Tag: politics

Making war great again

The God-Emperor Ascendant chooses Mad Dog Mattis for Defense:

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, nominating a former senior military officer who led operations across the Middle East to run the Pentagon less than four years after he hung up his uniform, according to people familiar with the decision.

To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law that states secretaries of defense must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exception just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.

An announcement is likely by early next week, according to the people familiar with the decision. Mattis declined to comment. Spokespersons for Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Mattis, 66, retired as the chief of U.S. Central Command in spring 2013 after serving more than four decades in the Marine Corps. He is known as one of the most influential military leaders of his generation, serving as a strategic thinker while occasionally drawing rebukes for his aggressive talk. Since retiring, he has served as a consultant and as a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University.

Once more, Donald Trump exceeds expectations. It will be good to see a genuine strategist who understands war and is capable of riding herd on the neocons and their insane, ignorant fantasies in a position of overseeing the military.

One hopes this will bring an end to the lunacy that has pervaded the Pentagon since 2001.

The best thing about Trump’s selections is that he clearly has a penchant for self-confident men who are not inclined to be influenced by the vagaries and narratives of the media.

To gain some insight into Mattis’s thinking, it’s worth reading A New American Grand Strategy, a piece he wrote for the Hoover Institute:

The world is awash in change. The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. It was created with elements we take for granted: the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods and more. The constructed order reflected the wisdom of those who recognized no nation lived as an island and we needed new ways to deal with challenges that for better or worse impacted all nations. Like it or not, today we are part of this larger world and must carry out our part. We cannot wait for problems to arrive here or it will be too late; rather we must remain strongly engaged in this complex world.

The international order built on the state system is not self-sustaining. It demands tending by an America that leads wisely, standing unapologetically for the freedoms each of us in this room have enjoyed. The hearing today addresses the need for America to adapt to changing circumstances, to come out now from its reactive crouch and to take a firm strategic stance in defense of our values.

While we recognize that we owe future generations the same freedoms we enjoy, the challenge lies in how to carry out our responsibility. We have lived too long now in a strategy-free mode.

To do so America needs a refreshed national strategy.

Sure, some of the language he uses is enough to make one reflexively reach for one’s pistol and scan for neocons. But the salient point is that what the USA has been doing since the end of the Cold War IS NOT VIABLE. And the fact that we “must remain strongly engaged in this complex world” is not a prescription, it is an accurate observation.

He doesn’t say what the nature of that engagement is. And, more reassuringly, there are these comments:

  • We know that the “foreseeable future” is not foreseeable; our review must incorporate unpredictability, recognizing risk while avoiding gambling with our nation’s security.Incorporating the broadest issues in its assessments, Congress should consider what we must do if the national debt is assessed to be the biggest national security threat we face.
  • Strategy connects ends, ways and means. With less military available, we must reduce our appetite for using it. Absent growing our military, there must come a time when moral outrage, serious humanitarian plight, or lesser threats cannot be militarily addressed.  Prioritization is needed if we are to remain capable of the most critical mission for which we have a military: to fight on short notice and defend the country.

If nothing else, at least he’s asking some of the right questions.

Democrats need black female leadership

I could not agree more with this call for black women to lead the Democratic Party:

The leadership of the Democratic Party, at the highest levels, has consisted of mostly White men and women and a handful of Latinos. What Democratic leadership in the United States Congress, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) doesn’t have — and has never had — is a representative from its most loyal voting bloc over the last three presidential elections: Black women. To say that all quarters of Democratic Party leadership is in need of change is a vast understatement.

The numbers don’t lie. The Democratic Party has lost a historic number of seats across the board from federal representatives to statehouse races.  Part of that shift is due to a realignment caused by the appearance of the first Black president. But another part of it is a lack of strategy and misallocation of millions of dollars in resources focused on the wrong voters.  While Democrats roll out the same old leaders who employ the same old losing consultants and staff, they ignore members of their most consistently loyal voting group: Black women.

The 2016 election was, in some ways, a powerful statement on who remains loyal to the Democratic Party and who doesn’t. On that note, Latino voters shocked and confused everyone by giving Donald “build a wall” Trump nearly 30 percent of their votes.

In 2012, more than 70 percent of Black women voted, while White women voted at 65.6 percent. Black women continue to make up a larger proportion of Democratic votes than any other subgroup.  Given all the research, the Democratic Party continues to chase and reward other groups. One would think that ensuring that African Americans get to the polls would become a number one priority at the DNC and DCCC or to anyone campaigning for the White House.  Instead, the party continues to chase voters who seem to have less loyalty to the party than Black women, spending millions, while losing elections.

More than half of White women (53 percent) voted for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, just 4 percent of African American women and 26 percent of Hispanic women voted for the reality TV star.

Why shouldn’t Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Marcia Fudge (D-OH), Joyce Beatty (D-OH), Alma Adams and Rep-Elect Val Demings (D-Fla.) serve in leadership? They’re part of the most reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party and Fudge, Beatty, Adams and Demings are from key swing states.  Who better to figure out how to win voters in other sectors than the members of the sector who’ve already shown support?  Who better to lead than a former college administrator, a former mayor in a swing state or a former police chief in a battleground state?

Why shouldn’t they indeed? If you’re a Democrat and you don’t support a gay black women for every party leadership position, then you are objectively a homophobic, racist, and sexist bigot. Loyalty must be rewarded and privileged Whites and Jews must be banished to the back of the party.

Let’s keep this party rolling, everyone!

That’s one down. Now we just need to convince the cuckservatives to either a) leave the White American Party altogether and sit in the back of the Not-White bus or b) get over their “I would just love to vote for a clean and articulate minority like [insert Black name here] to demonstrate how totally not-racist I am” fetish already.

Anyhow, this is the only chance black women are ever going to get. By 2020, Asians will be demanding their fair share of representation, which means Jews are all but done in both parties.

The recounts are irrelevant

There is nothing in it. There never was.

Jill Stein has everything she needs to launch a presidential recount. She’s got the cash, the grassroots fervor and the spotlight of an adoring media. But there’s one thing she needs to overturn Trump’s victory: a calendar.

Stein missed Pennsylvania’s deadline to file for a voter-initiated recount. That blown deadline is a huge blow for Democrats who have pinned their hopes on recounts in the Keystone State, Michigan and Wisconsin.

“According to Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday, “the deadline for a voter-initiated recount was Monday, Nov. 21.”

All of the dark conspiracy theories about overturning the election were nonsensical. Jill Stein’s call for a recount was driven by one thing: money. She raised far more money than was required for the Wisconsin recount, publicly stated that all the money raised would not be used for the recount, and publicly posted an incorrect date on the Pennsylvania deadline.

Cobb said they only factored in Wisconsin when they first publicized their $2.5 million goal on their website. Once the campaign realized the cost of a recount for other states, they upped the goal, he said.

The money will be used to pay off the Green Party’s campaign debt, which is to say, into the bank accounts of the staffers. It would be informative to know if they knew the November 28th filing date was inaccurate when they posted it.

And then, there is this:

Just two days after confirming that he would participate in Jill Stein’s recounts in WI, MI and PA, Hillary campaign attorney, Marc Elias, is now publicly calling on North Carolina Republican Gubernatorial candidate, Pat McCrory, to halt his recount efforts and concede his race.

Once you open Pandora’s Box, don’t think you can control the demons that are released.

An endorsement of General Mattis

General Krulak thinks very highly of him. That’s a good sign. He’d be a great choice for Secretary of Defense.

A couple of months ago, when I told General Krulak, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, now the chair of the Naval Academy Board of Visitors, that we were having General Mattis speak this evening, he said, “Let me tell you a Jim Mattis story.” General Krulak said, when he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, every year, starting about a week before Christmas, he and his wife would bake hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Christmas cookies. They would package them in small bundles.

 Then on Christmas day, he would load his vehicle. At about 4 a.m., General Krulak would drive himself to every Marine guard post in the Washington-Annapolis-Baltimore area and deliver a small package of Christmas cookies to whatever Marines were pulling guard duty that day. He said that one year, he had gone down to Quantico as one of his stops to deliver Christmas cookies to the Marines on guard duty. He went to the command center and gave a package to the lance corporal who was on duty.

 He asked, “Who’s the officer of the day?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it’s Brigadier General Mattis.” And General Krulak said, “No, no, no. I know who General Mattis is. I mean, who’s the officer of the day today, Christmas day?” The lance corporal, feeling a little anxious, said, “Sir, it is Brigadier General Mattis.”

 General Krulak said that, about that time, he spotted in the back room a cot, or a daybed. He said, “No, Lance Corporal. Who slept in that bed last night?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it was Brigadier General Mattis.”

About that time, General Krulak said that General Mattis came in, in a duty uniform with a sword, and General Krulak said, “Jim, what are you doing here on Christmas day? Why do you have duty?” General Mattis told him that the young officer who was scheduled to have duty on Christmas day had a family, and General Mattis decided it was better for the young officer to spend Christmas Day with his family, and so he chose to have duty on Christmas Day.

General Krulak said, “That’s the kind of officer that Jim Mattis is.”

Not looking good for Captain Underoos

We can’t know if KellyAnne is speaking for the God-Emperor Ascendant or not, but one would tend to imagine that she is, at the very least, speaking with his approval:

Appointing Mitt Romney as secretary of state would be viewed by many supporters of President-elect Donald Trump as a major betrayal, former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Sunday.

“It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity,” Conway said of the opposition to Romney among Trump supporters.

“Receiving deluge of social media & private comms re: Romney Some Trump loyalists warn against Romney as sec of state,” Conway wrote on Twitter on Thursday, linking to a POLITICO article about opposition to Romney.

“I felt compelled to come forward on behalf of the people who were weighing in,” Conway said of that tweet.

Speaking to correspondent Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” Conway went on to say that she, too, had personal concerns with Romney getting the job of top diplomat, and she even took shots at Romney’s run for president in 2012.

“You know, Gov. Romney ran for the same office four years ago and lost spectacularly,” she said. “Mitt Romney lost Michigan by 10 points; Donald Trump just won it. Gov. Romney in the last four years, I mean, has he been around the globe doing something on behalf of the United States of which we’re unaware? Did he go and intervene in Syria, where they’re having a massive humanitarian crisis?” Conway asked. “Has he been helpful to Mr. Netanyahu?”

At this point, I would not expect either Guiliani or Romney to be Secretary of State. They don’t require vetting, so if they were going to be named, they already would have been named.

KellyAnne is hilarious. She followed up that shot with a Frum-slapping chaser:

David Frum @davidfrum
Trump won according to the rules, but if I were his team, I’d go ixnay on “the people have spoken” bit. Reality is just the reverse

 Kellyanne Conway ‏@KellyannePolls
Thx for advice @davidfrum.  Just saw vid of you on CBC Election night saying Trump trying to win “solidly Dem” Michigan was “delusional.”

The new diplomacy

Somehow, I just don’t see Mitt Romney being selected as Secretary of State in this administration. He’s just not the man to go and relieve himself on graves on America’s behalf.

Donald J. TrumpVerified @realDonaldTrump
Fidel Castro is dead!

I am beginning to suspect we’re going to enjoy the God-Emperor’s iron-fisted rule even more than we initially imagined. In other news:

Trump piles pressure on Brussels after inviting eurosceptic Hungary leader to Washington

No Mitt

Forget the apology. The Trump administration should just say no to Captain Underoos:

Aides to Donald Trump have discussed asking former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to publicly apologize for insulting the president-elect in order to pave the way for a nomination to lead the State Department.

A Trump transition aide confirmed to DailyMail.com on Friday that there have been ‘discussions’ inside Trump Tower about the possibility. The source wouldn’t say if Trump himself is aware of those discussions or has given them his blessing.

Romney famously tore into Trump in March, telling a Utah audience that the New York billionaire was ‘a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.’

But eight months after the former Massachusetts governor said that ‘dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark’ and mocked his ‘bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics,’ Trump is reportedly considering making him America’s top diplomat.

Considering how the Reagan administration was often led astray by its moderates, the God-Emperor Ascendant’s team should know better than to put any trust in Mitt Romney. While Romney is competent and probably will take orders and do as he’s told, he’s simply not popular with, or trusted by, anyone who isn’t a Mormon or a GOPe figure.

There is simply no significant benefit to a situation where the best case scenario is that he doesn’t stab his boss in the back. Bring in new blood. Surely there is someone else out there with height, good teeth, and executive hair.

You may not be interested in identity politics

But identity politics is your new reality, whether you are a Republican (White party), a Democrat (Not-White party), or an Independent (White or non-White who votes White but doesn’t want to admit it).

Symone Sanders, former spokeswoman for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, appeared on CNN Wednesday afternoon to weigh in on the future of the DNC and the Democratic party. Sanders dismissed the idea of Howard Dean returning as DNC chairman commenting, “we don’t need white people leading the Democratic party right now.”

“Howard Dean is also on record maligning young people and millennials. Telling those Bernie folks they just need to get in line and maligning Bernie Sanders. And that is not what we need,” Sanders said about the former party chairman.

“In my opinion we don’t need white people leading the Democratic party right now,” Sanders said. “The Democratic party is diverse, and it should be reflected as so in leadership and throughout the staff, at the highest levels. From the vice chairs to the secretaries all the way down to the people working in the offices at the DNC.”

That’s not quite honest of Ms Sanders.What she actually means is “we won’t accept white people leading the Democrat party ever again.” And by “white people”, she actually means “white people and Jews”.

TL;DR: Jews just developed a newfound interest in small government, a newfound respect for Donald Trump, and have decided they are White again.

Next year in Beijing!

My take: A Black candidate in 2020 who loses to the God-Emperor is the last hurrah for the traditional Democratic identity groups, followed by an Asian-Hispanic ticket in 2024.

No charges for Clintons

The media breathlessly reports that Bill and Hillary will escape scot-free from everything they didn’t do anyhow:

After Trump stunned the nation during the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, in which he quipped that under a Trump presidency “she would be in jail”, and suggested that he would demand a special prosecutor probe into Clinton’s email server and the Clinton foundation, moments ago MSNBC’s Morning Joe reported, citing a source, that president-elect Donald Trump will not pursue any investigations into his former political rival Hillary Clinton “for her use of a private email server and the Clinton foundation.”

Trump reportedly feels that Clinton has “been through enough.”

Trump had routinely attacked Clinton on the campaign trail over her use of a private server as secretary of State and for foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was in the Obama administration.

The report, first announced by Mika Brzezinski, comes just a week after a 60 Minutes interview where Trump indicated that he may not launch a full investigation into the Democratic nominee. “I’m gonna think about it,” he said at the time to Leslie Stahl. “I don’t wanna hurt them. They’re good people,” he continued of the Clintons.

Again, for the Nth time, Settle. Down. Relax. The God-Emperor Ascendant clearly believes in keeping his enemies in the dark. I would not assume anything at all on the basis of news reports on a topic as sensitive as this.

Even if you insist on parsing the statement, we all know that Hillary is guilty of far worse crimes than setting up a private email server. And so does he.

UPDATE: Trump says “no” when asked if he is taking investigations off the table for the Clintons, @maggieNYT

Football in America

Peter King promotes an interesting, and unintentionally revealing, SI piece called “Football in America”

SI’s “Football in America” issue is a heck of a read. Writers Greg Bishop and Michael McKnight toured the country throughout October to ask hundreds of Americans—from strippers to Jerry Jones to 10-year-old girl players to gamblers to inner-city coaches to Roger Goodell to tailgating fans—how they feel about the state of football. The finished product, edited by Adam Duerson, was entitled Football in America and is a compelling, comprehensive read. I was taken with how many of the interviewees despised Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the anthem and the American flag, and how that’s not going away. I asked Bishop and McKnight about their takeaways from a month deep-diving into the soul of the game.

McKnight: “What I’ll take with me was the sheer quantity of dichotomy and conflict we found. We experienced it at every turn. From a hard-boiled Let-em-play! advocate taking a reflective moment to acknowledge, Yes, this sport does scramble brains to the mother whose teenage son died after a catastrophic brain and spine injury; she adjusted our interview appointment so she could watch the Raiders game. Americans are uncomfortable about the game and about the self-contradictions it inspires in them. This is all highly unscientific, but to me, the ‘Football is going soft’ crowd seemed much easier to be found in states that were won by the Republican presidential candidate, whereas those concerned about the game’s future (and the futures of those who play it) felt more prevalent in so-called blue areas (cities, non-Southern coasts, etc.). I didn’t expect this to be as stark as it was.”

Bishop: “I’d say that 95 percent of the people that I spoke with were conflicted. And many not in ways that I expected. Like the Kansas offensive lineman I spoke with who made the pragmatic decision to retire from concussions. He loved football so much he cried about the decision he had to make … The majority of people I spoke with were angry and disillusioned and wanted change—but they often wanted change back to the way that football was. I sensed they felt the same way about their lives. It was like they feel like the world we live in has gotten impossibly complicated, and that what they want is a simpler, romanticized, idealized time — a time that may not even be real but that they remember fondly. That came across so much more strongly than I anticipated. And yet, if you’re talking favorite moments, it’s hard to beat the Friday night I spent in Allen, Texas, at the $60-million high school stadium. The pageantry, the skill level, the barbecue, the Balding Eagles booster club, the stadium perch for the boosters. A lot of people would watch that scene and think that it’s everything wrong with football. But it didn’t feel that way when you were there. It felt like all the best of football rolled into one place.”

This is yet another demonstration that the white population of the USA is essentially two different nations. The media, which is populated by the smaller Globalist White population, has virtually no familiarity, or understanding, of the Nationalist White population, as evidenced even by these well-meaning attempts to do so. On what planet is the opinion of strippers and 10-year-old girls playing linebacker even remotely relevant to the NFL?

Football is merely one of the many friction points now fraying at the fabric of society. It’s been remarkable to see how the Globalist Whites have steadfastly denied what is manifestly obvious to everyone about the declining NFL ratings. It’s not that anyone actually cares what Colin Kaepernick or the players imitating him actually think, it is the symbolic nature of their actions that have infuriated millions of Nationalist Whites as well as more than a few pro-American minorities.

Despite living in Europe and being a player and coach of the game of football proper, which is to say, calcio, the beautiful game, I still love American football, particularly the chess game that is the NFL variety. But there are certainly times, such as when the idiot refs throw a flag on an irrelevant block-in-the-back penalty that negates a great punt return, or a highly questionable roughing-the-passer penalty on 4th-and-19 that gives a defeated team an undeserved second shot at winning a game it has already lost, that I’m tempted to turn off the TV. And the fact that the NFL is coddling anti-American protesters like Kaepernick only makes it that much more easy to do so.

And yes, NFL-hating spergs, you can do your tedious thing here, as for once, it is not off-topic. It won’t make any difference to anyone, you understand, but you can tell us all about your opinion that means nothing to any of us if you feel the need to do so.