And Was the Mission Accomplished?

Taki's Magazine
Verbatim Post

Patrick J. Buchanan

For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq.

On May 1, 2003, on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, the huge banner behind President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished!”

That was eight years ago. And so, was the mission accomplished?

Two-thirds of all Americans have concluded the war was not worth it.

And reading the description of Iraq from the editorial page of the pro-war Washington Post, who can answer yes?

“Al-Qaida continues to carry out terrorist attacks. Iranian-sponsored militias still operate, and a power struggle between Kurdish-ruled northern Iraq and Mr. Maliki’s government goes on. More Iraqis worry that, after the U.S. troops depart this month, the sectarian bloodletting that ravaged the country between 2002 and 2007 will resume.”
“What did we accomplish if hatred of America is so widespread our diplomats live in constant peril?”

And not all the Americans are really coming home.

Some 16,000 will remain in the huge fortress that houses the U.S. embassy and in fortified consulates in Basra, Irbil and Kirkuk. All four sites will be self-sufficient, so U.S. personnel can stay clear of what The Wall Street Journal calls “the perilous security situation on Iraq’s city streets.”

In each diplomatic post, the State Department employees will be outnumbered by private security contractors, 5,000 of whom will provide for their protection and secure travel.

U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey warns of the dangers that await U.S. diplomats who venture outside the compounds: “If we move out into the Iraqi economy, out into the Iraqi society in any significant way, it will be much harder to protect our people.”

NBC reported this week that two five-vehicle convoys loaded with Blackwater security types were necessary to escort two U.S. teachers to a meeting in a Bagdad hotel.

What kind of victory did we win if, eight years after we ousted Saddam Hussein and helped install a democratic government, Americans in Iraq should fear for their lives?

Did we win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people when they are burning American flags in Fallujah to celebrate our departure? Why was no parade held, so Iraqis could cheer departing Americans for having liberated them from the tyranny of Saddam?

What did we accomplish if hatred of America is so widespread our diplomats live in constant peril?

Neooconservative Fred Kagan writes that people who think all will be well after America leaves believe in a mirage.

The Obama administration lacks a vision and a strategy, and the regime in Baghdad lacks the assured capability of securing U.S. “core interests” in Iraq, he writes. Among these are ensuring that the state does not collapse, that civil war does not break out, that Iranian influence does not surge, that al-Qaida or Iranian militias do not establish sanctuaries.

Moreover, writes Kagan, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is “unwinding the multi-ethnic cross-sectarian Iraqi political settlement.”

To Kagan, an enthusiast of the war, everything vital that we won in almost nine years of fighting is at risk.

But if we have no assurance that the disasters he lists will not occur, perhaps within months of our departure, what kind of victory is this?

What did we accomplish with a war whose costs in blood, Iraqi as well as American, and treasure were so high?

“We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” President Obama told the troops at Fort Bragg.

Are we?

The Kurds are cutting deals with U.S. oil companies that Baghdad refuses to recognize, seeking to incorporate Kirkuk, and edging toward independence, which would cross a red line not only in Baghdad but Ankara.

Muslim pogroms have uprooted half the Christians, and half of these Christians have fled the country, many to Syria.

Maliki is moving against the Sunni Awakening warriors whom Gen. David Petraeus persuaded to fight al-Qaida in return for their being brought into the army.

The Sunnis sees themselves as dispossessed and marginalized in a country they have historically dominated. Al-Qaida continues to launch terror attacks on civilians to reignite sectarian war. And as the Americans head down the highway to Kuwait, Iran works to displace America as the dominant foreign influence in Baghdad.

That we were deceived into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use, and that he was the man behind 9/11—that we were lied into war—is established fact.

But, equally astonishing, though Bush & Co. planned this war from Sept. 11, 2001, if not before, no one seems to have thought it through before launching it. For as John McCain said yesterday, as of 2007, “the war was nearly lost.”

Yet the disaster that may still befall us in Iraq has not in the least inhibited the war hawks who, even now, are advancing identical arguments for a new war, on Iran, a country three times the size of Iraq.

Six Walton Heirs Have More Wealth than the Bottom 30% of Americans

Godfather Politics
Verbatim Post

Did Sam Walton know that his small company would make him and his family billions of dollars? No. Did he hope that Walmart would make him a lot of money? You bet. “The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion, according to Forbes.” Does the wealth of the Walton heirs make any of us poorer? Nope. Walmart employs more than 1.4 million people in the Unites States. That’s a bit more than one percent of our workforce.

Next to the Federal Government, Walmart is our nation’s largest employer. The Federal Government costs you and me money and freedom. Walmart doesn’t cost us a penny and can’t compel us to do anything.

Walmart does not do business in a vacuum. It has thousands of suppliers that employ millions of people around the world. In fact, Walmart employs nearly a million people overseas. They money paid to these employees enables them to purchase goods from the United States.

Why is Jeffrey Goldberg reporting this story? Tim Wortsall at Forbes has a theory:

I think we all know what Mr. Goldberg wants us to make of it, it’s a telling indictment of American wealth inequality, the world’s going to the dogs and something must be done about rising inequality.

Mr. Goldberg is pushing the class warfare agenda. He’s arguing that the Walton fortune is too much money for any six people to have, although it’s less than John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) was worth all by himself. Adjusting for inflation, Rockefeller is often regarded as the richest person who ever lived.

A millionaire and billionaire tax would not do anything to the Waltons because their billions are not income. In order to redistribute their wealth, the government would have to confiscate their stock. It’s not in cash.

Ninety-three billion dollars is a lot of money. If all of their stock was sold and the assets confiscated and equally redistributed to every American, a family of four would get $1240. And that would be the end of anything else the Waltons’ billions could do long-term. The wealth of the Waltons works for other people in investments and charity work.

Mr. Goldberg does not mention the philanthropy of the Waltons. Helen dropped in her wealth ranking because of her extensive philanthropic work. After Helen Walton died in April 2007, her fortune passed to charities.

Christy Ruth Walton, the widow of John T. Walton, is ranked as the highest female philanthropist according to Facesofphilanthropy.com, in terms of the amount she gives as a percentage of her wealth. Between 2002 and 2006, she contributed billions from her then $16.3 billion net worth towards philanthropic efforts.

Additionally, she supports her family’s own charitable foundation, the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, which prioritizes education and benefits colleges such as the University of Arkansas, the College of Business Administration of the University of Arkansas, and several other colleges, community trusts, universities and foundations. In 2007, her family’s foundation donated as much as $1.6 billion.

If you don’t like the Waltons having this much money, then don’t shop at Walmart.

Sam Walton and his brother took a huge risk. They invested time and money in business that became a retailing phenomenon.

Few people understand the small beginnings of companies and how long it takes to make a profit. Consider Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy. When he was young, Anderson considered business people to be evil, John Stossel writes.

“But then he ‘stumbled into a business career’ by going to work in a stereo store. ‘I watched what happens in building a business. [My store] the Sound of Music, which became Best Buy, was 11 years [old] before I made a dollar of profit.’ In 36 years, he turned that store into a $50 billion company.”

His efforts did not cost any of us anything but resulted in the employment of thousands of people and made purchasing electronic equipment convenient for millions of shoppers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, “My job is to create jobs.” Governments cannot create jobs because governments don’t have any money that they don’t first take from other people.

Most people who despise big business have almost nothing negative to say about the confiscatory policies of government.

I’d rather trust $93 billion to the six Waltons than $15 trillion to tens of thousands of government bureaucrats.

Kris Kristofferson makes an emotional speech as he accepts the Veteran Of The Year Award

Via Bill

Many people may have forgotten about his time in the U.S. Army. He is the son of an Air Force General, an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer, graduate of Pomona College with a B.S. degree, and then became a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford University.

He joined the U.S. Army at the prompting of his father. After graduating from Officer Candidate School he attended and graduated from both Army Airborne and Ranger training in the very top of each class. He was selected for U. S. Army Special Forces Training but refused so that he could attend pilot training where he earned his wings, and became an accomplished U.S. Army helicopter (gun ship) pilot, and achieved the rank of Captain.

He was about to be promoted to the rank of Major, and appointed to teach at West Point when he resigned his commission from the Army to go into music and acting.

Occu-Mom Places 4 Year-Old Daughter on Train Tracks

Via Moonbattery

I need to find another word than *unbelievable which I use countless times each day.

Synonyms: astonishing, beyond belief, cockamamie, cockeyed, doubtful, dubious, far-fetched, fishy, flaky*, flimsy*, for the birds, full of holes, harebrained, implausible, impossible, improbable, incogitable, inconceivable, incredible, kooky, lamebrained, open to doubt, outlandish, past belief, phony, preposterous, questionable, reaching, scatterbrained, screwy, staggering, suspect, thick*, thin*, too much*, unconvincing, unimaginable, unsubstantial, unthinkable, weak, won't hold water, won't wash

Lincoln’s Devastating War

The Constitution properly gives the authority to wage war only to Congress, not a president. The departing States offered no military threat to the States remaining in the Union, though they did pose an economic threat to Northern ports with low free-trade tariffs and cotton production. This economic reality was sufficient to push Lincoln and his northeastern political base to engage in total war to ruthlessly eliminate the South’s political and economic power, and then rehabilitate the region as an economic colony and market for Northern manufactures.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Lincoln’s Devastating War:

“Why did [Lincoln] start the war? Nicolay & Hay, [his secretaries and] close to Lincoln as brothers, writing as of April 1, 1861, p. 442, vol. 3, said:

“When the President determined on war, and with the purpose of making it appear that the South was the aggressor, he took measures,” etc.

Nevertheless, he asserted that “slavery was the cause of the war:” “And to strengthen, perpetuate and extend it was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.”

It was the intemperate agitation in the North against slavery, the refusal to submit to the decision of the Supreme Court in reference to the territories, and the instigation to massacre encouraged through many years that caused secession. But secession was not war.

Norway seceded from Sweden and there was no war. It was Lincoln that made war. North Carolina and Virginia and some other States were still in the Union, and he called on them to join him in his war! They refused and stood with the South.

As to South Carolina, who seceded first, where was she going “to extend slavery?” In the sea? So likewise the other Southern States, where were they going to extend slavery after secession? He attributes starting the war to the Southern States, and then, behold, he attributes his own actions to the Creator!

“Southerners must surrender unconditionally before the war should cease,” and thereby he became responsible for Reconstruction and all its attendant horrors. In his second Inaugural he ascribes his action to the Great Lord of Heaven, “If God wills it to continue, etc.”

One of the first acts of Lincoln, after declaring war, was to declare Confederate privateersmen [as] pirates, subject to death. This doctrine was contrary to the practice of the Americans in the war of the Revolution, and was denounced in the British Parliament as nothing short of legalizing murder. President [Jefferson] Davis threatened retaliation, and Lincoln, justly humiliated, desisted. Another of his first acts after declaring war was to proclaim all medicines contraband of war. Civilized warfare had been confined to military operations, but President Lincoln sought to promote the death of women and children in their homes.

With the applause of President Lincoln, his general, invading the country where there were only women and children, caused devastation and desolation. Grant, Sherman, Pope, Hunter and Sheridan boasted of their destructive conduct.”

Lincoln’s Devastating War

Archaeology - SCITECH Amateur Treasure Hunter Unearths Ancient Viking King

Via Kimberly

A British man rewrote medieval history on his lunch break when he unearthed evidence of a previously-unknown Viking king.

Darren Webster, a metal detector enthusiast, stopped by a field near Canforth, northern England, to practice his hobby and uncovered a hoard of silver Viking treasure buried three feet (0.9 meters) below the earth, The (London) Times reported Thursday.

"My machine was telling me that I'd found some kind of silver," Webster said. "So I was slightly disheartened when I saw a lead pot. It was as I was lifting it that silver pieces started falling out of it."

The 201 silver objects -- including 27 coins, 10 arm-rings, six brooch fragments, two finger rings, a fine wire braid and 14 ingots -- were put on display at the British Museum.

Dr. Gareth Williams, the museum's curator of early medieval coins, said the haul probably would fetch a "high five-figure sum."

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Obama storms out and kicks the door!

Via Peter

Part of Dedicated Dad's comment is just too good not to put at the top!:)

(2) Even if it didn't look "wrong", we could STILL be sure it was edited because O'Bozo doesn't have a masculine bone in his body and thus couldn't ever do such a thing.

Sam says this was edited. Sure did a good job!:)

Sheriff Mack Announces Lawsuit Against $PLC, Run for Congress

Via Oathkeepers

New American
Verbatim Post

Sock it to them!

At a speech in Sacramento, California, on December 10, Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), announced that within a matter of days he will be filing a lawsuit in federal court against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for slander, libel and defamation.

Sheriff Mack, who successfully challenged the 1993 federal Brady handgun control act in a landmark case that went all the way through the United States Supreme Court, has been an outspoken champion of constitutionally limited government and a critic of federal usurpation and abuse of police powers. The forty-year-old Southern Poverty Law Center is notorious for lionizing left-wing extremists (such as unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers) and equally notorious for smearing innocent individuals and organizations with the “racist,” “extremist,” “anti-semitic,” “anti-government,” and “hate group” labels. It is not surprising then that it has targeted Richard Mack for vicious treatment in a number of its publications and web sites over the years. But even more troubling than what it has published about him, says Sheriff Mack, are the lies that it has spread to law enforcement agencies about him in the seminars and training programs the SPLC conducts for federal, state, and local agencies.

Sheriff Mack, who was a speaker, along with this writer at the 53rd Anniversary Banquet of The John Birch Society in Sacramento, also announced to the assembled guests that he would also soon be filing papers to run in the Republican primary for the 21st Congressional District of Texas against incumbent Rep. Lamar Smith, whom Mack describes a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only). The 21st District includes much of San Antonio and Austin, as well as Fredericksburg, where Mack now resides.

In an interview with The New American after the banquet, Sheriff Mack, explained that he had contemplated a lawsuit against the SPLC for the past several months, but the difficulty, time, and expense of taking on such an endeavor against the well-funded organization had prevented him from doing so. In May of this year, however, he received a telephone call from an SPLC “reporter.” Mack says he was amazed and told the reporter: “This is really funny. You guys have been lying about me for 15 years and this is the first time you’ve bothered to call me.”

The reporter asked, “When did we ever lie about you?”

Sheriff Mack recounted the telephone conversation:

I said, well, recently you said I believe in shooting federal agents, killing federal agents — IRS agents in particular. I said I have never said anything like that. I don’t believe in violence. I spent 20 years in law enforcement and never slugged or slapped or hit or maced or shot another human being. So I don’t believe in violence and I’m not a violent person, nor have I been.

The SPLC reporter said he would check into that. Later that day, says Mack, he received a call from spokesman Mark Potok, who edits the organization’s Intelligence Report. Potok said, “Sheriff, we owe you an apology.”

Sheriff Mack says “I knocked on the phone and said ‘Is this really Mark Potok of the SPLC who doesn’t care who they lie about? I don’t trust you.’”

Mack says Potok then admitted, “We went back and reviewed the tape where we reported you advocated shooting agents and that isn’t what you said.”

Potok agreed to reprint a retraction. However, says Mack, the retraction was a tiny paragraph, compared to the massive coverage they had given to the earlier false charges about him. And it could not even begin to undo the vast damage they done in smearing his name and the CSPOA before other law enforcement agencies.

Mack pointed out that Sheriff Dwight Nothstein of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, for instance, has publicly compared Sheriff Mack to Hitler and repeated the SPLC charge that he has advocated shooting federal agents.

“It does hurt me to see that the SPLC, which does training for every federal law enforcement agency, including other police and sheriffs agencies all across the country, will actually tell these people that there’s something inherently wrong with someone who quotes the Founding Fathers and our Constitution,” he told The New American. “That’s all I’m guilty of. And isn’t it interesting that I’m called a racist, a bigot, a hate group monger, and I [supposedly] hate everybody because I simply quote American ideals as expressed by the Founding Fathers? That’s my ‘crime.’ And yet I get slandered all over the country to my fellow brothers and sisters in law enforcement.”

But the Sheriff is not one to let such things get him down; besides a busy speaking schedule, he is very active with a number of positive efforts and is always upbeat and optimistic. In addition to launching his SPLC lawsuit and a congressional campaign, he is also releasing his newly published book, The Magic of Gun Control (cover shown above) and gearing up for his CSPOA “Constitutional Sheriffs Convention” in January 2012 in Las Vegas. He is hoping to bring together 150-200 sheriffs from across the country, together with other law enforcement officers to discuss with them their role in the “lawful and peaceful way to restore the Constitution and its Bill of Rights as the supreme law of the land.”

Executive branch: Judge, Jury & Executioner

Via Green Mountains Homesteading

The signs of Jihad are everywhere

Will we ever know the extent to which President Obama’s most recent submission to the pressured demands of Islamists has endangered American national security? When the Obama administration yielded to the outcries of Muslim-American citizens and Islamic organizations recently with the removal of FBI training manuals containing certain anti-terror material deemed “offensive,” the President was either ignorant of the goals of Islam, complacent about what he knows, or notching up another win for appeasement and promotion of Islam ─ for now a mystery.

One persuasive player in that ongoing scenario was Salam al-Marayati, the director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and a member of the Executive Committee of the California Democratic Party and also a former Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention. He charged the FBI, which had documented facts about Islamic history and religious-political norms, with “ineptitude” in its use of erroneous and misguided language leading to “biased and faulty policing.” Although former analysis of this event has been thorough, I wish to point out that this occurrence not only jeopardizes our safety but perpetuates the common theme that the Islam of our nation's mosques and communities is somehow benign and different than the Islam of al-Qaeda.

We must always be mindful of the motives and methods of Muslim-Americans who pressure the U.S. government for Sharia compliant revisions and what it means for our country.

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