Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
jobs
Saturday, March 20th, 2010wrecked conciliation
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
HEALTH CARE THEATER
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Obamanomics does the Olympics
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Reid’s apology
Monday, January 11th, 2010
The Little Dog sums up the OBAMA year one.
Friday, January 1st, 2010
The attached coulumn is by Culpeper Star Exponent Columnist James Bayne IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING…
These are the beginning words from a quote attributable to Yogi Berra. The complete quotation is: “If you don’t know where you are going; you might wind up some place else”.
As we, as individuals and our nation as a whole, set out on this New Year it will behoove us to know where we are going. The last few years have seen a culmination of failure on the national level “to know where we were going” which has resulted in a protracted military undertaking in the middle east; massive losses in national manufacturing strength; transfer of large numbers of jobs to overseas locations; ruinous unemployment levels across the employment spectrum; and rampant avarice and greed in the upper echelons of banking and insurance industries who took advantage of the failure by the Federal Reserve Board to know where its actions were leading; are among those areas which affect the citizenry. It is my belief that each of these missteps occurred because we did not know where we were going.
While we tend to place the blame for failure of a national program or mission with the President in office at the time it is, in truth, not just the President but also those in his cabinet and the Members of Congress who share the blame. They must develop clear sustainable programs on “where we are going” and partisanship ideologies must be set aside for the good of the Nation in order that we do not wind up some place else. While I do not pretend to understand the contents of the proposed health care reform before the Congress, it seems to me that they are bound and determined to enact something that approximately 60% of the public does not want.
This seems to be a continuation of the types of errors made in the past such as the misapplication of our military forces in involvement in the internal affairs of other nations; covert operations (including abetting coups) in some nations; and internally we have been, and are, pursuing courses of action which threaten the long term stability of the nation. I understand that the debt limit for the Nation has recently been raised to $12.4 trillion and that increase immediately triggered new plans for further expenditures on programs which may have little, if any, sustainable long term benefit for the nation.
I will cite just one current example of not knowing where we are going and that is the recent airliner bomb threat at Detroit. Involved in this failure to detect are the National Security Agency; the CIA; the National Counterterrorism Center; the State Department; the Homeland Security Agency; the FBI Terrorist Screening Center and probably other agencies of which I am not aware. Might it be that we have too many cooks stirring the pot (and none with the recipe knowing where we are going)?
May you and yours have a most happy and prosperous New Year.
poor taliban
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Slow goat from China
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
fund raisin’
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Now here is a shovel ready project Scout can get behind! The State Theater project is about one and one half million dollars short of being able to renovate the Old State Theater in downtown Culpeper. The funding would put construction crews to work, and bring work for theater types as the idea is to have live arts in Culpeper. But alas, The Town OF CULPEPER got funding to buy up and flip foreclosed homes. Maybe someone can bring the bucks to the State! Support the State Theater project! Me and Scout do!
AFGHANISTANNAM
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
ATTACHED COLUMN BY JAMES BAYNE EITHER GET IN OR GET OUT—-NO MORE ATTRITION
Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. For some I am preaching to the choir but others seem to have forgotten the mistakes we have made in a number of international arenas. In this space last week I wrote of what I see as the similarities of gradual deepening of involvement in the internal affairs of an independent nation. We have done it time and again. One of our great presidents, James Monroe, gave us the Monroe Doctrine which said, in essence, to the rest of the world “stay the hell out of the affairs here in the western hemisphere”. In my opinion we should follow that advice with the respect to the affairs elsewhere. But should any other nation dare to attack our people, our embassies, or the legal interests of our citizens then we should take whatever action is necessary to inflict maximum punishment on them and we needn’t waste time with the United Nations.
What I see is a parallelism, by our involvement in Afghanistan, with our mistakes in Vietnam. Let us briefly look at the Vietnam era. We became overtly involved in 1962 when President Kennedy established the Military Assistance Command of Vietnam (MACV) and sending 1000 military advisors to aid the South Vietnamese. Within a year that force grew to 15,000. In 1963 we were misled about the success we were having and in August, 1963 we (the CIA and the US Ambassador in Saigon) secretly plotted to overthrow the existing government of South Vietnam. That overthrow occurred in November. After President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson vowed to keep Kennedy’s efforts going. He replaced General Paul Harkins as commander of MACV with General William Westmoreland who pushed for an additional 200,000 troops. However Johnson kept the status quo until it was reported that two US destroyers were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin (gunboats against destroyers?). Johnson asked the US Congress for authority (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to “take all necessary actions to protect US interests in Vietnam”. Congress passed the resolution with only two dissenting votes out of the 535 members. In the elections of the fall of 1964 Johnson pledged that “American boys would not be called upon to do the job that Asian boys should do”. But by June of 1965 we had 75,000 troops there and the next month another 100,000 were sent and another 100,000 were approved to go in the following year. Westmoreland embarked on a program of “seek and destroy” believing that he could wear down the North Vietnamese through attrition. When your supply base is half a world away believing in attrition of the enemy seems a folly. We became the victims of attrition in Vietnam and at home.
It seems to me that we are on a similar course in Afghanistan. We started with advisors, then a few troops, then we replaced the commanding general (maybe we should have—I just hope that was a military decision and not a political one), we’ve doubled the troops, and the new commander is saying he needs more troops. Today it is reported that Admiral Mullin (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff) is lobbying for yet another increase in troops. I see the same mistakes being made again.
