EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS #22
What does President Obama bring to the table? Given a teleprompter and a prepared speech he will deliver a magnificent piece of oratory. A performance that few in our history could match. But what else? He may project likeability but he is not. He is quick to anger. Carries grudges even those of his family. His treatment of the Supreme Court Judges in one of his State of The Union speeches was unprecedented. Remember his treatment of Representative Ryan. Not the work of a kind or gentle man. He cannot think on his feet. You have seen how he does without the prepared speech on a teleprompter. He is very thin skinned and cannot take criticism. He would prefer to do nothing if he can’t have his way. He does not even meet with his
I can’t stand to close this piece without debunking President Obama’s bragging rights. I know something about preparing operations for Presidential approval. I did that for President Reagan for the last two years of his administration. Take drones. They were developed and flying operations long before Obama’s tenure. All he did was approve the increase in their use. I agree with their use for it saves lives of our men and women in uniform. The only hard part for the President to decide is what is the political and foreign affairs fallout. The same is true of the Usama bin Laden affair. There is political risk in both approving or disapproving the staff recommendation to go. If it fails, ala Carter’s attempt to rescue hostages in Teheran, there will be negative fallout from the opposition. If the staff recommendation to go is disapproved there will be, sometime later, attacks from the opposition. Being President is a very hard role to fill. Sitting around the Situation Room with anxious looks for photo ops is not necessary. The credit goes solely to those who execute and face the real risks. Nor is leaking classified intelligence successes necessary to campaigning for re-election. Last night you saw the real President Obama who is not used to people talking back. Most supreme leaders and emperors are like that. Last night was no surprise.
EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 21
Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.
MY PERSONAL VIEW OF PRESIDENT REAGAN
In December of 1986, Frank Carlucci pulled me aside in the coffee hour following a worship service and told me President Reagan had asked him to be his National Security Adviser. He was putting together an entirely new Security Council Staff and wanted me to do all the intelligence, covert action, counter terrorism and counter narcotics staff work on his staff. I greatly admired Frank Carlucci and would have followed him anywhere. I reported for duty just after the first of the year. What follows is my personal view of President Reagan whom I would soon meet for the first time.
My motivation for writing this after decades of silence is the similarity between where President Carter and President Obama have led this nation. Neither one of them could ever have led us out of where we were then and now. But I have nothing but praise for President Reagan. I have several unflattering comments I could make about people in his Cabinet but silence is the better choice. I will say that Cabinet government cannot work without a strong, committed presidential staff. In my time, that was the National Security Council Staff. Cabinet members are soon captured by the organization they lead and soon are presenting the organizational viewpoint rather than that of the president. Please don’t believe I was an important person in the White House or that I was close to the president. In this case, admiration flowed one way. I was in his presence several times in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, but less so in the latter. My role was to provide the staff preparation for National Security Council meetings that fell within my area of responsibility. Okay, enough of the establishing of credentials.
In my first meeting with President Reagan in the Oval Office, he immediately made me feel at home and that he wanted to hear what I had to say. After his opening humorous story or joke, he said, “Frank, unless you tell me what is happening, I have no way of finding out.” He wanted us to know we could say what we thought without holding back. Bad news as well as good news is all relevant to the president. He was always gracious and sincerely interested in the well-being of his staff. I never saw him treat anyone with anger or sarcasm. He was extremely loyal to Cabinet members and Pentagon officials even when they deserved being sent to the wood shed. Keeping government organizations on the course the president wants, not what they want, is more than a full-time job.
Foreign officials couldn’t understand that the Reagan Revolution was first and foremost for Americans. His vision of the ‘Shining City on a Hill’ was not for nice-sounding rhetoric read from a teleprompter. It was call to all of us to throw off the cloak of doom and gloom and to remember our heritage, remembering also that government growth diminishes individual freedom. This is the president who destroyed Communism, rebuilt our military power, restored faith in capitalism and the free market, spoke truthfully, practiced transparency, and was respected by both parties. The most powerful man in the world never thought of himself in those terms. He understood those of us from blue collar backgrounds. The last quote I remember from him was, “Barry, I want Americans to be able to walk down any street in the world and be safe.” He cared about all of us. I’m glad he is not here to see Americans slaughtered in Libya while Carter, sorry, I mean Obama, dithers.
http://www.factsandfictions.com The author of the Jack Brandon Thriller Series.
EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 20
POINT OF NO RETURN
When your candidate loses the election, there is a period when you hope the guy you didn’t vote for surprises you and is successful. Each of us has our own POINT OF NO RETURN when you realize this isn’t going to work and you try to get the ship of state turned around or at least reduce the speed. I had several indicators the voyage was not going well. They were more than bumps in the road. OBAMACARE was the first. It wasn’t the attempt to fix health care. I realized the system was broken and needed fixed but not the way it ended up being done. No debate, discussion, openness to amendments, and total obscurity when we were promised transparency. The third person in the succession list for the Presidency said, “You have to pass it to see what’s in it.” That was the beginning.
Then we had the world apology tour to put our past uniqueness and power for the good into perspective for the world. Followed by the unwarranted snubbing of old allies like the United Kingdom and Israel and new ones like Poland. What kind of a President would make it one of his first acts in office to send back the bust of Churchill, a revered hero of the West?
The foreign tour was followed by the unprecedented growth and use of the power of the Executive Office, the attempt to close Gitmo, put previously cleared CIA officers under investigation for the use of torture, i.e. water boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques that saved hundreds maybe thousands of American lives. With the worst Attorney General in my lifetime turned loose to impose his unique style of law and order we had Fast and Furious, the de facto granting of citizenship rights to the underpants bomber, the push to try the moslem thugs responsible for 9/11 in New York City. Finally THE ATTORNEY GENERAL was held IN CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS for the first time in our history. THE ATTACK ON CAPITALISM AND THE FREE MARKET SYSTEM were followed with the loading of the previously non-partisan National Labor Relations Board with Union supporters that tried to stop Boeing from building planes in Charleston, South Carolina, because the state was a Right to Work state.
This President does not like meetings where records are kept and many people witness the proceedings. As a senator, he was the chairman of the Afghanistan Committee that never held a meeting. To get around his own Cabinet he appointed thirty plus czars who do not need Senate confirmation and cannot be summoned to Congress to reply to questions or give testimony. They also do not meet as group. Written records of the President’s inter action with his secret “cabinet” will not be available to historians. Perhaps the most notorious of the czars was Van Jones, the Green Czar and a self-avowed Communist and a signer of the Truther Petition (a document that claims the U.S. Government was involved in a 9/11 cover-up and complicit in the attack in order to establish an excuse for the Iraq and Afghan wars). Valerie Jarrett was probably responsible for putting Jones in the President’s inner circle. After quietly leaving the White House, Van Jones showed up as one of the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
There were other strong indicators such as: Failure to get even one Democrat to vote for his budget submissions; announcement for troop withdrawal dates in Iraq and Afghanistan; the total lack of a plan to reduce the deficit; and the new mission for NASA (help Muslim states to feel proud of their contributions to science and math). But the big one for me was the President’s open mike mistake when he was talking in low confidential tones to Dmitry Medvedev. President Obama asked Medvedev to tell Putin that he (Obama) would have more flexibility after his re-election. Medvedev answered he would pass on the message. That an American President would pass such a message to a man that is no friend of the United States is the worst transgression I have ever personally heard of in my life in government. That was my Point of No Return. Do you have one?
http://www.factsandfictions.com author of the Jack Brandon thriller novels
EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS #19
LETTER TO FAMILY & FRIENDS
I was asked recently to comment on the use of lies, flip flopping, and spin in the presidential campaign. Politicians from both parties and their surrogates are and have been guilty of all these methods of distortion. I will concentrate on those of the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in this blog because I believe the distortions here are more dangerous to our nation than those of their opponents and are more outside the normal use of truth twisting. I am aware of my own bias in favor of centrist policies and hope I will not offend my many Democrat friends, present or past. I’m going to present the case in bullet form without paragraphs of evidence.
*President Obama is often mistakenly accused of lying when he simply failed to reach one of his goals: Unemployment under 8 percent and cut the deficit in half in his first term if he was given more than 800 billion of stimulus to spend. Those are not lies; they are simply failures of management and leadership.
* Obamacare will be deficit neutral. No one now believes that will happen. Lie? Probably not. But the denial of movement of 700 plus billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare is much closer to the definition of a lie. Many would say that is just slight-of-hand budgeting and more in line with spinning the truth. It seems clear this transfer happened but the faithful will say it was all going to a medical fund for the American people. The choice is yours.
* Repeated charges that the Republican Party is waging a war on women is a hard stretch to fit under political spin. Did Secretary Sebelius of HHS anticipate the firestorm that followed her decree that the Catholic Church had to pay for contraceptives for women who worked in all Catholic hospitals, clinics, and schools? The issue was and is, simply: Could the president force the Catholic Church to pay for something that is against their religious beliefs? To me this is clearly an example of the Big Lie strategy. Speakers at the DNC expanded on the extent of the “war on women” to fears of losing their right to vote or exercise of their right to decide on having an abortion. Maybe they were reading too much into the Republican Party platform. Platforms of both parties, no longer, if ever, follow principles. They are used to give radical and fringe elements evidence of their influence in return for their support.
Keynesian Economics
* If only Congress, especially the House, would pass the president’s Jobs Bill or bills, millions of jobs would be created. Lie or an example of the vast difference between Progressive and Republican financial theories? I think this is not the president or his surrogates lying. This issue is a philosophical chasm that divides conservative from progressive. The Keynesian theory, in simple form is that government spending or pump priming can grow the economy and bring an economic system from recession to a growth mode. It can add jobs in the public sector and in infrastructure improvements as long as the taxpayers continue to pay the costs. It does not create wealth or long-term growth. Only the private sector by expanding the supply of goods and services to sell in the free market can create wealth and improve the gross national product.
Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Secretary of Treasury and financial guru, remarked after several years of trying Keynesian economics that it just doesn’t work. Contrary to folklore, the unemployment rate late into President Roosevelt’s tenure was more than 12 percent. Many communists and socialist nations have tried to develop growth and national wealth through varying forms of Keynesian schemes. All failed. Yet it remains a mantra of the far left, while to Progressives supply side economics is still the enemy of growth, even though its record shows a very high rate of success. While it is true that the House and the Senate have not passed the president’s jobs plan nor any of his budgets, their failure is due more to their lack of fiscal reality than to partisan politics. Not one Democrat voted for any of the president’s budgets. (This is an example of political spinning and differing beliefs and not lying.)
* Political spinning is also the answer to conflicts about the amount of jobs created, when, by whom, and at what cost. The whole rationale of how the unemployment rate is computed gives wide latitude to different claims. Progressive ads and political claims are often not lying, just avoiding the unpleasant facts in favor of partisan sound bites. And every time a politician, from either party, changes his or her mind in the face of new information or an internal conviction, their new position should not be called flip-flopping. Maybe it was the right thing to do.
Rather than labeling opposition statements as lies, wouldn’t it be better to shed light on the truth, even the relative truth?
http://www.factsandfictions.com The author of the Jack Brandon thriller series.
EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS #18
BEYOND THE WORDS
Words are the fuel of politics. During an election cycle as important as this one, Americans are bombarded with words that are interpreted according to the experience, education, and existing beliefs of the audience. One of these terms, “share the wealth,” has been a cry of the progressive utopians, socialists, and communists. Hitler’s Germany used the promise of shared wealth and “every one belongs to the government.” Nazi Germany was not a right-wing autocracy. They called themselves The National Socialist Party. Lenin and Stalin’s Russia was a dictatorship of the proletariat (today’s have-nots.) This, too, was extreme left wing group. Land, bread, peace was the early slogan. Class warfare was the end result. Share the wealth certainly fit this monstrous regime. Mao’s communist China also promised a wealth-sharing economy.
Is there anyone who would like to live under any of these regimes with left-wing roots who practiced genocide and class warfare in the name of “sharing wealth” and with all people swearing allegiance to the government and all benefits coming from the government? Everyone belonged to the government. Party and government were the same. Only the leaders of government or party benefited. To various degrees, the people under these regimes struggled to overthrow these totalitarian regimes.
We, in America, have a history of well-meaning populists, progressives, or socialists writing about the beauty of living in a utopian society where everyone worked for the good of the society, with all sharing in the common good. These societies all fell. The experiments all failed because the reality of leveling society means the exceptional or better than average have to be pulled down for everyone to have equality and sharing of the wealth generated by others. The field of civilization can not be evened by everyone being pulled up to be exceptional. Everyone can not be exceptional. But everyone’s status in life can be improved by hard work in a society that does its best to give everyone equal opportunity.
One of the enduring lessons of history is that some level of government is necessary and circumstances can cause the relative size of government to increase to meet threats. The more powerful a government becomes, the greater danger it is to individual freedom. Under President Obama, the federal government is constantly increasing in size and scope. The Executive Office has assumed powers formerly and constitutionally left to Congress and the states. Cabinet officers now routinely issue Department orders, not Executive Orders, that have the force of law. In the first two years of his administration, while we were all consumed with the push to nationalize health care, the ground work was laid to steadily increase the power of the Executive Office. Four more years of this type of government and Greece will look good. Beware of leaders who espouse class warfare, using the slogan “everyone pays a fair share” and sharing of wealth and the joy of belonging to the government.
http://www.factsandfictions.com Author of the Jack Brandon Thriller Series
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