four on October the 15th, which is just a little pinch of salt to remind you that all such projections need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Still, whether it’s 2027, ’28, ’29 or ’30, the interesting thing is the first time they made that projection, they thought it would be 2040. Every time I see Jim, I say, “Have you moved the date forward yet?” because he made that 2027 call before the financial crisis.

“The financial crisis unquestionably has hit the United States much harder than China. Their stimulus worked much better than ours…The first point I just want to put out there is: it’s hard to believe, under these circumstances, that the acceleration, the shift, if you’d like, from West to East hasn’t been speeded up by this crisis.

“The second point is: Of course, power is not just about GDP. It’s not just about the economy. Power is also about the ability to project hard power through military means. And some people in Washington like to comfort themselves by saying, “We can still do that way more than they can. Count their aircraft carriers, count ours.”

“But one point that follows from the financial crisis which is terribly, terribly important is that by combating our crisis of private debt with an extraordinary expansion of public debt, we inevitably are going to reduce the resources available for national security in the years ahead. Because as the debt grows, so the interest payments you have to make on it grow, even if interest rates stay low. And on current projections, the federal debt is going to be absorbing around 20 percent, a fifth of all the taxes you pay, within just a few years. The item of discretionary federal expenditure most likely to be squeezed is, of course, defense. And there are lots of historic precedents for that. So, I fear that the financial crisis doesn’t just impact on the economy. It actually impacts on American power in the hardest sense.”

This is just a taste, and he does offer some hope, so I won’t spoil his offering but suggest you link to the talk.