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Rope-Sellers Running Your Pension Fund

Sometimes idiocy gets so entrenched that it’s mistaken for wisdom. For the rest of us, we should start to shake our elites’ false aura of authority and easily recognize some of their chic passions for what they are – nonsense. In this, I refer to our the corporate suits’ enthusiasm for woke ideology. How could adults embrace something so ludicrous? The farce would be apparent to a child.

I’m reminded of the old gag of a tractor-trailer hauling a tall earth mover but at a standstill at a bridge. Stumped as to how to get it under the bridge, a kid in a mini-van rolls by with the window down and yells, “Let some air out of the tires!” Staunching the drivel, before they mutilate our livelihoods and retirement systems, is as obvious as letting some air out of the tires.

It might take a kid to cut through the overwrought bunk to help return us to sanity. Right now, overwrought lefty foolishness is piloting the ship of our retirements. Pay attention those of you at the mercy of CalSTRS and CalPERS and the rest of the public employee pension gang. Lefty ideologues control your pension checks. One such lefty avatar is Kirsty Jenkinson, Investment Director, Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Whew, what a mouthful, but a title that can be simply translated as “useful idiot in selling the rope that eco-totalitarians will use to hang us”.

Kirsty Jenkinson

Lenin was famous for his characterizations of supportive capitalists as “rope sellers” and “useful idiots”.

Taking a closer look at Kirsty shows the scope of the threat. This girl has an illustrious leftist pedigree, albeit one in carefully coiffed hair and suit (see below). She went from a four-year stint at Edinburgh University with a MA in “International History” to six years as an executive director at Goldman Sachs, innocuous enough till we find her as Director of “Governance & Sustainable Investment” at BMO Global Asset Management. What’s that obtuse title mean? Well, it’s a rephrasing of the leftist tag “ESG”, or Environment, Social, and Governance.

Whose Environment? Not ours, but the greenie utopia that people like Kirsty, schooled in all the lefty jargon, want to impose on us.

Whose Social? Not ours, but the “social” of the lefty faculty lounge and their legions of acolytes. Yep, that’s the stuff fed to your child through their curriculum and shows as Critical Race Theory and hides under the acronym EID – Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. All of this lingo boils down to perpetual victimhood of the “other” which is defined by a laundry list of immutable characteristics and a host of mental dispositions (“My genitalia doesn’t define my sex.”). Of course, the “social” encompasses an explosion of so-called remedies in government commands, rewards, and punishments. It’s a complete omni-competent state, as in the one contemplated by Karl Marx.

Whose Governance? Yes, ours. Meaning, they want to control us in every possible way. This political disposition leads to the reflex to funnel campaign cash to eco-socialist parties, like today’s Democratic Party. It also seeks to rope the Fortune 500 into the revolution. That gets us back to Kirsty Jenkinson.

From BMO, she ends up at the World Resources Institute as Director of Markets & Enterprise Program. Media Bias/Fact Check rates them “left-center”. It’s an eco-group with the same eco-mantras.

The BMO and WRI stints uncovered her as a lefty political activist in the corporate suite. She continued her march through the boardrooms as the Managing Director & Sustainable Investment Strategist at Wespath Institutional Investments. Are you getting the picture? This lady is into funds that have millions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal which can be turned into seats on corporate boards. The sheer weight of shares counts for a lot. All the better to foist ESG, EID, CRT, and the rest of the lefty litany on the nation from the classroom to the workplace. What doesn’t get through in the Green New Deal will be swept up by the Fortune 500.

Racial Equity indoctrination – CRT is foundational – in a North Carolina Episcopal Diocese in 2017.

That’s not the end of Kirsty’s sojourn. She’s now the Investment Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies at CalSTRS, the second largest pension fund with $275 billion in assets. Thus, this eco-activist has an outsized influence over the financial well-being of 949,000 teachers and staff. She can wield the fund’s $300 million stake in Exxon/Mobil like a Swiss halberd and force them to renounce any effort at producing affordable energy, their core business.

Bear in mind, that greenie stuff – “sustainable” – is expensive and unreliable, and that’s before we start the slide in our and our kids’ quality of life. And that’s before pensioners begin noticing the stories of CalSTRS’s difficulties in cutting the checks. At the end of the day, eco-fantasies don’t make for corporate health, and corporate ill-health becomes the basis for a bad portfolio, and a bad portfolio equals a bankrupt pension. Get it?

People like Kirsty Jenkinson, with her lefty fairy tales, have no business using my pension to advance their ideological crusade. The fiduciary rule requires the fund managers to work on behalf of the best financial interests of their clients. A totalitarian eco-utopia is not in the best interests of the beneficiaries. If individual beneficiaries want to send a little cash to the eco-blob, more power to them. But Kirsty should have another job, other than political activist. In fact, a proper functioning fiduciary rule would demand an end to titles such as Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies.

Either she finds another role or send her packing.

RogerG.

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Brainstorming Our Way to a Medieval Life, Part II

Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )

Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.

I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.

Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.

Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.

As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.

EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.

We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.

What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.

As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.

Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.

The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.

Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.

We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.

Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.

Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.


Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.

And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.

Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.

The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.

Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.

Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.

Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.

RogerG

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Left-Wing Glamour at War with Physics and Economics

Biden in the Ford F150 Lightning.

Remember Biden behind the wheel of Ford’s F150 Lightning, a propaganda stunt to make EV’s appealing to rednecks (like me)? Anyone, though, with a smidgen of brain function will notice the silliness of the whole exercise. Ford’s newest addition to its truck lineup is a Rube Goldberg contraption whose purpose is a political one, not a practical one that can only emerge from the many confrontations with reality over time, like the iconic F150. It’s what happens when greenie fantasies declare war on physics and economics.

A Rube Goldberg machine.

The saga begins with greenie dreams of heaven on earth and hatred for those not so enthralled with the dreamscape. When the dream captures the imagination of people similarly cocooned, people removed from the hoi polloi and rustics, but powerfully influential, it is shoved onto everyone else. So, if hair-on-fire congresswomen from gerrymandered, gentrified districts scream the climate-change apocalypse, out comes the snooty vilification and pressure on the corporate bigs to play along if they want to remain in the cool persons’ club.

Our excitable hair-on-fire congresswomen from NY’s 14th Congressional District.

Of course, the way is greased with other people’s money in tax credits and subsidies. To get on board the money train, the bigs conjure something that . . . works . . . but . . . . Thus, we get the Ford F150 Lightning with its 1,800 pound battery that takes 12.5 hours to recharge. The problem with EV’s has always been the battery. For the Lightning, a longer range and heavier battery is an option; the behemoth becomes a real behemoth. The problem is still the battery.

Now, imagine yourself the kind of person who actually likes, and needs, trucks. By the way, they aren’t the kind who reside in Greenwich Village flats, shop at Whole Foods, and whose personal transportation needs are satisfied by an electric golf cart masquerading as an EV car and Uber and Lyft. I’m talking about the type of people producing the grain that goes into our Boston University graduate’s plant-based Awesome Burger. An EV is as practical as a Gucci suit at a barn raising.

In such locales in the fruited plains, distance means distance, as in many, many miles. What happens when the twenty-something offspring took the sleek thing on a beer run the night before but forgot to plug it in? On your monthly trip to Costco the next day – 300 miles round trip – the contraption stops dead on the interstate. What do you do? The thing is heavy, takes 12.5 hours to charge, and nothing as simple as a five-gallon gas can offers a solution. If you are on the interstate, call for a heavy-lift, flat-bed tow truck. If you are stuck on a dirt road in a sea of rolling hills on the northern plains in the middle of winter, you die.

The northern Great Plains of the United States.

For our congresswoman from her gerrymandered, gentrified perch in the megalopolis, the answer is The Green New Deal. Capital meant for better devices and more energy will now go into upending the grid and bribing people with other people’s money to buy the contrivances, by force of law. We’ll end up with a mountain of the impractical and a lot less of the stuff that works. The state will simply step in to command the laws of economics and physics to disappear.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Welcome to 21st century America. It’s a world that Salvador Dali made famous in his paintings. No, it’s not a real world, but it is to our hair-on-fire congresswoman from the Bronx/Queens. She actually believes in “her truth”, a “truth” at war with the laws of physics and economics. Biden also believes in her truth. This style of “reality” may be appealing as art in a Dali exhibit at the Met but is not so agreeable as policy to a South Dakota farmer stuck as the snow begins to fall with no cell reception.

A Russian teen found frozen to death in a car in 2020.

Left-wing glamour confronts the plain facts of existence and the results aren’t pretty.

RogerG

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An Institutionalized People

Red, the Morgan Freeman character, and fellow inmate from The Shawshank Redemption.

Red, the Morgan Freeman character in The Shawshank Redemption:
“These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s ‘institutionalized’.”

Kyle Smith in his article, “Team Fear” (NR, June 1, 2021):
“. . . Blue America receives each nonsensical new government edict [Biden, Dr. Fauci, CDC, etc.] as reverently as if it were carved on stone tablets, then erased and recarved as necessary. These tablets, they’re a lot like Etch A Sketches.”

Mask wearing in an American subway.

Welcome to modern America, a land populated by people who’ve invented a new class of shamans; only these are in white coats. A large portion of the nation seem to treat them as if they are the new Moses attending to the burning bush. The believers show no cognizance of the fact that these soothsayers are specialists, people who can only contribute a piece of the puzzle in developing something as grand as a government response to a serious challenge like COVID – the other pieces being the social, economic, and sensible legal/Constitutional dimensions.

Particularly irksome is the slavish devotion to their every word. Red might say, “That’s ‘institutionalized’.” These new-age Linuses (of Peanuts fame) can’t let go of the security blanket of government control. So, the masking while jogging, the euthanasia of the restaurant industry, the 6-hour suffocation of children behind dirty masks in school (if they’re allowed back in the classroom), an end to grandma visits, etc. The madness, sadly, is political in nature. Or more specifically, I should say, it’s ideological in nature.

Ideological prevalence is color-coded, by state and local jurisdiction. Blue is the color of institutionalization, aka progressivism. It’s the place of big, expensive, intrusive mommy government. It’s the place of absolute faith in the government “expert”. It’s a target-rich environment for the white-coated, careerist bureaucrat. They’re the new clergy for an irreligious time. People sell their soul to this new clergy, since the old one is increasingly looking out onto empty pews.

The new secular clergy is disgracing itself like some in the old. It’s the same old story: the more fame, wealth, prestige, and exposure they get, the greater the temptation to soil themselves and not even be aware of it. The story is as familiar as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Hans Christian Anderson provided an insightful allegory in his “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. A vain and pompous ruler, lavish in his attire, is convinced by a couple of trickster hucksters that they will make an ensemble that only the foolish and stupid can’t see. The emperor and his advisers visit the workshop, see nothing, but pretend otherwise to avoid being thought idiots. The people join in the hustle out of fear as the emperor parades in public, until a child shouts the obvious. I can’t get past the clear association with Biden and his coterie of appointees and administrative sycophants.

An illustration from the published book by Han Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The child in Anderson’s tale blurts out, “. . . he isn’t wearing anything at all!” Well, here’s a parallel: “Look, the vaccinated are wearing masks as if the vaccine doesn’t work, but it does work.” Leave it to an innocent child to make clear that masks were made irrelevant by Operation Warp Speed.

Don’t expect Biden and his people to mention it. They are espousing COVID nonsense that a child could identify. Vaccines are great. Get jabbed. But a response to an epidemic is more than taking the jab, much more. The emperor’s magical clothes are synonymous with the goal of 95% of 330 million – or the world’s 7.9 billion – getting poked. Five percent unvaccinated is worse than utopian; it’s hallucinogenic. We’re probably already near practical statistical saturation with the vaccine, taking into account the hesitant for whatever reason, those for whom the vaccine is a medical threat, and the vast numbers of the naturally immune.

Bottom line: the bug will get out and it’ll be off to the races to more lockdowns and another bank-busting moonshot vaccine discovery, unless we learn to live with it. Try as we might, try as we squirm, this thing will get out in one form or another.

Right now, the careerist, bureaucratic white coats can’t let go of their power to straitjacket the country. And there are hordes of fervent believers in those blue states waiting and wanting to be straitjacketed. They are a people, like those with a natural addiction affinity, who are prone to developing an institutionalized personality. Their ideology, filled as it is with a host of unexamined assumptions, paved the way. These people are acculturated to mommy government to such as extent that it shows in the masking in such innocuous activities as hiking the 7,000-foot Logan Pass in Glacier National Park.

This is not a population open to common sense. If the vaunted “experts” say mask, close or “hybrid” the schools, turn the private sector into Stasi hall monitors, get vaccinated or else, this crowd will jump to it. The lunacy of it all escapes them. It’s get vaccinated, get vaccinated, and nothing else. But there is something else. In addition to the wonderous vaccines, there’s therapeutics.

If you get the bug in any of its mutations, we have therapies at the ready for respiratory illnesses like this one. If we don’t have enough of them, get them. There are many on the shelf that are efficacious (Remdesivir and a variety of medicinal cocktails). Is this view understood by the institutionalized? It certainly isn’t the message that they’re getting from their secular saints in the bureaucracies.

People will get the bug no matter the success of the campaign to vaccinate. I think that our message should not be “get vaccinated or die”. If it is, not only are we showing ourselves to be gruesome believers in magical clothes, we are institutionalized to the point of dispensing with the obvious to maintain a religious devotion to a class of people whose claims of divine inspiration derived from a classroom and government board, and have only shown themselves to possess the skills at climbing the bureaucratic greasy pole.

Are we so institutionalized that gibberish suddenly becomes wisdom if it is mouthed by a government employee?

RogerG

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Froehle’s Baloney

Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor, wrote the following in 1911: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Yep, it is, since words require more brain juice than eye candy. Visual images strike our limbic system with greater force than words on a page. Goebbels and Lenin knew this from the get-go. Many times, illustrations or cartoons, more so than photos, get right to the point without the limitations of reality. The uber-left activist Craig Froehle in 2012 gave to his ideological compatriots an iconic absurdity. His tall-to-small threesome behind a fence on crates (see below) appeals to the zealots but does nothing for understanding.

A big part of the problem lies in the vacuousness of the political sloganeering that is “equity”, the point of the image, and one third of the verbal contraption “equity/diversity/inclusion” (Interesting to note, the more apt acronym DIE is possible by changing the order.). Oftentimes, “equity” is used without definition, as if it burst from the brain of God and to the mouths Lori Lightfoot and the radical activists running the show in the Biden administration. “Equity” is the criminal cousin to “equality”. We have at least a playground understanding of “equality”, but “equity” at the hands of our racialist carnival barkers isn’t what lights our eyes after our house’s assessment. It’s a weapon. It’s forced equality of outcome. And, for that, our lives are left open to state-run malevolence and malfeasance writ large.

A crowd whose brains have been softened to the agitprop will miss the folly and danger. Equity is a crutch for activists traumatized by life not being equal. Everywhere they look, they are horrified by inequality, inequality everywhere. They are forced to confront disparities in everything from size, talent, quick-wittedness to the incidence of low-birthweight babies by race, genitalia, income, bed partner, whatever. It’s enough to drive the traumatized to thumb-sucking.

The cure for the anxiety is found in the seizure of power to force equality. Freedom, as in equal opportunity, is repealed by the invention of “systemic racism”, or systemic . . . whatever. Just make the threat improvably “systemic” to empower the commissars to make things equal by imperial edict. The so-called malevolent “system” is a ghost presence but don’t bother with inductive or deductive reasoning for verification. We are coaxed to rely on the ghostbusters instilled with the secret gnosis, like the racialist grifters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DeAngelo from their tenured academic redoubts.

Karl Marx played the same scam, only he didn’t leave this world with a fat bank account. But his pupils succeeded if you measure success by over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. How much ruination will Kendi, et al, visit upon us?

Back to Froehle’s cartoon scam. It doesn’t take much to dispense with the message. Life isn’t a matter of crate-sharing. Those crates in the illustration are actually other people’s income, jobs, property, and their children’s education. Froehle is actually practicing a zero-sum game: the state takes from one to give to another. And the assignment of forced contributor and assigned recipient is based purely on race, or any other grouping with the political clout to nose their way into the trough.

The cartoon is childish, but even children have an instinctual grasp of the unfairness of it all. They know that one kid getting two suckers based on melanin count isn’t fair. So is the award of benefits due to genitalia, bed partner, or personal declaration that supersedes their chromosomal makeup. A child has a better grasp of intrinsic fairness than some who’ve spent too much time in classrooms, a place where education has evolved into mal-education.

But that’s where we are at: the land of Orwell’s Oceania. The Ministry of Truth practiced “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, a language that undermines language. Language relies on common meanings so sharing and interaction can take place. In this world, everything is political, including words. Language is distorted to push the “defence [sic] of the indefensible”. So, racism and sexism became “equity” to the great detriment of ourselves, our children, and our nation.

RogerG

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Progressivism Is the Problem

The federal Leviathan

James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.

Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.

So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.

There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.

In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.

As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.

One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.

The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.

The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)

One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.

Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.

We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.

To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.

None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.

Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.

RogerG

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Should Biden Be Impeached?

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3:
“. . . he [President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Presidential Oath of Office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Drone photo of crowds of illegal immigrants at the International Bridge on the southern border in Texas, Sept. 16, 2021.
President Biden after signing a stack of executive orders shortly after taking office to reverse many of Trump’s actions.

Yes, but he won’t be.

How to rein in the President when occupants from both parties, but particularly the donkey party, have overstepped and shirked their legal responsibilities? Do we have to wait four years to correct the abuse?

Well, no. Impeachment stands at the ready. The Democrats tried it twice in Trump’s one term. They may have debased its utility by frivolous and failed overuse. Yet, it has become commonplace for federal officers throughout the three branches to egregiously overstep their powers while flagrantly ignoring their clear constitutional responsibilities. Most recently, President Biden refuses to enforce the immigration laws. He has, by execute order(s), simply repealed enforcement of the border. That’s a dereliction of a clear compulsory-in-law duty.

Could it qualify as a “high crime” when an elected officer grievously neglects his or her lawfully required responsibility? Biden’s executive orders are a clear violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute” the constitutional position. You can’t “faithfully execute” if you refuse to do your job. You’re willfully derelict. Willful, persistent dereliction is a willful, persistent violation of the Constitution. “High crime” anyone?

The scenes at the southern border are gut-wrenching for all the people allured by illegal presidential promises to not enforce the law. The human tidal waves passing through without paying heed to legal strictures, while enabling passage throughout the country of said violators, is tantamount to presidential complicity in crimes. This isn’t an indictment based on a phone call or overheated rhetoric at a rally. It is a shredding of the oath and Constitution. What can be a more serious “high crime” than to blatantly violate the highest law?

The donkey party’s abettors of the behavior will try to hang their hat on “prosecutorial discretion”. Where’s the discretion? Is it “discretion” to take an entire class of law and pretend it doesn’t exist? Not only that, but to assist in the violation of the laws? Hardly. It’s the practice of euphemism to provide cover for criminal conduct. “Prosecutorial discretion” turns a bank robbery into an “unauthorized withdrawal”.

It’s time to rethink our obese federal Leviathan. The level of government headquartered in DC has been unhinged from Constitutional moorings for quite some time. Impeachment might be one useful tool to once again align the branches within the bounds of our charter – i.e., return them to legal status.

However, I’m under no illusion that anybody in either party has the stomach for such medicine. We’ll, as before, muddle along and be content with the results of an electorate equally as unhinged as the people they elect. And surveys will continue, as before, to show deep disenchantment with the people they choose.

Pogo in Walt Kelly’s comic strip famously said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly meant the statement for the plague of pollution. He’d probably be surprised to learn that Pogo’s quip has a much more robust application.

RogerG

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The Consequences of a Cosseted Population

Gov. Gavin Newsom at his victory bash after surviving the recall.
Gen Mark Milley at his June 2020 commencement address to the National Defense University.

Cosseted: adj.; cared for and protected in an overindulgent way; pampered.

David Mamet:

“We’ve often heard, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal’; but everyone is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ So the phrase can be most usefully translated: ‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my own finances. Now I intend to control yours.’”

*From Mamet’s essay “The School Dream” in National Review, May 17, 2021, in a footnote.

Two events erupted recently: Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was reported to have subverted the authority of the President in communications with subordinates in the chain of command, the military leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the President’s political opposition. Obviously, both are, or can be, deeply disturbing. Which is worse? You choose.

Yet, both instances are evidence of a troubling trend among the citizenry (and uncitizenry since certain places have effectively erased the distinction). In the one, California clung to its current class of baneful leaders. In the other, according to reports coming out of Bob Woodward/Robert Costa’s new book, a member of an elite class of administrators – these happen to be military – may have attempted to supplant the Constitutional authority of the duly-elected President with his own, even possibly going so far as to cooperate with an acknowledged and powerful foreign adversary. It’s what happens when an increasingly cosseted people surrender personal sovereignty to elected or unelected lords and oligarchs in an administrative state. It’s a horrible deal for rulers and ruled. It comes down to a people who longingly desire to be ruled and a group chomping at the bit to do it.

California has frequently asserted the mantle of being on the cutting edge. From Prop 13 to high tech to the counterculture, California expanded on its reputation by justifiably being the first to go from Ronald Reagan to the embrace of the Fabian socialist dream of a cradle-to-grave nanny state in the span of less than 20 years.

I suspect that demographics had a monumental role to play in the transition. It’s much more than immigration. The state changed social complexion by changing its economic complexion (and I don’t mean skin pigment) after the end of the Cold War. Defense industries and the kinds of people attracted them faded as their numbers were replaced by elements drawn to the burgeoning workplaces of entertainment, the college campus, unionized public-sector employment, and the pampered, climate-controlled world of computer screens on the elongated coastal plain west of the Coast Range – the denizens east electorally less consequential. The newly burgeoning cohort demand a different form of governance as opposed to those inspired by Chuck Yeager, and can be rightfully called subjects and not citizens. This new class of subjects is all-in for anything and anyone who’ll promise to build, extend, and maintain the public romper room. The state’s Democratic Party is the breeding ground for this claque of wet nurses and hall monitors.

That distinction between a subject and citizen is critical. A subject accepts a role of inferiority in the status ladder and looks to their “betters” for guidance and restraint. A society of citizens is a society of peers.

For the state’s segment still considering themselves citizens who find this state of affairs repugnant, you still have the right to travel . . . if Biden hasn’t repealed it for the unvaccinated. So, move, leave the place to the emotional midgets in desperate need of a helicopter-parent state.

The dependency demographic, or subjects, is always in search of a mommy or daddy who’ll protect them from the vagaries of life. When the real mommy and daddy go into chronic care or the rest home, the urgency for a cloying adult stand-in becomes paramount. Stepping into the breech is the vaunted, credentialed public-sector “expert” and administrative functionary. The subjects’ hopes and affections goes to the head of the those exalted with power. The laureled class morphs into a law unto themselves to rule over the subjects. Enter General Mark Milley, showing in a more martial manner the symmetry between the Pentagon and the nanny state.

In California, the elected leadership and the massive, unionized administrative state that they birthed are unsurprisingly on the same page. Nationally, the situation is quite different. Many states aren’t as affectionate of rule by credentialed autocrat. That’s where you find the greatest concentration of citizens. Since there is a whole other expanse to the country between the coasts, sometimes elected federal leadership doesn’t correspond to the wishes of the Google and Harvard campuses. Yet, the specific ethos of the minions of DC and its environs is more at home on those campuses than Texas-to-North Dakota.

The Pentagon is an administrative state par excellence. Think of it as a microcosm of Sacramento, and Sacramento is solely a microcosm of LA to San Francisco. Milley sounds like he stepped out of CRT/Faculty Lounge central casting, or the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only in uniform. For instance, why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weighing in on an ongoing criminal matter – the Derek Chauvin case – imitating Rev. Al Sharpton? If your eyes were closed, you’d mistake his June 2020 National Defense University commencement address for a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Here’s a snippet:

“I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued, not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice towards African Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of original sin in Jamestown, 401 years ago.”

Mind you, Chauvin’s trial hadn’t begun but that didn’t stop Milley from declaring his guilt with as much caution and reserve as Maxine Waters at a BLM rally. Little did we know back then that we were experiencing our first woke, safe-space, four-star general who functions at the frontier between a racialist neo-Marxism and treason.

Who can forget his following year’s comments before Congress? He sounded less like a mature adult and more like the infantile statue topplers of the previous summer of manufactured “rage”. In response to a question on the teaching of CRT in the military academies, he said, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” The answer assumes the existence of “white rage” and is not a call for the academic study of its legitimacy.

Milley – and Austin – subsequently tried to backtrack on their “white rage” and “white supremacy” remarks. He later said, “I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution.” It’s pure hokum. Of course Austin and Milley are politicizing the military in their ideologically-laced purges and neo-Marxist indoctrination.

Austin and Milley being questioned on CRT in the military in June 2021 testimony before Congress.

To better understand, let’s turn to an instructive hypothetical. Let’s say that the concern is about the teaching of Marxism in the academies. Suppose Milley had said, “I want to understand capitalist exploitation of the working class and I’m a capitalist, and I want to understand it.” Already he’s gone more than halfway to accepting the premises of communism. Marxism and CRT are claptrap. “Understanding” claptrap is a mealy-mouthed way of accepting many of its fundamentals. Who’s he trying to fool? The cadets are being indoctrinated in a form of ideological self-loathing.

And I haven’t gotten to the most disturbing charge against Milley. Most frightening is his alleged usurpation of civilian control of the military and his pre- and post-election cooperative assurances to the head of the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. The latter behavior comes very close to the Article III, Section 3, clause 1’s definition of treason. A portion of which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Milley certainly may have given the Communist Chinese “aid and comfort”, even though technically and legally Red China isn’t a formally declared enemy. But Congress never declared war on the USSR and there is many rotting in prison for giving “aid and comfort” through espionage to the Kremlin.

That’s how Milley gets off: he didn’t commit espionage. He allegedly just picked up the phone to openly declare the “aid and comfort”. No sneaking around . . . apparently. But that puts him in the same category as O.J. Simpson. Everybody knows they’re guilty but the technicalities of jury nullification and legal jargon saved them from the chair and Leavenworth.

California is a sickening role model. Don’t expect citizens to emerge from the cosseting of perpetual adolescence in a nanny state. The best hope for citizen-Californians was made familiar by Cubans braving the waters of the Florida Strait on rickety rafts to flee Bernie’s workers’ paradise in the land of Castro. Just like them, Californios, rent yourself a box truck before the fee eats up your 401k and flee east across the border. To reformulate Horace Greeley, “Go east, young man.”

More tools are available to cage the federal Leviathan. At least the rest of the country can bring to heel the federal administrative state and prevent it from being a cheap imitation of the California nightmare.

RogerG

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America’s Soul-Destroying Time

If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.

One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.

These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.

All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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9/11/2021, An Eviscerated America

Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.

Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?

From this
To this

Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.

What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?

Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.

On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.

Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.

And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.

It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.

No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.

All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)

It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.

The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.

But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.

So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.

We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.

RogerG