A Tale of Two Attacks

Heavily Armed Israeli Soldiers

On November 5, 2009 a Muslim terrorist, masquerading as a U.S. Army psychiatrist, conducted an attack on Army personnel at Fort Hood, Texas. Major Nidal Hassan, the terrorist, opened fire with a handgun on military personnel on their base and succeeded in killing 12 American soldiers and wounding 31 others.

On August 18, 2011, three Palestinian terrorists conducted an attack on a bus full of Israeli military personnel traveling from their base at Be’er Sheva to the resort city of Eilat on leave. When the three Palestinians opened fire on the bus with automatic weapons, the Israeli soldiers got off the bus and engaged the terrorists with their own automatic weapons, killing two and seriously wounding the third.

These were two separate attacks with two very different results. But how could the Fort Hood terrorist with a handgun succeed in killing 12 and wounding 31 while the three Palestinians with automatic weapons ended up the only victims of their attack? Simple, the U.S. Army (and the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps) prohibit the possession of weapons, either military issue or private weapons, by military personnel while not directly involved in training exercises. So American soldiers are liable to be shot down as helpless victims of a deranged Muslim on their own base while Israeli soldiers, when attacked while riding on a bus through the desert, are able to dismount the bus under attack and successfully defend themselves.

But this is the United States, not the violent Middle East, where everyone needs to be armed and capable of defending themselves, right. If a Muslim terrorist can conduct an attack on a U.S. military base with enough impunity to kill 12 and wound 31 before being stopped by an armed policeman, it will not be long before such attacks are conducted in the public domain such as at malls, shopping centers, and sporting events. The attacks of September 11, 2001 are nearly a decade behind us, yet the United States still does not consider itself a nation under attack.

The critical difference is trust. The Israeli military trust their personnel to possess weapons and to use them for their intended purpose: defending themselves and the state of Israel. The Israeli military issues weapons to every soldier. Israel then trains them extensively on their use and allows the soldiers to retain possession of them at all times. The U.S. military does not trust the American servicemen to retain possession of their weapons, except when using them in training or in actual combat. That’s why Nidal Hassan knew he would be able to kill and wound many Americans before being subdued at Fort Hood.

Its time that we in the United States understand that we are at war, as the Israelis have been for years. We are all at war, and are all vulnerable to committed Muslim terrorists who want nothing so much as the sight of dead American bodies in the street.

Governor Perry is no John McCain

Texas Governor Rick Perry has come out swinging in his bid for the U.S. presidency. Governor Perry, who announced his intention to oust incumbent Barack Obama in the 2012 election last Saturday, said he considered the Federal Reserve Board policy of printing money, known as Quantitative Easing, could be treasonous.

The fair and balanced news agency Reuters reported Perry’s strong statement on August 16th. The article, by objective journalist Patricia Zengerle, quoted Governor Perry saying, “Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous, treasonous in my opinion.”

The White House naturally denounced Governor Perry’s stated opinion, with Obama Press Secretary, the former objective journalist Jay Carney, asserting, “Its not a good idea threatening the Fed Chairman.” What Carney should have said was he does not consider it a good idea to have an opinion on Quantitative Easing that differs from that of his boss.

Ms Zengerle went on to fret that such a belligerent stance might go a long way to scare squishy independents from the conservative republican candidate, though if that were the case it would probably be cause for celebration in the Reuters editorial offices.

Republican establishment figures also expressed concern over the Texas Governor’s tone. Ford O’Connell, a former advisor to the failed 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona Senator John McCain, offered sage advice to the Texan, bleating, “When you say these things in the Lone Star State, you look colorful. When you say it on a national stage…it’s going to come back to get you.” Mr O’Connell went on to say, “You’ve got to be more James Bond than Rambo.”

And who would know more about what can “come back to get you” while making nice to political opponents than a squishy, inoffensive advisor to the failed McCain candidacy. It was McCain’s abysmal campaign, advised so inadequately by the likes of Mr O’Connell, that refused to call out then-candidate Obama on any of the myriad issues that could have been raised in the campaign to defeat him. It was McCain’s half-hearted effort to stand up for conservative principles of limited government and fiscal discipline, advised by the likes of Mr O’Connell, that led directly to the disaster we are living through with this incompetant socialist in the White House.

It’s about time someone started speaking up to the incumbent president’s sycophants in the administration and in the fawning, corrupt media, telling the truth about “Quantitative Easing.” Such a policy is not, as Reuters breathlessly reports, “an attempt to right a stumbling economy.” It is a disingenuous attempt by a political toady to prop up an inept, stumbling administration.

Grabbing DoD Funding

With pressure mounting on President Obama and his allies in Congress to reduce the profane spending of the federal government, the budget of the Department of Defense is once again the target of another inept democrat administration. Like President Jimmy Carter before him, Mr Obama views the Defense budget with envious eyes. Unlike Carter before him, however, Mr Obama presides over a military fully engaged in two live wars and several percolating hot spots.

Mr Carter did not have to deal with active wars (only the Cold War with the Soviet Union) during his administration’s efforts to gut the Pentagon, resulting in the “hollow force” of the late 1970’s, but Mr Obama does. He has troops engaged in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as smaller scale efforts such as the NATO effort to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Khadafi, and ongoing effort to destroy Al Qaida in Yemen. Still, Mr Obama feels he can find nearly $400 billion is savings from the Department of Defense, nearly half of the total bill for the military in 2011 of $861 billion.

It is curious that Mr Obama and his congressional toadies seek to cut the budget for national defense nearly in half, while any suggestion that the government limit spending on many of the less significant areas of federal spending is met with hysterical wailing about republican cruelty to children and the elderly. Oversight of the national defense effort is one of the tasks and powers specifically granted to the Congress and the President by the U.S. Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 of the document empowers the Congress to “declare war” and to “provide for the common defense.” Congress also has the power to punish piracies on the high seas; raise and support armies; and to provide and maintain a navy. Article II, Section 2 identifies the president as the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, and the Militia of the several states when called into actual service.” These are all legitimate activities for which the Congress can appropriate funds, and on which the President can spend those funds.

But the U.S. Constitution does not say one word about the power of the government to spend a dime on health care. The document does not confer any power on the government to mandate mileage standards for automobiles, nor does it empower the federal government to bail out failing businesses, no matter what their size may be. The Constitution does not enumerate any power of the government to participate, let alone control education, or labor, or the production of energy. And yet, cabinet level departments exist for each activity.

To be sure, the Department of Defense could probably do well to reduce some of the waste in its huge budget. But before Mr Obama and his allies in the democrat congress and the derelict media repeat the folly of the Carter years, perhaps they should cast their eyes in the direction of government activities that the government has no authority to conduct in the first place.

How can we possibly identify activities that are not authorized by the Constitution? Simple, read the 10th Amendment to the document. It says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” While that simple text should require no definition, it clearly means that if the activity cannot be found enumerated in the Constitution of any of its 27 ratified amendments, the federal government has no authority to be conducting that activity.

After we eliminate all the money the federal government wastes on unauthorized activities, we will have solved the government’s spending problem and we can get on with defending the nation. But we will also have removed the last viable method for democrat politicians to buy votes with the tax revenues of their fellow citizens. And that is why it will never happen.

He Just Doesn't Get It

Within two hours of the bill’s passage by the Congress, President Barack Obama signed the Debt Limit Increase Bill into law on August 2nd, averting by several hours the dreaded possibility of national default.

The president then ran to the microphones outside the Oval Office to thank the American people for keeping the pressure on the Congress to ensure the continued solvency of the government.

The president went on to add a few personal observations to his remarks. He stated as an accepted fact his supposition that, “We can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts.” Without pausing to consider the mendacity of that comment, he went on to suggest that the only way to accomplish “closing the deficit” would be to have the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations pay their fair share.

Then he went on to say something he may come to regret if anyone in the neutered American press would take him to task. The president said, “Everyone is going to have to pay their fair share. It’s only fair.”1

As it stands today, the president is correct; everyone does not pay their fair share of taxes. Today, 47 percent of the wage earners in the country do not pay any federal income tax at all. Either due to low income, tax credits, or deductions, these workers, numbering over 110 million people, have zero federal income tax liability. It is possible for a family of four earning $50,000 a year to owe no income tax. But even if all those individuals paid an average of $2500 in federal taxes, it would only total about $275 billion, enough to run Mr Obama’s administration for just over three weeks. 2

So, if 47 percent of wage earners pay no federal income taxes, who does? The top 10 percent of all income earners, the evil rich, those earning more than $113,000 per year, pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes collected by the government.3

President Obama is simply using class warfare as a straw dog to deflect attention from the actual problem: outrageous federal spending. To turn Mr Obama’s original statement around, we cannot “close the deficit” by taxing the rich or corporations. As indicated in the very entertaining video at the Heritage Foundation web sight (narrated by Bill Whittle), if we were to confiscate 100 percent of all the profits earned by the Fortune 500 companies ($357 billion) plus 100 percent of the assets of the rich ($1.412 trillion), we could only run Mr Obama’s government for about six months. After that, we’d be out of money with no way to produce more.

While the rich are a tempting target for the socialists and communists of the world, they are not the solution to the budget problem we are facing. Mr Obama’s declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, the only way to eliminate the budget deficit and the resulting increase in the national debt is to stop the runaway federal spending.

The idea that there are no areas of the federal budget that can be cut without harming children or the elderly is preposterous. Examples of federal profligacy are well known, but some of the more ridiculous are catalogued at Darwin’s Money.com where some of the more foolish examples of spending from Mr Obama’s Stimulus spending are documented.4 Examples like the California Academy of Sciences receiving $1.9 million to send researchers to the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean to capture and photograph exotic ants, or the $90,000 in stimulus money that the town of Boynton, Oklahoma received to replace a five year old length of sidewalk.

In normal times, these expenditures would be thought unnecessary and perhaps even somewhat amusing. But in a time when the economic future of the planet may be in jeopardy if we do not get our fiscal house in order, they are a travesty. Spending trillions of dollars of money we do not have should not be a political issue; it should be a criminal issue. The days of using the endless flow of taxpayer money to ensure the re-election of politicians is over. We need someone in Washington D.C. who can be trusted to act in the best interests of the nation. In years gone by, that’s what we elected the president to do. Sadly, the current occupant of the White House seems unable, or unwilling to do so.


1- http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60503.html
2- ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat3.txt
3- http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/14/video-eat-the-rich-liberals-will-still-be-hungry/
4- http://www.darwinsmoney.com/dumb-stimulus-bill-spending/