I’ve long thought Walker one of the best candidates for 2016. He lacks only foreign-policy experience, but he’d still be a lot better on that front than Obama after six years of on-the-job training, in which he seems to have learned nothing.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Putin’s Kremlin And Oil
He’s losing the price war:
Well before Crimea, European nations resented Russian natural gas price gouging. The Kremlin used pricing threats to bully Ukraine, Poland and even Germany into political concessions.
After the Crimean travesty, the Baltic States and Poland demanded alternative gas supplies. The Obama administration quietly agreed to permit U.S. gas exports and the development of a liquefied natural gas exporting facility.
American LNG supplies might reach Poland in three years. That’s good news. Here’s the bad news: Putin has three years to exploit E.U. divisions and politically split NATO.
Or he had three years. Enter Saudi Arabia. America’s “fracking” success challenges Saudi global oil dominance. What’s the price point where fracking becomes unprofitable? Estimates run from $55 to $70 a barrel for oil. The Saudi oil ministry intends to find out and says it will not cut production. The market will determine price.
Though Russia can strangle Ukraine by denying gas supplies, the stunted and corrupt Russian economy survives on energy sales. Without its cash crop of oil, and gas, Russia is a big cabbage farm with a second-rate armaments industry. Cabbage, tanks, ICBMS and nuclear weapons mean Russian is not quite a petro-emirate writ large, but the cruel analogy has instructive utility.
If Russian nukes mean open war with Moscow is too risky, then attacking the Kremlin’s cash generator is war by appropriate means.
The question is, how long will the Saudis be able and/or willing to try to break the US energy industry? Regardless, OPEC is dead. Which is bad news not just for Russia, but Venezuela and Iran. It’s a shame that the administration has been doing almost everything it can to hamstring us.
The House Benghazi Report
Ten major takeaways from it that the media are completely ignoring.
Of course they are.
That House Benghazi Report
Twenty ways the media completely misread it.
Shocking, I know.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a key point for those who think the report “exonerates” the administration:
…if you were to ask people who aren’t reflexively defensive of President Obama (as the media tend to be) what their main concerns with Benghazi were two years ago, they’d probably say something along the lines of:
- That we allowed an ambassador to be assassinated by Islamist militants in Libya.
- That we didn’t quite seem as concerned as we should have been, as evidenced by our commander-in-chief heading off to a Vegas fundraiser hours after it happened and a general patience about seeking justice.
- That we claimed that an attack on September 11 probably actually had something to do with a silly video and nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
- That we officially told the world that “since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” as President Obama said.
That our Secretary of State said of a video made by an American that “We absolutely reject its content and message.”- That these statements were dangerously untrue. In America, you’re actually totally allowed to disparage any religion you want. (I myself have fun targeting Methodists.) (Sidenote, check out how our Secretary of State gave a rhetorical beatdown to the Nazis when they complained about a mock trial of Hitler held in Madison Square Gardens in 1934.)
- That our media seemed more obsessed with covering for Obama than investigating what the heck happened that night.
Now, the report whitewashes, excuses or glosses over almost all of this and fails completely to get at any of the deeper and troubling questions about what’s wrong with our intel community. It only “debunks” claims if you think that bureaucratic ass-covering and rather strained justifications of what I would hope all Americans would agree was a clear intelligence failure count as “debunking.”
Yup.
The Last Days Of The Communist Party?
It would be nice to think so, but it might be the case at least in Vietnam. If so, forty years later, we finally won.
The RD-180 Replacement
Congress won’t like this. Insufficient opportunities for graft.
Note the implicit acknowledgement that they’re going to be using Falcons.
Lest We Forget
Today’s Remembrance Day is particularly poignant, the first one on a century anniversary from the beginning of the war. And I think that no one who fought it is with us any longer. My paternal grandfather was a veteran. He had emigrated from Eastern Europe as a young man, and then returned to fight in France.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Valerie Jarrett
A link roundup.
But here’s what I find interesting. If you read through Scheiber’s piece, there’s a word that doesn’t appear in it: Iran. That is, her place of birth (she reportedly grew up speaking Persian as a child). Does no one really think this influence is one of the reasons he seems so eager to do business with the mullahs?
Obama’s ISIS In Syria Strategy
It’s basically collapsed. But of course, tomorrow is its sell-by date anyway.
If You Strike Down Bill Maher
…he will become more powerful than you imagine.
I’m not a Bill Maher fan, but at least, unlike much of the left, he’s willing to be an equal-opportunity religion basher.