THAT SUDDEN RAIN OF FIRE

 I think it was General B.B. Bell who took on the aspect of Commander, United Nations Command, Commander, Combined Forces Command, Commander, United States Forces Korea who came up with the slogan all those guys promptly adopted as their own, if you believe them, that asked, "what if we had to fight tonight!?" He thought it was a wake up call to a combined force of thousands who rotated into and off of the Korean Peninsula every year to prepare to fight the North Koreans.

Oddly enough, as powerful as the message might have been to the Army and the Air Force it had just about no meaning to the United States Navy. It didn't really apply to the naval forces ashore or to the staff in Seoul and there was a reason for that. The U.S. Navy in Korea was not really there to fight a war, it was there to prepare for a war. Every scrap of war fighting naval stuff was located away from the Korean Peninsula with some of it nearby in Japan but the naval forces in Korea filled a role similar to that of the  maître d’ in your fine dining establishment.

It occurs to me that my days on the staff at NAVCENT were never really tortured by inept Admirals coming in and telling us that we needed to be able to fight tonight. We too were akin to the maître d’s. Our role was to plan for the war but the tactical execution of it was going to be, in the first moments of war, totally up to the Battle Group Commanders in the Gulf and those just outside. It never even occurred to us what would happen in the event things got spicier than, say, Praying Mantis which was the last time we waxed Iran's tail in a straight up naval war nobody here ever heard of or knew about.

There wasn't a single ground based missile launcher anywhere and the role of Aegis in defense was probably disposed of when Bahrain declined to punch holes into the last remaining aquifer by dredging the navigation channel to permit Aegis ships to enter the port.  I suspect Aegis would do well enough at Sitrah or even out by the Bahrain Bell.

I'm trying to remember all my ARCENT briefs from JTF A in Cairo but I cannot recall if there were any missile defenses in the Kingdom or anywhere else in the Gulf. I don't think there were. Aegis was about all there was back then except for a handful of Patriot batteries and IHawk batteries. I'm not even sure we were selling that stuff to the Saudis or the Gulf emirates outside of Kuwait.

The long standing difference between the Navy and the other Armed Forces is that the Navy is, on deployment, always prepared to fight at the drop of a hat. It has been that way for a very long time. In areas where armed attacks are a possibility, the ship mans its weapons 24/7 underway and inport. Where the danger is nonexistent the ships are still prepared to fight for their lives because fire is a constant risk and an all consuming hazard that ship's companies fight just about every single day.

As I read the tiny bits that make it out about the Iranian missile attacks on places like NAVCENT Headquarters in Bahrain I wonder if they had any time in the 18 years since the last time I was there, actually taken any steps at all to shore up their air defenses beyond the scope of Aegis in Sitrah. I wonder if the King did either. 

At the end of the day there is still a significant difference between the Army and the Navy's readiness. Unlike Korea where the Army has large tactical formations that should be prepared to fight instantly on warning, the only thing like that in the Middle East might be the Air Defense Artillery and maybe the ATACMS guys if they're still around. 

I wonder if the Commander's of the force formerly known as ARCENT had psychologically prepped their forward deployed forces to be ready to fight tonight. Maintaining a heightened tactical readiness places great demands on manpower and weapons and sensors. Operating sensors from fixed locations in a hostile environment is an invitation to anti-radiation missiles. I wonder how that worked out for them. It seems to be a huge weakness in the Russian air defense forces. The thing is, all the planners around the world know that among the very first targets in a shooting war are the air defense sensors and weapons. How Ground Based Air Defense Systems in a 'non-hostile' neighborhood make the leap to full readiness with fixed sensors is a bit of a mystery.

On the gripping hand, we are moving closer to the "uncommanded sea and skies" mentioned by the great naval strategist, Sir Julian Corbett. A true revolution in military affairs right in front of your eyes. 

HONORABLE DEALING WITH THE ENEMY

 i see some idiots are mad at Vice President Vance because he led the team of negotiators that President Trump dispatched to negotiate an end to hostilities with Iran. They seem to think JD is a buffoon who literally didn't know how stupid this was. I wish they would all dry up and blow away. Things have to happen and they have to be seen to happen and the order is very important.

President Trump knows that his own Party would backstab him on the War Powers Resolution and rather than put it to the test he decided to negotiate in good faith and seek to find a deal that would allow us to end hostilities in Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. A man of unquestionable integrity had to lead the negotiators and the negotiators had to be our very best and most importantly, the deal they sought had be one that President Trump could sign and follow through on. That is Step ONE.

It may surprise you to learn that not one single soul at those negotiations had any real reason to believe that any arrangements agreed to would be followed and yet still good men persisted and did try to find a way to bridge the gap between the 7th century and America. Both sides knew beyond any doubt that any treaty or Memorandum of Understanding was doomed from the start because Iran's leaders had broken the country into multiple military regions and appointed fanatics to lead each of them independently and to carry out the final orders of the Ayatollah despite anything coming from Tehran. Some damned fanatic was ALWAYS going to open fire and keep on shooting as long as he had breath in his body and any weapons at all. That's the nature of muslim fanatics.

So there is poor Vice President Vance doing his very best to get a solid treaty agreeable to all parties and knowing it's doomed to failure and sure enough, the damned Iranians opened fire the instant they heard about it and they didn't stop shooting. This neatly abrogated the idiots in Congress who were demanding the President obey them by using the club we call the War Powers Resolution and left President Trump free to carpet bomb the Iranians into oblivion. That, sadly, is what it is going to take. The Peace was there and the Iranians broke it, End of Step TWO. Everyone saw that we did our best for a peaceful ending.

Now the war moves on to the deliberate phase in the Plan and the Air Force and others start destroying each of the targets on the integrated Priority List. One by one or ten by ten, the bridges and tunnels will be destroyed, the power plants or distribution networks, the oil pumping and transfer facilities and the water supplies. Now America pressures the people of Iran to toss the fanatics off the high points and seek peace.

No, I don't think that will work all that well either but it's always nice to think it would. What it looks like we're going to do is shatter Iran. That probably looked like a good idea to some guys working in offices in Tampa but it won't work out as well as they hope. For all that it is a fanatical failed state, it is the last remaining real power in the Middle East. When it shatters it will be torn apart like Lebanon and Syria and it won't be pretty. The only thing that will grown there is fanatical hatred for America and the region already has enough of that.

I just wanted to say that those who think that events have proven JD Vance was naive and gullible are very wrong. He did what he was asked to do, did it in good faith and accomplished something very important. The world, and more importantly, the idiot leftists in America had to see that Peace was attempted and it only failed because Iran proved faithless. That is behind us now.

I think Congress is stupid and vicious enough to try to knock him down with their mighty War Powers Club but they don't seem to understand that is another one of those blindingly stupid weapons that has no real power because the Constitution gives the Executive all the power to defend the country and Congress cannot take it away from him and Trump will prevail if it goes to Court.

But if you like nightmare scenarios, imagine that President Trump loses in Court and Congress does get to "fix" things as they see fit. You know what happened the last time they did that? Yeah, that was what caused the actual fall of the Republic of Vietnam. Congress did that. The Democrats did that. I don't know how any sane person can tell our Gulf allies that they are on their own now against Iran because Schumer and the other poltroons are running things if that happens. 

On that note, did you see how in Hungary the new government threw out the President because he did nothing wrong except was usually found to be in agreement with the previous Prime Minister? These marvelous anti-democratic follies and coup d'etats are getting wonderfully predictable in the 4th Reich.

And finally, I'm really impressed with the savvy cunning and straight dealing we’re seeing from the top echelons of this government. It is such a welcome change from the idiotic and sleazy ministers we had under Obama and Biden. I trust they all have their Presidential Pardons locked up safe because they will sure as Hell need them if JD or Marco don't win the next Presidential elections.

POST WAR WONDERMENT

 You know all those billions of dollars worth of military vehicles and weapons that we left behind in Afghanistan when we lost the war there? It didn't really accomplish very much, did it? Not really worth bringing home when you think about it.

So if the stuff was no good, why was it there?

If the stuff is no good, why do we still have it in our current inventories as frontline combat gear?

Does anybody have the Afghan War version of: On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, by Harry G. Summers? It would make fascinating reading.

A LAUNCH LIKE NO OTHER

 Well, I was sorry to see the fizzle on the pad yesterday as Starship blasted off for the 13th time. It kind of brought back memories long repressed as a young Fire Control Officer, for a missile system that was famous for its own failure to launch. The RIM-7H NATO SEA SPARROW was a wonderment back then and the wonder came from the fact that almost half the time, it never left the rail after committed to launch. You can imagine the disappointment in it if this was one of the 8 air defense missiles you had to shoot at an incoming raid launched by a full regiment of Backfire bombers or the loadout of an Echo-II submarine.

Fingers crossed Starship will do better on the next attempt. 

GIRDING MY LOINS

 Steeling myself, getting ready in all ways and making all overt and obvious preps to sit out going to see The Odyssey in the theater. I know, I know, it will be their loss but I am prepared to make this sacrifice so that they will learn better and maybe even take the lesson home, write it down a thousand times and remember it for the next time. I am sick of directors and film makers making movies that have already been done to death and ignoring all the new things that pop up every day that would make a killer movie. The Odyssey has been done 33 times! I'll admit that I really enjoyed, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? but I have to admit, that was a fluke.

When the only thing people talk about in your daring "new" movie is your wacky casting, you just may have a problem with your latest. b l o c k b u s t e r. It sounds really dull and boring and everybody knows how it ends anyway.

Anyway, there are hundreds of books and stories that would make great movies because they are entertaining, interesting and even fascinating. Why not make those movies? 

ON REPAIRS

 Some people think that the military and Navy's problem with self repair is that we simply gapped the structural manpower with the necessary training, education and skill to carry out troubleshooting, maintenance and repair of complex everyday systems on our ships and combat vehicles. Sadly, that is part of the problem but it is not the problem. The problem is one of spares and access to them.

One of the sad realities of life starting in the 90s was that we made many fewer same type systems and also decided to save money by not buying or budgeting for spare parts. I'm not kidding. The $ used to procure the actual hardware that was given to the Fleet or the FMF was Procurement $ and those could only be used to purchase an initial allowance of spare parts and even then we cheated outrageously to try to buy as many parts as we could because we in the Program Office knew for a fact that there was no, and never would be, a budget line to buy spares for these new systems.

Spares are essential but they don't happen in the right Congressional District and so they cannot find a sponsor who reliably pokes and prods his peers into seeing to it that enough money is put into spares every year in the out years so that there will always be spares. The system was initially designed to run this way but then the bottom fell out of the Procurement Bonanza and the spares became unreasonably expensive.

There was also the problem that as systems reached their end of service in the Fleet we had Logistics types who maintained warehouses bulging with spare parts for thoroughly obsolete weapons and weapon systems. They were spending good money looking after billions of $ of spare parts for F-14's that left the service a decade or two ago. The stories were common and not unfounded. [Iran was paying good money under the table for those spares! It's not like they were going completely to waste.]

As the LCS hit the fleet the trail of tears spares was just a trickle compared to what was to come. Absolutely nobody put their career on the line to line up invulnerable supplies of critical spares and long lead replacement items for infernally complex ships. They just didn't do it. This is why you see Admirals who seriously decided it was more economical to scrap the brand new but broken and fundamentally useless $500,000,000 ship rather than replace the engines and combiner gear. First, they had no replacement engines and Second, they had no replacement combiner reduction gears. Simplest solution? Shitcan it.

That's the endgame of buying war machines without the tail to support them. We have been doing that now since Vietnam. That's a long time to screw up that badly. How many submarines have we scrapped because we cannot fix them inside of 9 years? How many cruisers went to the bottom because we could not repair them? 

The Admirals always claim they are saving money and that savings will be applied to the follow on new ships and aircraft. That never happens. It never happens because we never 'save' any money by scrapping irreplaceable ships. We simply grind up and spit out existing ships and aircraft much faster than they were designed to last.

On the other hand, I'd say from here, that it looks like the DDG guys all did their jobs very well indeed.  BZ!

ANYONE?

 

I cannot.

THE OLD MORE CRAZY MAD DANGEROUS STRATEGY

 There was a time and place where villains used to lead whole countries and they were really evil and despicable men but they managed to hang on to power for decades because everyone knew that the man was propped up by a thug or group of thugs even more evil and violent and dangerous than the leader. That appears to be the strategy that the Grand Leader of Iran adopted and implemented and it is paying off in ways that could be entirely foreseen; not well for Iran.

I read earlier that the Leader divided Iran up into separate military districts that were answerable only to the Supreme Leader and in the absence of the Supreme Leader the thugs running each of those military sectors was permitted to use the maximum force and power available to him to strike out at Iran's enemies. At this point I'm pretty sure he didn't even furnish them with a definition of Iran's enemies and just left it up to the individual wickedness and hatred of the Satrap.

Thus, there can be no agreement absent a Supreme Leader standing up and declaring it so. No Supreme Leader is ever going to come again and do that and so each military district of Iran has to be defeated in detail by force or annihilation.  As you might suspect the more muslim wickedly crazy and vicious you are, the less inclined you are to see or even recognize reason and restraint.

I am going to laugh if we offer the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan a couple million bucks to invade and wipe out sectors of Iran. We can probably take the north with the offer of a couple F-16s and all the bombs they want to the PKK.

When you think about it, this is pretty much exactly how the US crushed Prussia and extinguished Germany as a military threat for all time. We just let the savages and barbarians run loose and out of control over the parts we didn't need or want. Sadly, that applies to just about 100% of Iran. This is how the game used to be played back when Tacitus and Thucydides were keeping score.

WHERE IN THE FLOCK IS HE?

 It seems with the multiplication of tracking cameras going up everywhere to track Americans that it might be time to put up cameras to track our elected leaders. How exactly does a sitting senator just disappear for 3 weeks and nobody is supposed to notice? Same thing for those two missing representatives who just bailed out and checked into mental health clinics or long term care facilities for the feeble minded.

We should be able to put an Apple tag on them or something.....Just sayin.

 I saw this on the car in front of me the other day. It sums up the situation fairly well these days.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE

 As we engage in another 24 hour battle over Iran it is interesting to note how very different our war with the mullahs is from our war with the communists. We made our enemies our targets in this war and we politely ignored our enemies when they were communists in all the wars of the 20th century. It seems that 50 years of reliable, relentless and repeated teaching of military professionals about the idiotic mistakes made in Vietnam are finally paying off in our struggle against the Rest. It worked damned well in First Iraq and even in Second Iraq and it crushed the Taliban in weeks in Afghanistan. WE easily won the wars and lost the rest because it was no longer war. Our politicians suck at that. They need their own school to study how the Romans and the old Raj handled that phase of it in the past.

I'm not sure what the Air War in Vietnam was designed to produce. It did not target and gut the major cities in North Vietnam. It did not destroy the ports and harbors where so much aid and weaponry was brought in from the rest of the communist world. It did not blow apart the dams and flood the valleys to produce massive crop failures and famine. It did not destroy the power generation facilities, air fields, air forces or military units in North Vietnam. In fact, I'll be damned if I know what the B-52s were doing up there.

I'd like to read about what the bombers are attacking these days because while it would offer some insight into how the war is progressing, at least in terms of damage and loss, it would also be a damned good indicator of American Leadership's Sincerity this time about winning the war and killing our enemies. If all we're doing is going after water buffalo and bread factories it would be helpful to know that and realize that this is just another gigantic charade playing out for the rubes.

Let me help you out with the targeting hierarchy as I understand it:

Locate and destroy the enemy air defenses everywhere.

Destroy the Air Fields and all military aviation. 

Destroy all Command, Control, Communication and Computer Information centers. Holes in ground.

 

Destroy the leadership wherever they can be found. Do it again and again and again.

 

Destroy the long range missile launchers, short range launchers, missile storage and launching sites

Destroy all naval units, destroy the navy ports and all magazine including sea mines

Destroy all minelayers and potential minelayers. (that's any ship with rails going over the side or a crane)

 

Destroy 100% of the country's Oil refining capability and storage. 

Destroy the power plants.

Destroy all telecommunications and all network switches, cut off the internet 

 

To be honest, at this point the war is over for Iran but of course we're not actually going to begin to do all that. The question we have to ask our leaders is, why aren't you doing that? Don't you want the war to be over? Why not show that particular neighborhood what it means to return a place and people to the Dark Ages? What is stopping your hand from destroying it and your lips from ordering it to be destroyed?

 

There are, oddly, still people who think that it is possible to negotiate a peace settlement. I have never actually seen one of these but I'm told they exist. Just for the Hell of it I asked google, "how many times did Austria sign a peace treaty with Napoleon?"

 

 Yes I know that some will say we negotiated formal peace treaties with the Japanese and the Germans but we didn't really negotiate, did we? Others might say well, the Vietnam War came to a negotiated end and all I would have to do is ask what happened to the other signatory on that treaty, you know the one, South Vietnam?

 

Clausewitz is famous for declaring war to be the continuation of politics by other means but the fate of Czechoslovakia is still fresh in my mind and those poor bastards never even had a chance because politicians just sold them down the river without even a chance to fight. 

 

It's hard to see where this is going to end but one thing looks likely, it is never going to end. These sorts of things just go on forever. 

THE EDGE OF CRAZY

 We may finally be staggering to the finish line on the issue of crazy in America. That would be nice. It is long overdue and while I am sorry to see it come back it must. The public really cannot tolerate a class of victimizer that can literally get away with murder running around untouched simply because they don't have the mental abilities to know right from wrong. People like that must be locked away. That whole thing is, after all, the very point and purpose to organized society.

Seeing killers turned loose again and again to kill again is wrong at every level and the idea is that a judge can order this to happen and it is then up to some cop to take the defendant out of the cell, away from the jail and then drop this time bomb off somewhere and somehow all this happens with complete immunity for everyone involved.

No I don't really think that anyone would find this in the ranked priorities that one sees lists of things expected from government and legislation. I don't think it makes the list because people are simply led to believe that this sort of thing is, of course, impossible. And yet you see it happen every single day if you live in a metropolis larger than 100,000 people.

We are not allowed to protect ourselves from them and they in turn must be protected from predation by others like them or somebody has to go to jail. Do you see the problem with that? 

This falls within the sphere once defined as the basics we expect out of government, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's hard to get that if an urban underclass is allowed to destroy your world and simply walk away because they just don't get it. This is where the art of balance comes in and for way to long the balance has been set to favor the rights of the killers and destroyers.

That's what has to change. 

A BEND IN THE RIVER

 So, Expeditionary Warfare Conference long ago in Panama City where the deputy commander TRADOC, as I recall, got up and talked. He talked about many things. I'll be damned if I can remember what his main point was but these were 3 charming little vignettes he wove into whatever he was talking about and they were truly wonderful

There was General Sherman and his knife reforms for the Army. Throughout the Civil War it had evidently bugged him that the troops had to carry so many sharp tools and he thought and the Army thought they could consolidate them and eliminate the load and the wear and tear on the infantry. He was the Chief of Staff of the Army after the War  and he had a plan. He appointed a research team and told them to get to work. "Find the solution!" 

They settled on trying to find a universal common knife that would replace the fish knives, gutting knives, skinning knifes, carving knives, bayonets, entrenching tools and all that and get it down to just one single knife to do all that sharp and pointy thing. Sort of like the Navy and Air Force getting together to build a common fighter design.....or even having the Marines climb aboard with common fighter known as the F-35abc.

Then there was the German Army and their fascination with long range artillery and the siege guns and how they took up whole railroad trains with an enormous cannon with a 121 foot long barrel and shells that weighed over 200 pounds with every shell numbered in sequence because each and every shell was different because the engineers knew the wear and tear of each round fired would wear down the lands on the barrels which meant each shell had to be just a little bit bigger in order to keep everything proper and ballistic....

The shells could be fired 81 miles and reach altitudes of 24 miles and flew so far over the horizon that the ballistic calculations had to incorporate the Coriolis Effect of the Earth. This was a masterpiece only Krupp could design and build and it was simply magnificent. Yes, yes, it was damned near useless but wow, the engineering!

The Paris Gun

 

There was this tiny fire control issue. On it's first day 21 rounds were fired at Paris and Crown Prince Wilhelm who had been invited to observe asked the Vice Admiral in charge of the gun, "so, Max, what did we hit?" There was no answer for there was no way to observe the fall of the shot. 

According to the Deputy Commander, TRADOC, a young officer leaped forward and declared that he would have the answer within 12 hours and indeed he did. He found a man to bicycle to the nearest French town and get the next issue of the Paris daily in the morning and the paper was full of the details where each of the shots landed. Such was the nature of war in the modern age. 

And this all came to mind while reading the always enchanting Chant du Départ   who recalled that day long ago when the new Army rifle used at Little Big Horn, was the 1873 Springfield Trapdoor Carbine with it's copper bullets which the Army had just approved for use and which, due to the economies imposed on an massively over-tasked and severely underfunded army of 25,000 men, meant that they had not bothered to fire more than a hundred bullets at one time out of the new rifles which meant that when the 7th cavalry was surrounded by every indian for a thousand miles and blazing away with their guns, the bullets made with a copper case which disastrously expanded when the gun was fired repeatedly for extended periods left many a round getting stuck in the barrel in the midst of battle and can you see the cavalry men surrounded by a zillion indians trying to use a knife that could double as an entrenching tool trying to dig those little bitty cartridges out of the barrel on their rifles....

I think the General's point was that innovations in weapons need to incorporate both adequate training, experience and doctrine for the employment of the weapons. His point might be that those tasked with equipping the Army with weapons for the next war had a clear duty to make sure that the men going into battle had weapons that worked, had been tested and operated under all operating conditions and had the training and the experience to make them work to specification.

I would have to say that I think that the Navy and the Air Force are showing a pretty clear and convincing case that they have successfully carried out the functions that the General was saying were/are so important in those brief interludes between wars and it remains to be seen if the Army has followed suit.

From what I know of the Army, I am not all that sanguine. You see I know a thing most don't know and that is that using modern satellite communications we can command and direct a naval war from anywhere on earth. There is not just no need to direct a war from some headquarters in Bahrain or an Air War from Qatar, the real operational cell is back in Tampa. The showpieces in the middle east were just for show.

I don't think ARCENT can do that from CENTCOM because I don't think the Army has even begun to grasp how deadly to it the drones are when they are free to seek out and kill every C4I node they can reach. The Navy and the Air Force don't need to put those nodes out there in fixed locations and so they don't. The Army doesn't know any other way.

Still, there's always fractional orbital bombardment, blowing the dams and mining 100% of the ports and harbors. Drop the bridges and blow the tunnels and the people will soon die of thirst and starvation. It's an old trick. I believe that last time it was used there was over a thousand years ago and you can still see the marks left from when the Mongols destroyed the canals and waterworks in Mesopotamia.

Steamer Far West at Little Big Horn

The Far West was an amazing little ship and weapon system.

AUTO DA FÉ II

 It's like democrats cannot enjoy life without a ritual disemboweling and humiliation of a candidate selected by the poor boobs who actually vote for democrats. As we say around here, another one bites the dust. Do they never wonder who should be doing the basic background investigation and digging to turn up the dirt before the election so that this sort of cannibal feast doesn't happen? I know they don't.

This is the sort of thing that the media is supposed to do and the way the media is guided to the real background is by the opposition doing some basic research on the candidates put up by the other party. This is not just the failure by the New York Times and Washington Post and The Atlantic and all the rest, this is a basic and unforgivable tool that has been tossed out of the tool bag by the RNC. They persistently and stupidly believe that having the opposition candidates blow up in flames right now is somehow better for them, better for us, better for the country. This is not the way.

The fact remains, they could pull up clear, truthful convincing evidence that the democratic candidate raped and murdered people and give it to the media and nobody in the main stream media would ever run it and the fools who vote democratic don't believe anything they don't see in the Times or the Post. 

One of the most regrettable things about living in California for decades was how the field of candidates was winnowed away to nothing by the time Primaries got to California. We did not get to pick and choose. The electors in the East did that and what we got was the dregs that remained. We usually ended up with garbage candidates like John McCain and Obama Light Mitt Romney. That was it. The Primary was over before we ever even got to vote.

I remember being disgusted with the media and google because it would take me 20 screen updates to get to a page that finally told the truth about how John McCain volunteered to crossdeck from the fire gutted Forrestal to the Oriskany so that he could CONTINUE to fly combat missions over Vietnam. He volunteered. Over 400 results before I was able to get beyond the lies that were there up front on google and wiki that claimed he ran away from the mission over Vietnam. I despised McCain but he was no coward and he could never beat the lies that technology spread about him faster than light and I knew that and it still took considerable digging to pull up the truth online and it was never addressed by 60 Minutes, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR or NBC.

Mitt Romney was worse. He was a carpetbagger and he imposed Obama Care on Massachussets when he was governor and long before anybody ever heard of Obama. The problem we have is not insurance, it is access and to make it about insurance is surely the stupidest and most evil policy initiative in the world.

Platner is gone and now who is going to pick up the pieces and tell Maine's idiots that they got played again by their own Party and that they now have a chance to vote for the Party appointed Führer or the Squish. 

Does this look remotely democratic? 

MAD COW

 Well, I see that somebody dusted off some ancient allegation about a democrat wannabe Senator in Maine and see that, "oh no! Now he's in trouble. There's no way he can discount these allegations of alleged sexual misbehavior!" It makes me laugh. That sort of ploy works against people with integrity or at least those who try to fake it better than 100% of democrats but it really doesn't fly well against the party that elects and reelects Klansmen, liars, fake indians, oath-breakers and all the rest as a matter of routine. Their base just does not care.

I remember the old days when it took getting caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Nothing has changed.

It is time for rethuglicans to reflect on this matter though and think very seriously about committing to never ever falling for this load of bullshit  again when it gets dumped in front of some campaigner you like and had respect for. I'm sick of this dirty trick. I was sick to death of it when Anita Hill started down this low road of defamation and character assassination and I'm sick and tired of it now.

That NYT is a party to this leaves me in no doubt that this is yet another Democrat Party technique somehow learned from masters in the EU Commission to sideline the popular winner and substitute a 'more worthy candidate' at the last second just like they did with Biden and the idiot. 

UPDATE:

The crazy party tells him to go, he invites them to buzz off and now the reconsideration/negotiation begins. 

Worst case, everyone ends up with the Collins squish in the seat for another 6 years. 

ON TO INDOC

Indoc is not actually a bad word. It is used harmlessly every day by people looking for it, people who question it and people that thank God they learned that in Indoc. Indoctrination has been with us since the beginning. It is the method used to socialize the tribe and get the tribe moving in the same direction on the issues that are important to the tribe.

Our tribe lost sight of that and what is worse, they left the indoctrination of the young to the vilest sort of people on earth who hate America, loathe Americans, despise democracy and want this country burned to the ground. You can double check me and let me know if I'm wrong but the evidence is starting to pile up.

The only way you get ignorant louts who know nothing is by teaching them nothing and the only way you get ignorant socialist and communist louts is by teaching them socialism and communism all day. It is time to put an end to this practice. It is time to purge all the schools of the American hating teachers and staffs and if we have to, replace them by just showing endless gray movies showing the ignorant louts exactly what communism is like when it is adopted universally. We have a lot of video of Cuba, Venezuela, and even the USSR. There is nothing grayer and more horrible than the life behind the Iron Curtain so let the kids watch that until they are sick of it and want to read The Federalist Papers for themselves and maybe read the rest of the lexicon of America and Western Civilization.

The kids won't read or pay attention if they have devices so it is time to make it a crime to give one to children unless they have passed all the written essay questions (blue books) and the orals that show they have a true understanding of Western Civilization, how it was built, how it works, who built it and the Civics lessons that brought it about. Then and only then should they get their own personal device.

And if you cannot pass the tests because you failed Indoc? You still don't get a device.

I cannot believe liberals haven't figured it out yet but just as we would never put a gun or other weapon into the hands of an untrained or irresponsible child, nobody should put the power of the Web into the hands of an irresponsible and ignorant adult. 

We should send them back where they came from. From what I can see these days, violent, ill-informed, ignorant, racist, civilization hating morons will blend seamlessly into Western Europe and anywhere else on the planet. There's no reason not to expand their horizons and also, get rid of them. And all those that were born here, well we need to fix that too.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

Happy Independence Day America! We rock!

It was a learning experience every inch of the way. Let it go on and on.

Taken by the author at Fort McHenry. Wrong war but still

Last there over 50 years ago
 

I really don't think any of the things touted as advancements in the social sciences have really yielded any benefit at all to Americans or America. The moon landings were done over 50 years ago on a schedule that would give anyone but SpaceX nightmares and then it all stopped as progressives set about demolishing the cornerstones of the Republic starting with education.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

 

Can a real Republic last forever if the society it serves and which props it up no longer exists in the form that created it? If we look at the Foundations of the Republic it must be clear that just about every single Amendment after the first 10 diminished what that Republic stood for and which the various Colonial and State Representatives wrote, approved and voted for. Using a term the left misunderstands, that the orignators held that there was a Social Contract that bound the original 13 colonies together as one and which each new member state agreed to. They debated it and debated every single word before they approved it.

There is not the slightest shred left of that Social Contract. We like to think that this is because our society has evolved. I don't think that this is so but a lot of people think that things are better and better every day and the way they and previous Courts have muted the clear and singular notes that made this country so different from any other is lost on them. The amusing thing is how many of the left hate what we are today and really hate anything and everything they know about the founders of the Republic. Thanks are owed to the loathsome Howard Zinn. That's the history of America the schools taught your kids and grandchildren.

When I was young there was a coin used in the measurement of the social contract and it had two sides. There were your Rights and on the other side there was your Responsibilities. I'm pretty sure that right now almost nobody who calls themselves a liberal or democrat or socialist has the slightest idea what the responsibilities of citizenship are but if pressed I'm sure they'd all agree that Society "owes them, and owes them big."

Every time the Court acts these days it diminishes the Republic. There is simply no reason to tolerate an endless procession of bad laws that are allowed to persist for decades simply because we have idiots on the Court and because every Court tries to throw down the worst laws using only the most narrow and limiting language so that no destruction of bad law ever gets applied to every bad law exactly like it without further Court review and shenanigans.  

People are still allowed to say what they like here but that right is being winnowed and harrowed away every single day and the sheep nod wisely because, "offensive or mean-spirited  or hate speech." I don't think I'll like the place 30 years from now but then, I have a cunning plan.

On the other hand, things mostly work out.