Tag Archives: Obama

by Barry Kelly | May 10, 2014 · 10:54 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 113

PROFILING: A SURVIVAL INSTINCT

Profiling is not a politically correct law enforcement policy in today’s world. Most liberals and even George W. Bush, a Republican president, spoke against profiling as part of a counter-terrorism program. Profiling doesn’t need to be defined. Everyone knows exactly what it is because everyone does it.

The act of profiling is as old as the beginning of life. Isn’t profiling simply looking for indicators of a danger to survival? Like any other activity, profiling can be misused. But when used properly it can save lives and diminish day-to-day threats.

People who live and work in active war zones quickly sharpen up their profiling skills. In Danang, Vietnam, in 1968 one of the best Viet Cong assassins was a young boy, probably not yet in his teens. His modus operandi was to carry a pistol in a paper bag and on a crowded street walk casually up to his selected target and shoot through the paper bag from inside three feet. How long do you think it took for those of us walking in the markets of Danang to profile any young boy carrying a paper bag? Not long. It wasn’t because we were discriminating against young boy or paper bags. It was the awakening of an old survival instinct. All living creatures have the ability to recognize dangers to their survival. Ask anyone who has ever hunted crows. They will tell you that the crows can recognize if you are carrying anything looking like a rifle or shotgun. The crows profile hunters.

In the world of counter-terrorism, all Arab Muslims are not terrorists but most terrorists are Arabs and Muslims. It is insane for law enforcement officers to not give special scrutiny to Arab-looking men and women traveling by air. How many elderly non-Arabs have been pulled out of line for extra scrutiny just to show no one is being profiled? If you resemble a rational threat description, you should be profiled. Not many blue-haired grandmothers have been terrorists.

Profiling has been attacked by people perpetuating racism. Black male teenagers have reported they hear car door locks clicking when they cross streets. Our president has said he has heard the doors locking when he was a young man crossing streets. Of course, and it is not because they are black or young. It’s because nearly all urban street crime is by young black males. Most of it black on black violence. You have to be nearly mindless if you do not profile a group of young black men approaching. Remember the wave of people injured in the “knockout game” on urban streets. Weren’t all the victims white and the attackers black?

Profiling can be abused and profiling policies need to be routinely reviewed. Profiling is a natural instinct. Don’t confuse it with racism.

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Tagged as arabs, blacks, muslims, Obama, profiling, racism, survival, whites

by Barry Kelly | May 6, 2014 · 6:06 pm

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 112

WHAT IS THE SCORE?

The president’s polls are dropping. He long ago slipped under the fifty percent favorability rating. The majority of the population believes he lies and doesn’t pay any heed to the transparency issue. For example:

His delaying tactics on the ‘Fast and Furious’ gun-running episode
IRS scandal of discriminating against conservative political groups
the facts of the deaths of four Americans in the Benghazi terrorist attack
the anti-Muslim video talking points by Susan Rice
the monitoring of journalists phones, and the infamous,”If you like your health care, you can keep your health care, period” lie

This is a terrible record of over-the-line actions that is matched by Obama’s failure to solve a single problem in either domestic or foreign policy. Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, and Israel highlight his foreign policy. Obamacare, energy, job creation, thousands of government regulations that slow or kill economic progress, class warfare, and his fixation on income redistribution showcase a failed domestic policy.

Judged by those traditional issues that presidents have always been rated by, his is a failed presidency. But what if a successful presidency by our terms is not his agenda? What if he is the first American president not to care one bit about solving problems? In that case, he would be judged by progressive insiders to be very successful.

He may not be a leader or an experienced manager, but he is not dumb or stupid. How then can he be doing so poorly in the eyes of the opposition who think all they have to do is wait for the 2016 election? The answer cannot be found in the traditional leadership of the Republican Party, which has failed to understand Obama is not playing the traditional game of a president struggling with a non-supporting Congress.

A progressive jury would give Obama high marks. He has set in motion a universal health care system that will nearly destroy the America traditional medical care system. The health care in America will soon be in such chaos that the progressives will be able to bring in their long-wanted ‘single payer’ system, which is really just socialized medicine. One seventh of the economy will then be under government control.

Obama’s energy policy is preventing America from becoming self-sufficient in the production, refinement, and marketing of natural gas, coal, and oil. This policy of the EPA fossil fuel haters prevents economic growth and maintains a high unemployment and under employment rate. Welfare systems have expanded beyond any rational hope of sustainability. The national debt will cripple a stagnant economy.

Obama has successfully sown all the seeds of destroying what he inherited so he can proceed with transforming America. He has made no secret of his plan to destroy America’s military and economic power and move toward socialism and one world government. If only the real Democrats, independents, and Republicans would get their heads out of the sand and recognize Obama is winning by his rules. His opponents don’t even have a rule book.

Spread the word. Save the nation.

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Tagged as Obama, politics, Progressives, rating, socialism

by Barry Kelly | April 26, 2014 · 9:33 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 111

THE CHANGING FACE OF RACISM

Eight decades is a long time. Fortunately as we age, and I am very close to 83, our long-term memory remains vivid. The short-term is another story. I have seen the face of racism in the south and the north. It was very real in 1938 when I was a transplanted Yankee in the third grade in Jackson, Mississippi, an early learning experience. In case there was any doubt about how whites and blacks lived in the deep south, there were signs to help and firm comments from white residents making sure Yankees knew the rules.

My first venture into the deep south only lasted a little over a year. My family moved back to Jeannette, PA. Jeannette was then a small tough town of mills and manufacturing, primarily glass factories set in the soft coal region. Racism was far less visible. While neighborhoods were mostly segregated, all the schools were integrated. The president of my senior class was a black student and captain of the football team. A few years later I was in a Navy boot camp. The camp was integrated but the black sailors in my company did not have the same choice of navy schools or occupations. Black recruits mostly ended up in the navy’s version of service industries. The navy was behind the army and air force in integrating. Racism was still alive but was definitely giving ground.

I took full advantage of the G.I. Bill and went to the University of Pittsburgh. While there I became a member of the NAACP. By that time a very high percentage of my peer group and fellow students knew that skin color was not linked to abilities in anything from sports to scholastic achievement. I think that single awareness, that skin color meant only skin color, contained the destruction of the elaborate trappings of racism, mostly then, held by an aging population, both white and black.

My awareness and exposure to racism had another chapter. While studying for my master’s degree in political science at Duke University, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Martin Luther King when he came to Durham in 1960 to guide the “sit in movement.” I didn’t realize at the time how lucky I was to participate briefly in picketing, attending church to hear him preach, and to meet the black college students who were the mainline troops on the street.

Twenty odd years later after retiring from the CIA and while working in the Reagan White House, my wife got me to join with her in a church sponsored part of the “I Have A Dream” program in the inner city of Washington, DC. A wonderful experience. The sixth-grade kids we were closely involved with over the next seven years taught us all more than we able to teach them. Years later we are still in touch with some of them.

All the above is just to establish some background for what I want to say.

We have arrived at the point in America where few whites admit to being racists. It is a bad thing and none of us want to be known as racists. If you’re white there is no upside to being a racist. I think American blacks are expected to have some anti-white feelings. It’s part of the inner city culture. No black wants to be labeled an “Uncle Tom” or an “Oreo.” While there are hundreds of thousands of blacks that do not carry racist baggage, it does not help that the President and his Attorney General never miss a chance to suggest racism is alive and well in America and use it as an excuse for their failures.

The President and his AG are unpopular with a growing segment of our population not because they are black but because of their actions, non-actions, speeches delivered, and those that should have been delivered but weren’t. Entrenched black political leadership never misses a chance to hoist the flag of racism. It is the tool they use to justify their roles and to motivate their followers. Sadly, they are the primary guarantors of the continued presence of racism. Our black citizens have done their share in the building and defending of America. Let’s bury racism and rejoice in our diversity. Racism can only exist if it has victims who search for it and find it where it doesn’t exist. Progressivism needs class warfare and racism to carry its message of transformation and destruction.

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Tagged as blacks, martin luther king jr, Obama, progressivism, racism, whites

by Barry Kelly | March 6, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 104

CHAOS IN THE LAND

I wonder how many people when they hear the word “change” think of a new and better approach to individual and national problems. When I hear that word, I think, “hope and a better life are gone.” It seems that hope and change requires chaos as a required element of the way progressives bring about change. Our president isn’t very good about working on our issues, individual or national. Is it possible that a man who has won two national elections seems to be a reckless, incompetent leader when it comes to management.

Take Obamacare. It would take a battalion of Philadelphia lawyers to mess up the implementation of the Affordable Care Act more than President Obama and his minions. He’s been educated at our best schools, taught Constitutional law at the university level, given countless speeches, and served in the Senate of his state and nation.

Maybe he believes radical transformation of a long-standing national system of government requires widespread chaos as a midwife. When people are in despair over health care, lack of employment, a capricious and/or corrupt civil service, lost lives, and treasure in wars the president never explains or even mentions, the erosion of savings, a poor education system with no other choice for their children, welfare of the nation’s warriors, a government that no one trusts anymore, a national government that has lost respect at home and abroad, and an administration that destroys both individual initiative and American industries, they are ripe for change of any kind. We elected this president twice. Why should he doubt he and the progressive party can offer change people in despair will accept?

You would think the debacle of Obamacare, the rapid growth of the rate of spending more then we take in, the plan to cut back the Army to pre-World War II levels, the push to destroy first coal and then the rest of the fossil fuel sources, the thousands of returning veterans without civilian jobs or the option to remain in the military, the corruption in the IRS, that never seems to be investigated by the Justice Department or the FBI, would be enough to ensure a change in the White House in 2016. Not so. The growth of people who are dependent on government welfare, if incentivized to vote, will be enough to swing the popular vote to the progressives.

Don’t believe President Obama is inept. He isn’t. By his standards and those of Saul Alinsky, the progressives guru, he is right on schedule. The issue is never the issue. Traditional Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and independents — you don’t have many chances. The 2014 and 2016 elections must be won by the opponents of the progressive party and its foreign ideology.

By the author of the Jack Brandon novels. This blog is meant to be shared and encourage dialogue.

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Filed under Alinsky, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, General, Obama, Obamacare, Progressives

Tagged as change, issues, Obama, politics, Progressive

by Barry Kelly | March 4, 2014 · 7:40 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 103

PUTIN-OBAMA FACEOFF

Are Putin’s action in the Ukraine a surprise? I hope not, but for the group of amateurs in this administration, they probably were. Is there a foreign policy expert in the stack of dead wood the president depends on? Certainly not Secretary of State Kerry or Vice President Biden or the departed Mrs. Clinton. Reminds me of the surprise of the Carter White House when the Ayatollah was allowed to enter Iran from Europe. When have deeply committed religious radicals ever established a true democracy with regular free elections? I think the Carter administration was shocked when his followers took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and established an Islamic theocracy. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, he was again surprised.

For centuries, the czars had tried to establish a geo-political foothold in South Asia. Through Afghanistan was the most direct route to a warm-water port and the riches of the sub-continent. Only the power of the British Empire thwarted the Russian plan. The Russians, seeing a weak U.S. president, made their move and thousands of lives were lost to add to the total killed by the Muslim aristocracy in Iran. History holds many keys to the future and weakness invites aggression. It has always been so. Now what about Ukraine?

The Ukraine was part of the great Russian Empire that President Putin wants to restore. Ukraine looks both east and west. To the west are its hopes for a close relationship with Europe to balance the threat from Russia. To the east it has a long border with a powerful nation that has shown its willingness to use its military power to achieve political goals, such as the forcible annexation of a part of the Georgia nation in the era of the Bush presidency. Ukraine’s current leadership knows it cannot afford a conflict with Russia without strong political support from the west.

What are President Putin’s plans? Well, even the Obama administration should understand that the recent upheaval in the Ukraine threatens Russia’s strategic interests. The only warm-water port in the entire Russian nation is in the Ukraine. This port is part of a settlement between Ukraine and Russia. Russia’s entire Black Sea Naval Force calls Sevastopol home. A large portion of the people in the area of Sevastopol are Russian ethnics. President Putin probably felt he had to move to protect his naval forces. The question is will he push to acquire Ukrainian territory beyond the strategic area of Sevastopol? He knows his history. There is not great love between the people of Ukraine and the Russians to the east. When the German panzers pushed into the Ukraine in World War II, many Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators. Some even took up arms and supported the Germans. Unfortunately, for those Ukrainians and the German Army, the German leadership treated the Ukrainians like the other people they had conquered. German cruelty knew no ethnic bounds in their drive to occupy Moscow.

President Obama has few options. One is to know that his plan to reduce the U.S. Army to pre-World War II levels is another revealing sign of his weakness. He should immediately re-think his destruction of American power. Peace has never come from weakness. A strong America is necessary for a path to peace. The progressive party is well on the way to achieving what neither the aggressors of both World Wars and the Cold War could accomplish. Our president is a master of winning elections but he is way out of his league when dealing with a man who is not afraid of power and its use.

If Putin goes beyond the securing of routine access to strategic Russian bases in the Crimea portion of the Ukraine and annexes Ukrainian territory, the Obama administration will maybe learn that words do not count for much in the constant struggle to maintain world peace. Weakness only feeds the actions of dictators. It does nothing in the struggle to contain territorial aggression. The willingness to maintain and use national power when necessary, sets apart real leaders from empty ones. Ronald Reagan was a real leader. Barack Obama is not.