Get your own Free Home PageThe news media don't cover the news much anymore unless its about some victim group whining or entertainment or sex. Therefore, you are probably not aware of how much American defense forces have been cut since the artful dodger became president in 1992.
Here are the cuts: 709,000 regular-service soldiers; 293,000 reserve troops; eight standing Army divisions; 20 Air Force and Navy air wings with 2,000 combat aircraft; 232 strategic bombers; 13 strategic ballistic-missile submarines with 3,114 nuclear warheads on 232 missiles; 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles; four aircraft carriers; and 121 surface combat ships and submarines.
Plus, of course, many bases and other logistical assets. All of that is gone with the wind.
Now, you may approve of these cuts. You may be saying, well, old Ronnie Reagan won the Cold War, so we don't need all that stuff. You may even have been convinced that we have this super-lethal, technologically advanced force that hardly needs warm bodies to operate.
Well, let me share with you some information from a friend on active duty who had access to the official study. What do you think the projected casualties are for the first three days of a war in Korea? The answer is -- and this is the Pentagon's number, not mine -- 70,000 per day. Doesn't seem like a Gulf War, does it? Nope, it doesn't, and neither North Koreans nor Korea resembles the Iraqis and the treeless desert of Kuwait.
But the Korean peninsula is only one potential war. There's always the possibility of a clash with China. And also Russia. Last time I checked, the Russians had about 11,000 nuclear warheads that we knew about but not a stable government. Boris Yeltsin's government is a lot more unstable than the nuclear arsenal. The new International Monetary Fund bailout will, as all its bailouts do, help Western banks but make the situation of the Russian people even worse. And it's real bad already. If Yeltsin goes, who knows who and what kind of government will replace him?
I'll tell you something about Southerners. Every Southerner knows spiritually and perhaps genetically what it's like to lose a war and to be under the heel of a conqueror. That's why Southerners as a whole are adamant about this country having so strong a defense force that no one will be tempted to take us on.
The president, scalawag and anti-military as he is, is not really responsible for these cuts. Oh, he wanted them, but Congress didn't have to go along with him. The Constitution places the responsibility for military preparedness squarely on the shoulders of Congress. The president is commander in chief of whatever forces exist, but it is the duty of Congress to provide and to equip those forces. There is not much point in Congress being a separate branch of government if it just plays lap dog to the president.
So you can blame Congress and your Republican majority for these cuts, which I believe are well past excessive, given the unstable situation of the world. What's bloated and should have been cut is the welfare-state part of the budget. You can cut domestic spending without endangering lives and national existence. You better be darned sure what you're doing when you cut the defense forces.
Forces, of course, should match the mission requirements. To show you how incompetent and amateurish the Clinton crowd is, they have cut the forces while at the same time they have expanded the missions and gotten us more heavily involved in more places that have the potential to create war.
To put it mildly, respectfully and politely, that's stupid.
The news-media lie about the use of nerve gas in Vietnam is only the latest of a long string of lies about Vietnam vets in what former Secretary of the Navy James Webb calls ``the media's war on Vietnam vets.''
Webb, by the way, ought to be persuaded to run for president. He's that rare public figure these days who combines intelligence and courage with a high sense of honor. He is hated by the right people -- feminists, opportunists, political generals and admirals who sell out their men for their own careers, and the average whining, bed-wetter leftist. That is a sterling recommendation.
Webb recently ripped into the subject of the war on Vietnam vets in an article in which he pointed out that the hostility toward those who fought has deep roots `` ... in the elite among the old anti-war left whose members not only avoided military service but openly derided those who went to Vietnam as either stupid or evil.''
When that group's assertion that the Vietnamese Communists had benign intentions was refuted by their Stalinist actions, the antiwar left just lied even more. That is the pattern among the riffraff that makes up today's elite. Many of these despicable people occupy high positions in the news media, the universities and, of course, government.
Webb lists several lies repeatedly told about Vietnam veterans and then exposes them. It was purported, for example, that the war was fought by the poor and the minorities forced to go by the draft. Webb states acidly that, although the elite ducked out, the middle class showed up.
Of those who died, 86 percent were white, and 12.5 percent were black. Volunteers accounted for 77 percent of the battle deaths.
He upends the lie peddled that Vietnam veterans were ``over-decorated'' by showing the contrasts between the medals issued in World War II and those in Vietnam. Vietnam soldiers were not over-decorated. They earned their medals the old-fashioned way. They fought bravely and often died for them.
Furthermore, Webb exposes the canard that the Vietnam vet was a disgruntled, disillusioned soldier. In the largest survey ever done of them, a whopping 91 percent in combat said they were glad they served their country; 74 percent said they even enjoyed their time in the military; and two out of three said they would go back to Vietnam -- even if they knew in advance what the outcome would be.
The men who fought in Vietnam were as good as the Americans who fought in any other war. What was different for them was that the country they fought for wasn't as good as it had been in the past. Instead of receiving a well-done, they got spit on by lousy leftists other civilians didn't have the guts to confront.
Webb also lashes Hollywood for its uniformly negative picturing of the American soldier in Vietnam. The American fighting men won the war on the ground. Hanoi admitted that it lost 1.1 million soldiers dead plus another 300,000 missing in action. That's against 58,000 American and 254,000 South Vietnamese losses. The war was lost, just as the communists predicted, not in Vietnam but in the American news media and on American streets and campuses.
A lot of the anti-war propaganda was fueled by people who pretended to have been in combat in Vietnam. Many of these were fakes. Webb states that a new book by B.G. Burkett, Stolen Valor, looks into 1,700 cases in which people distorted or lied about their service in Vietnam.
This book, Webb states, ``constitutes a damnation of the major media so great that the CNN-Time story on sarin will take its rightful context as a rare moment when the purveyors of dishonesty got caught, rather than as the journalistic aberration many would like to term it.''
Let's start a Webb for President movement!
Too many Americans suffer from historical Alzheimer's. Like those with the physical disease, they do not know where they are or how they got there or what they are doing.
As a result, they sin grievously.
No sin blots American politics today more than the betrayal of the Serbs. No one ought to be more ashamed of U.S. treatment of the Serbs than American Jews. Yet most Americans, Jew and Gentile alike, duped by the clever public-relations counsels for the former Nazi Balkan allies, have in their ignorance turned against the Serbs who, when it meant life or death, stood by the Jews.
What follows are excerpts from a letter from a Jewish physician published in the book, The Serbs Choose War, by Ruth Mitchell, sister of the famous Gen. Billy Mitchell. Here is what the doctor told his friend:
``No German measures in Belgrade were able to upset the friendly relations between the Serbs and the Jews. During the forced-labor period, Serbs talked to their Jewish friends in the streets even in front of the German soldiers and police. During the period when over 300,000 Serbs were massacred by the Croat Utashi in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Lika and some 60,000 shot by Germans in Serbia, during the period when Serbian students and peasants were hung in the main square in Belgrade, the Serbs of the capital had sufficient courage to protest publicly their indignation at the treatment of the Jews.''
Americans blessed by never having lived under military occupation have no idea what magnificent courage that protest took.
``The example of the Serbian people,'' the Jewish physician wrote, ``with regard to the Jewish people is unique in Europe... . In spite of intensive German propaganda in writing and through the wireless, the Serbs remained unaffected... . It is my desire as a Jew and as a Serb that in free democratic countries where Jews are still enjoying full freedom and equality they should show gratitude to the Serbian people, pointing out their noble acts, their humane feelings, and their high civic consciousness... . I cannot conclude this report without mentioning how the Serbian Orthodox Church tried to save Serbian Jews and Gypsies. Serbian Orthodox priests and the Serbian peasantry risked their lives to save Serbian Jews and Gypsies.''
In the book, Mitchell tells how outraged the Serbs were when the Yugoslav government (a federation of Serbs, Croats and Muslims) signed a pact with the Nazis. Within two days, the Serbs rose up and overthrew it.
``Then an almost incredible thing happened, a thing so important to the history of the world that freedom-loving men will speak of it with admiration and with gratitude down through the centuries. The Serbs rose. A little race of not more than 8 million souls deliberately, sternly decided to die rather than submit to Axis vassalage. They were the only small race of Europe to come in openly on the side of the Allies before they were themselves attacked and while they still had a promise of complete security of frontiers, of lives, and of property; the first and only small race themselves to declare war -- a war they knew to be absolutely hopeless -- against the invincible German war machine.''
Their reward? They were betrayed after the war into the hands of a Croatian communist, Joseph Tito. And today, America arms and supports the Croatians, who have again massacred Serbs. A Croat diplomat, describing the 1940s massacres, wrote of a boat set adrift, crammed with children's heads, of rape and mutilation of Serb women and children, of a vessel holding 31.5 kilograms of Serbian eyes, of wreaths made of Serbian tongues.
And these Croats are the people we help to kill the Serbs who stood with us against the Nazis.
Shame, shame, shame.
The two Capitol Police officers killed recently are victims -- and by no means the only ones -- of civil liberties run amok. The man charged with killing them, Russell E. Weston Jr., is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia.
Not many decades ago most states had laws that allowed family members to commit involuntarily people who are mentally ill. In Florida, a family could petition a county judge. The person would be picked up, held in custody and examined by two or more psychiatrists, who would then make a report to the judge, who would make the decision. (Note 1)
The process, like any process, may have been abused, but I was never aware of any when I was covering beats that included it. Nevertheless, sometime in the '60s, civil libertarians dismantled most of those laws. They said it infringed on the rights of the mentally ill.
The result: It is very difficult today for a family to have a relative involuntarily committed. In many states, it can't be done until the person ``does something'' -- kills two police officers, for example. By then, of course, it is too late to avoid what could have been an avoidable tragedy.
Schizophrenia, a brain disorder that causes delusions, can be treated with medications, but there is no way to force the person to take the medications.
One of the difficulties of mental illness is that so often the person does not, of course, believe that he or she is ill. This makes it extremely difficult for loved ones to persuade that person to seek treatment. The Westons said that they saw that their son was getting worse, but there was nothing they could do.
The larger problem is the tendency of people to view civil rights as an ideology. Such people develop tunnel vision. They are not interested in solving problems. They have a preconceived notion of the solution, and imposing that solution is all they are interested in. (Note 2)
The rational approach, which used to be common before Americans went nuts, was to look at the problem calmly and from all angles. In this case, there was clearly a need to have a mechanism by which people dangerous to themselves or others could be involuntarily committed. At the same time, there should be safeguards to make sure people don't commit perfectly sane people in order, for example, to get control of their money.
It seemed to me the opinion of two psychiatrists and a public hearing before a magistrate offered sufficient safeguards. But not to the ideologues, because -- and this is another fault of theirs -- they have no faith in public officials. They want to leave the public official with no room for exercising judgment and discretion. They are really egotistical. They want to substitute their judgment in the form of laws for his.
That's a key point, it seems to me. If you trust nobody, then it seems that no form of government is available. A basic level of trust, without falling into the trap of gullibility, is necessary for a human community to function.
Sure, sometimes our trust will be violated, but that is no reason to scrap the whole system. There are no perfect humans. There are no perfect systems. There are no perfect laws. (Note 3)
It appears to me, a non-lawyer observer, that the old standard of the prudent and reasonable man has been lost. What was meant was that, in seeking solutions, the law should reflect what a prudent and reasonable person would do -- not what a fanatic or an ideologue would do. (Note 4)
People who need treatment will continue not to get it. People who don't need to die will continue to die.
But, say hey, dude, their civil rights will be protected.
(Note 1: The old procedure reflects that of Deuteronomy 21:18-21.)
(Note 2: Often, extreme cases are used as an excuse to pass bad laws, which are suitable only for the extreme case.)
(Note 3: A perfect system of safeguards is impossible. The better you make the safeguards, the greater lengths corrupt people will go to circumvent them. Procedural safeguards cannot preserve society. Only a virtuous population can do that.)
(Note 4: "Multiculturalism" causes people to disagree on what is prudent and reasonable. Multiculturalism thus breaks down society, creating the need for voluminous laws.) (notes are added, not by Mr Reese)
I noticed in a directory of conservative organizations a proliferation of organizations concerned about the family. Most of them purport to have an interest in ``public-policy'' matters.
Sorry, folks. The imperial government is guilty of a lot of stuff, but it is as innocent as Snow White on this issue. The government did not break the American family. The government cannot restore the American family. (Note 1)
When you hear a politician purporting to be interested in ``restoring'' the family, write him off as a demagogue or a fool. No law, no appropriation, no bureaucratic program can fix what's wrong. It's all personal and private. It's a morality issue, not a public-policy issue. It's not just the government that has gone sour in America; it's people.
It's people who spend $8 billion a year on pornography. It's people who spend God knows how many billions of dollars in gambling casinos. It's people who take vows and break them. It's the people who bring children into the world and abandon or abuse them. It's people who watch the Jerry Springer show or listen to Howard Stern. It's the people who patronize trash. It's people who approve of Bill Clinton, a sleaze and failed president.
The government has nothing to do with it. The government didn't corrupt anybody. It would be closer to the mark to say people have corrupted the government.
The first idea Americans ought to get over is that government can fix whatever we decide ails us at any given moment. Government is quite limited in what it can do. It is just force. The government can kill people, confiscate their property, deprive them of liberty or threaten them with all of the above. It can confiscate money and write checks on the confiscated money and thus buy votes. That's it, as far as basic powers go.
Wise citizens would be as leery of asking the government to solve a problem as they would be of asking a wolf to watch their children. The problem won't get solved, but the government will use the attempt as an excuse to widen its jurisdiction into even more areas of our lives -- and, naturally, confiscate even more of our money. (Note 2)
Historically Americans have believed, and wisely so, that the power of government should never be used except to protect public health and public safety. It should act only to protect people from communicable diseases, force and fraud. If we could ever re-chain the federal government to the Constitution, it could easily live off revenue tariffs and the proceeds of the sale of public land.
The second idea Americans ought to get shut of is that if they do something wrong, it's somebody else's fault. Everyone has heard of a free market in goods and services. Well, the free market of morality is even freer.
People can choose their own character. All it takes to be a truthful person is a decision not to tell lies. All it takes to be brave is the decision to do what has to be done despite one's fears. Whatever we choose to be, in terms of character, we are free to be. No one can make us lie, cheat, steal, rob, murder or abandon people we are responsible for. When these things happen, it's because people freely choose to do them.
Teaching morality is the province of parents and religion. If they fail, the government can't do it instead. George Washington's argument is still valid. He said republican government depends on a virtuous people. No means of instilling virtue has been found to be superior to religion. Therefore, he said, anyone who is an enemy of religion is an enemy of republican government.
A government cannot make bad people good, but good people can make bad government good.
(Note 1: Government DID in fact contribute to family breakup by subsidizing it.)
(Note 2: Government can't fix families, but it should stop harming them.) (notes added, not by Mr Reese)
Is it time now to comment on the Monica and Bill show? As Michael Jordan says in a hot-dog commercial, ``No, not yet.''
The special prosecutor has not completed his investigation. When he does, when he issues his final report, then comment will be justified. Prior to that, it's all speculation. Speculation is trash talk.
Noticed in the supermarket the other night that news-magazine covers now resemble the entertainment-magazine covers. In fact, television's Entertainment Tonight regularly reports on Monica Lewinsky. And recently the prez spent a weekend raising money at the Eastern homes of actor Alec Baldwin and director Steven Spielberg.
The line between entertainment and news and government is completely gone, and that alone ought to tell you what a nutso nation we're becoming. I would not be surprised to see Spielberg invited to testify before Congress on defense matters now that he has made a World War II movie (a very good one, by the way).
Some years ago, a congressional committee actually did invite three Hollywood actresses who had played farm wives to testify at hearings on the plight of American agriculture. And they came and testified. I suppose any actor who has played Hamlet is an expert, by congressional standards, on Scandinavian politics. I wonder why they didn't invite actors who had played ranchers to that agricultural committee hearing? Maybe they ought to make Pierce Brosnan, the current James Bond, an ex-officio member of the intelligence committee.
Oh, for the days when serious was serious and frivolous was frivolous and never the twain did meet.
H.L. Mencken once called American politics a ``carnival of Buncombe,'' and it is certainly that. Congress seems to want to cure every ill known to man except unconstitutional government and high taxes. Whenever anything makes headlines or hits the TV news/entertainment shows, some congressman or senator proposes a law. Pretty soon, they will have to build a monstrous new building just to house the federal statutes and federal regulations.
In the interest of truth in journalism, I have to state that the Confederate Congress was not much of an improvement over the U.S. version.
``I have been up to see Congress,'' Gen. Robert E. Lee wrote in a letter to his son, ``and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.'' There must be something about the business of law-writing that attracts a certain type of people.
Our imperial Congress persons certainly do not chew tobacco. But they are junketing around, indulging themselves in luxury, while young naval aviators cannot afford to fly the hours necessary to keep their skills up, and military personnel are forced to live in shoddy housing and, in some cases, apply for food stamps to feed their families. Our Army, if not starving, is being hollowed out and could not now even duplicate the Gulf War.
A wise man observed that ``arms abroad are useless unless there is wisdom at home.'' If there is anything scarcer in Washington than integrity, it is certainly wisdom.
But have no fear. There are plenty of games and entertainment to amuse us, virtually around the clock, seven days a week. We can have enormously deep discussions about the movies and sports and a few scandals involving sex. We can carry on our pointless debates about Republican Tweedle-Dee and Democrat Tweedle-Dum.
In the meantime, the world -- out of sight and out of mind -- goes its own way. But what's to worry? Our leaders and pundits assure us that everything is hunky-dory, peachy-creamy.
One of the oddities of post-modern America is that truth and facts have no bearing on public policy. Policy seems to be adopted -- and supported -- as a matter of religious faith rather than on an empirical basis.
Take free trade, for example. For 20 years people have argued that free trade will create American jobs, and for 20 years free trade has resulted in the loss of American jobs as well as the piling up of trade deficits to staggering levels.
No matter. Proponents keep making the same disproven arguments, as if there were no evidence to the contrary whatsoever.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, has done precisely what its opponents predicted. It has shifted jobs from the United States to Mexico. Why is anyone surprised? Labor costs in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the United States. Lower labor costs mean higher profits for capital, not lower prices for consumers, as some naive people suppose.
Mexico today produces 1.5 million vehicles, nearly all of which are exported to the United States. According to Business Week, analysts expect this to increase to 2.2 million vehicles in the next three years. That increase can come only at the expense of American autoworkers.
A Mexican company, the same article reported, now controls 40 percent of the North American market for some suspension parts and is expected to increase that to 65 percent. It's chief rival is also building a new plant in Mexico.
Under NAFTA, tariffs have dropped from 20 percent to 6 percent and are scheduled to be zero in 2004. ``That shift,'' Business Week states, ``has encouraged the Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, General Motors) to move ever bigger chunks of their car and truck operations to Mexico.''
The magazine reported that Mexico's exports of autos and auto parts has soared from $7.2 billion five years ago to $19.2 billion, generating 360,000 jobs. That's good for Mexico but bad for the United States because virtually all of that production and all of those jobs came from the United States.
The magazine pointed out that a supervisor at one of these plants in charge of 20 people makes $10 a day.
Americans had better wake up to the truth that the free-trade policies as practiced today represent an assault on the American worker and on American prosperity. The form imperialism and col-onialism have taken on today is the vision of a global plantation run by the elite in transnational corporations. It is as ambitious and evil as any other vision of world conquest.
It is a measure of the stupidity of some conservatives that they hang on to their ideological belief in the face of facts that clearly show that free trade in the 20th century bears no resemblance to the free trade practiced in the 19th century.
Free trade today is a plot against the nation, a part of a scheme to destroy the nation state and shift power to the hands of an international elite who will control not only the economic but political destiny of the world's people.
This scheme won't work and will generate wars and revolutions, but it ought to be we, the Americans, who stop it before it comes to that. For that to happen Americans will have to break free from bonds of ideology and old, obsolete associations and recognize the new facts.
Today, true American traditionalists include not only people who think of themselves as conservatives but people who think of themselves as liberals. The two groups will be utter fools if they allow the Machiavellian corporations to pit one against the other over scraps while the corporations steal the whole house. Today, a true conservative stands with the United Auto Workers, not with GM.
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