Politics

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obamatux

by Reid Fitzsimons

One of the less uplifting constructions in polemic discourse is the one using, “Oh yeah, well…” Such as, upon losing at rock-paper-scissors, the defeated child exclaims, Oh yeah, well my father has a bigger SUV than yours!” Usually one doesn’t find much enlightenment in such a retort. I have an in-law who is a decent sort but a dogmatic, knee-jerk type progressive, quite willing to share his opinion regardless of the circumstance. Sometime during the 2008 presidential primary season he asked my thoughts on Mitt Romney, to which I lamely replied something like, “He seems like a nice enough guy.” His response was a swift, “Oh yeah, well did you know he’s a Mormon and Mormons are for polygamy.”

The “Oh yeah, well…” rebuttal is fairly low in the hierarchy of intellectualism and thoughtfulness. Nevertheless, one need not be an undereducated nitwit to use it: my in-law in this case is a PhD astrophysicist at MIT. In regards to polygamy I’m fairly certain the nebulous masters that determine the course of progressivism will declare it a cause-celebre in the near future. Hence my in-law will quickly evolve and soon enough will be shaking his head and perhaps fists at the intolerant hate-filled polygamyphobes. ...continue reading →

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by Barry King

On June 4, 2009, only a few months into his presidency, US President Obama gave a major speech about US relations with the Muslim world, at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. Reuters reported that the President’s objective in the speech was to “repair ties that were severely damaged under his predecessor George W. Bush.” One sign of that damage was that at the end of Bush’s term, only 27% of Egyptians reported having a favorable view of the USA. Today in 2015, after the first six years of President Obama’s tenure, that approval rating in Egypt has dropped an additional 17 points, to the current abysmal 10% (according to Pew Research). That’s the real-world result, so far, of Obama’s pressing of his metaphorical “reset button”.

On January 1, 2015, only a few months into his presidency, Egyptian President Al-Sisi gave another speech in the same venue, at Al Azhar. ...continue reading →

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silver cuomo

by Reid Fitzsimons

Recently the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, was arrested on predictable corruption charges. Some people expressed surprise at this development, likely the same people surprised to discover liquids are wet or one shouldn’t eat batteries.

New York is ostensibly a state-level bicameral democracy but in reality it is a three-person oligarchy consisting of the Governor, Senate Majority Leader, and Assembly Speaker. The members of this troika usually include a Democrat from the assembly, a Republican from the senate, and one or the other as the governor and it generally rules by decree. The party affiliation doesn’t really matter because the policies and practices never really change. The members of this elusive body of three tend to hang around a long while, like that car up on blocks a few houses down that never gets repaired. Sheldon Silver, for example, has been Speaker for over 20 years. One of his brethren from the senate side was Joseph Bruno, who assumed the high office of Majority Leader in 1994 and remained until he resigned in 2008- soon thereafter he was convicted of fraud but, to be fair, this was overturned on appeal and he was acquitted at a retrial in 2014. I haven’t been to the Albany airport in a while but at one time at least there was a bust of him on display, artistically quite hideous in my opinion and it seemed kind of freaky overall considering he is still living, convicted criminal or not. ...continue reading →

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drone result edit

During the Bush administration, suspected terrorists were captured, imprisoned and interrogated. Some critics (including Obama) argued that it would be better to view terrorist acts as crimes needing prosecution and punishment rather than as acts of war needing retaliation. Now the Obama administration, eschewing American soldiers on the ground and imprisonment or interrogation without “due process”, is relying instead on blowing up the terrorists in drone attacks. There is a tactical difference, and a legal similarity, between the two approaches. The difference is that the live prisoners at least had the possibility of revealing important information, whereas the corpses at the drone attack site do not. The similarity is that the death penalties meted out to the drone attack targets and their friends also lack legal “due process” and trial in a civilian court with lawyers present. To me those were, and still are, interesting topics, but it seems that many who found them interesting during the Bush administration are not interested in thinking and talking about them now. Why is that? Forward progress in developing our morality and ethics seems to be stalled. http://www.amazon.com/The-Violence-Peace-Americas-Obama/dp/0984295178

However, progress in science and technology continues. (Actually, it seems to me that that disparity is at least 500 years old now. During that period, progress in science has been real, whereas progress in ethics has been mostly imaginary, existing mostly in human imaginations as an artifact of human narcissism.) Because of aerospace science, the US President will soon be able to deploy a small fleet of Lockeed-Martin / Kaman “K-MAX” unmanned external-load helicopters “as-is”, carrying a squadron of weaponized Lockheed-Martin unmanned “SMSS” vehicles http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/smss.html The K-MAXes will drop the SMSSes near the target, and they will carry out their attack against a terrorist wedding, or whatever. After the “battle”, the K-MAXes will be able to go in to retrieve the surviving SMSSes and airlift them back to base, with no American humans being physically present for any of it. The unrecovered vehicles will be taken by the “enemy” to Iran for reverse-engineering, to discover and duplicate the latest tech secrets used in their design. However, one capability is still missing: that tactical plan does not yet include the option of capturing any suspects alive, imprisoning them, and interrogating them. Aerospace science "progress" means for military applications what it has meant for the last 100 years: increased ability to kill along with reduced risk of dying. But Augustine and Aquinas, cited by Obama during his Peace Prize acceptance speech, would not view that as "progress" at all. Hundreds of years ago, both of those guys viewed killing as far more problematic than dying.

Maybe all of that is OK from a “liberal” point of view, as long as no American soldiers are killed or injured, and none of the corpses are at any point subject to imprisonment or interrogation without due process. Maybe the meaning of the term “liberal” is changing over time, like everything else.

I suspect that living in Africa has enhanced my ability to imagine an attack like that from the point of view of the targets, and to extrapolate from that viewpoint what the long-term impact of it might be on America’s reputation in the world, and American success in the global war on terror. An obvious part of it will be the spread of the sentiment: those Americans who just send their demonic death machines to kill us, and are afraid to come out and fight us themselves, are the worst kind of vile cowards. But I’m just an ordinary guy, whose viewpoint does not matter much. For Samantha Power, current US Ambassador to the UN, it matters a lot, when she finds herself (for example) recommending to the President and to the UN that we keep soldiers out of Libya, but launch air attacks against one side in the Libyan civil war. From a distance I watch Samantha and try to see what she is seeing, but my perception of it remains unclear.