But you’d have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue–as Trig Truther Sullivan does–that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious “long game” that is destined to succeed.

If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field.

Sullivan, who claims to care about national debt, begins by arguing, contrary to reality, that Obama’s massive $787 billion stimulus (actually, $862 billion) turned the economy around. He offers no proof other than the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy familiar from basic economics. Sullivan also ignores the composition of the stimulus, which shoveled cash to cronies and bloated big states with their massive public sector obligations.

In addition, Sullivan claims that Obama’s auto bailout succeeded–when in fact it pushed aside property rights and subsidized failed “green” cars, rather than allowing car makers to rebuild through normal bankruptcy. He also commends Obama for continuing George W. Bush’s bank bailouts–but does not mention the Dodd-Frank financial “reforms” that enshrine “too big to fail,” hurt small businesses and fail to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Next, Sullivan tries to defend Obama on taxes, pointing out that the president passed tax cuts as part of the stimulus. He ignores the numerous new taxes and tax increases that Obama signed into law–from higher cigarette taxes to the many ObamaCare taxes–as well as the glaring fact that Obama has been campaigning for the past several years on the promise to raise taxes on the rich, and would have done so if not for Congress.

Sullivan’s defense of ObamaCare is that it is more “moderate” than it might have been. That is hardly a measure of success–and after devious accounting tricks, thousands of waivers, and the abandonment of ObamaCare’s Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, the law is clearly on a path to failure. Fundamentally, it is unconstitutional–a reality Sullivan does not care to note in his encomium to Obama.

On foreign policy, Sullivan hails Obama’s success in the death of Osama bin Laden–giving a fantastical account of the president’s courage, and perpetuating the false meme that Bush had “ignored” Al Qaeda. In fact, it was the war in Iraq–and the interrogation methods that Sullivan decries–that produced the intelligence that led to bin Laden.

Aside from the war on Al Qaeda, Obama squandered every diplomatic and military success bequeathed to him by Bush. He destroyed missile defense in Europe, and wasted hard-won gains in Iraq by withdrawing troops against the advice of the military. While appeasing Iran and gutting the future of our defense, Obama alienated and undermined U.S allies. Sullivan, who detests Israel, even applauds Obama’s pointless confrontation with Benjamin Netanyahu–hardly a way to sell a second Obama term.

Having dealt with conservatives (in his own mind at least), Sullivan lists reasons that the left should be pleased with the president they elected. He’s correct that liberals should back Obama; they will never again see a U.S. president with such radical policies and pedigree. But he overlooks the degree to which Obama has discredited left-wing theory by exposing its flaws in practice–the real reason the left is distancing itself from him.

What is most telling in Sullivan’s admonition to liberals is his use of Obama’s inaugural metaphor of the “clenched fist.” The president, he says, “begins by extending a hand to his opponents” and outwits them when they respond “by raising a fist.” Yet Obama was referring to foreign policy, not U.S. politics. Once in office, of course, Obama embraced America’s enemies and bullied domestic opponents–as even the left knows all too well.

Sullivan quotes George Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” What is in front of Sullivan’s nose is Obama’s incompetence. He has coasted on the military success of his Republican predecessor, and is taking credit for moderate economic progress enabled by a Republican Congress that has held taxes, regulation, and spending in check. If he wins in 2012, Obama will again have Republicans to thank.

North Korea’s military had moved combat aircraft, mobile ground-to-air missiles and missile launchers to attack positions near the border with the South. Had those ammo boxes – the final step in preparations for an attack – appeared, whether for war-making or simply for live-fire exercises, it might well have triggered a resumption of the shooting war that began in the 1950s and never truly has ended.

Elsewhere recently, a North Korean diplomat at low-level talks at the University of Georgia said war on the peninsula seems closer now than it has in decades, and Iran was linked to a clumsy attempt to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington. The Iranians also are “playing” in hot spots throughout the Middle East – from Syria to Yemen to Egypt and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and working feverishly to overcome a cyber attack on its nuclear weapons development program.

Clearly, this is no time for the United States to let down its guard on missile defense. Congress – which is under pressure to cut defense spending but maintain capabilities – must show resolve to ensure our nation, troops and allies are protected.

Recently, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to strip $123 million in funding for development of a follow-on to the most successful ballistic missile defense weapon the nation has ever deployed. Not funding a new missile that won’t be ready for another 10 years may be appropriate given our current budget constraints, but those dollars should be immediately invested in missiles that protect us from near-term threats.

The system currently in use – the SM-3 IA – is the United States’ first line of defense against short-range airborne attacks. It is a ship-based system used by the Navy to intercept enemy ballistic missiles. It is the key component of President Obama’s planned European missile shield and the NATO effort to defend against missile threats posed by Iran, North Korea and others.

Moreover, it is the very definition of a successful weapons program. The United States has purchased just shy of 100 SM-3s, and all have been delivered on time and on cost.. The SM-3 IA had 19 successful back-to-back intercepts at the end of its testing program and is now deployed. The SM-3 IB’s first flight test did not result in intercept, which is not uncommon in the early testing of new missile variants. Even without the intercept, Patrick O’Reilly, director of MDA, called the results of the flight test “extremely encouraging.”

But we need more. Rear Adm. Alan Hicks, director of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Program, has said the projected number of deployed SM-3s is “inadequate for our combatant needs” and that “we still have a tremendous demand signal for more missiles.”

Importantly, SM-3 missile may help us beyond the prospect of short-range attacks. In April, the SM-3 IA delivered a surprising result. Designed to defend against short-range missile attacks, the system surprised even its development team when it knocked out an intermediate-range missile in a test over the Pacific Ocean. If the most basic variant of SM-3 can take out an intermediate range ballistic missile, what will evolved variants be able to do?

It’s not a stretch to say that future SM-3 variants such as the IIA could one day be capable of taking down ICBMs, a strategic priority that deserves Congress’ support. On IIA we even have a partner, in Japan, that has contributed more than $1 billion to development expenses. And partners are extremely valuable in this pursuit. They are force multipliers who contribute both to the cost and to the effectiveness of the shield. We need more partners like Japan who are willing to share the burden and cost of ballistic missile defense across the globe.

To be sure, our enemies seem more determined than ever to produce these weapons. Iran suffered a significant setback to its uranium enrichment program in the recent cyber attack. But in June, the government announced it would triple efforts to develop weapons-grade uranium. Once that is accomplished, the Iranians will be nuclear-capable within months.

North Korea also continues to perfect its long-range delivery devices and to export them to rogue regimes, such as Iran, Syria and perhaps others. Planners fear the East Coast of the United States will be vulnerable to long-range missile attack from Iran by 2015 and that the West Coast already may be vulnerable to missile attacks from North Korea.

To make matters worse, internal conditions in Iran and North Korea further increase the possibility of attacks. Both regimes are failing, flailing and increasingly likely to attack others to maintain their own positions of power.

The good news is we have a reliable, cost-effective weapon, partners in development and deployment, a track record of procurement success and a path forward.

If we’re serious about missile defense, we have no choice but to beef up acquisition of the SM-3 IA and continue the development of IB, and IIA. And if we’re paying proper attention to the actions of our adversaries, we better be serious about missile defense.

The former would be bad enough, starting with Candidate Obama’s pledge to block “unproven missile defenses.” Once in office, he cut over a billion dollars from the Missile Defense Agency’s budget.  He cancelled the deployment of interceptors and radars in Eastern Europe designed to defend this country, as well as our allies over there.

Among other reprehensible actions, Team Obama terminated the nation’s only program capable of providing a near-term ability to intercept ballistic missiles early in their flight (i.e., the boost-phase).  This Airborne Laser Program nonetheless was successfully tested earlier this month — destroying not one but two missiles similar to those arrayed against us and our friends today and making the case that such systems should be operationalized and deployed as a matter of the utmost urgency.

Then, there are the persistent reports that President Obama is going to accede to Russian demands to reinstitute bilateral restrictions on missile defenses as part of the new START follow-on treaty now being finalized with the Kremlin.  Moscow lost its effective veto over such U.S. systems when George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 and the Russians have been as anxious as its American fellow-travelers to be able to exercise it again.

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant:  Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte.  They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above).  As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo. (For a comparison, the previous logo is below.)

Even as the administration has lately made a show of rushing less capable sea- and land-based short-range (theater) missile defenses into the Persian Gulf in the face of rising panic there about Iran’s actual/incipient ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.

Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.  Readers are encouraged to offer examples of their own to info@securefreedom.org.

From Guantanamo to Health Care, Obama is certainly seeking to Change America – or more accurately -to accelerate the pace of change from a private enterprise-freedom based civilization to a Big Government-run society.  According to Thomas Paine, “It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from his government.”  I realize that is a slightly different definition than Joe Biden would use, but nevertheless, in that light, here is my listing of the worst of his policy decisions:

6. Bailing Out GM.  “His policy of public investments prevented necessary liquidations.  The businesses he hoped thus to save either went bankrupt in the end, after fearful agonies, or were burdened . . . by a crushing load of debt.  [He] undermined property rights . . .pushed federal credit into the banks and bullied them into inflating . . .” Historian Paul Johnson wrote that of Herbert Hoover.  You can almost substitute Obama’s name for Hoover’s  in every detail.   By the way, Government Motors sales are declining at 3 times the rate of the industry as a whole.  Hoover would be proud.

5.  The Energy Farce.  In what universe does economics work like this:  A $14 trillion economy is sinking and employers are cutting jobs, so…let’s raise the costs of doing business even more and that will lead to a recovery fueled by an industry, i.e. green technology, which barely exists?  Cap & Trade is right out of a classic “command economy” model worthy of 1940’s Eastern Bloc imaginations.  If it passes, its regulations will stifle the US economy for decades before someone is wise enough to junk it amidst global cooling.

4.  The So-Called Stimulus Bill.  So far, this is Obama’ signature legislative “accomplishment.”  In time it will be his albatross.  The basic policy decision made by Obama was directly the opposite of the choice Reagan made.  Reagan said government was not the solution to our problems -  Government was the problem.  Reagan dramatically cut taxes and regulations, the economy rebounded and tax revenues doubled.   Obama’s policy, on the other hand was, and is, to have government spend our way out of our economic problems.    Sadly for us, spending, taxing and borrowing is not an economic remedy for too much existing debt and the far too high existing tax burden.  Indeed, as the Congressional Budget Office pointed out, in the long run, Obamanomics will hurt more than it will help.  Given its short term-failure, it’s hard to imagine something worse and it is even harder not to dub this one of his worst policy decisions.

3.  Socialized Health Care.   Do I really have to explain the demerits of this decision?  Socialized medicine doesn’t work, never has and never will and will be nearly impossible to repeal – oh, and it will bankrupt us.  Next!

2.  Trying Terrorists in American Courts.   As I stated my article, Internment, CSI and Eric Holders Disarming of America, throughout our history, we have treated enemy combatants as those committing an act of war.  That is so because (a) they are not US citizens, and (b) their acts were acts of war.  In other words, they were not criminal acts of a US citizen committed during peace time.  Now however, Obama has allowed at least one enemy combatant to be tried in a US criminal court subject to the constitutional laws of our country.  The parade of horribles that will emerge from this decision are numerous and include putting America on trial, tearing down the barriers between citizens and non-citizens and changing the way we fight wars.

1.  Cancelling the Missile Defense System.   On November 16, 2008, fresh off Obama’s victory, Time Magazine carried an article that read:  “Missile-defense skeptics yearning for a fresh look at the wisdom of pumping $10 billion annually into missile defense aren’t going to get it from Barack Obama when he moves into the Oval Office.”  How so very wrong Time was.  Obama did cancel the long range system – just as every liberal Democrat has been want to do to American defense systems in pursuit of less guns and more butter.   So why was that Obama’s worst policy decision?  Even worse than nationalization of health care?

Let me count the ways:

1) Defense spending on defense technology is dollar-for-dollar very productive (compared to most gov’t spending) and leads to break-throughs thereby employing and encouraging US scientists – I thought the liberals told me we needed to encourage future scientists?

2) You do not negotiate for years with an at-risk ally, i.e. Poland, and then pull the plug on the deal – what does that say to future at-risk allies, like say Israel!  It says you can’t count on the U.S.

3) Obama’s decision to abandon the longer range missiles is based on an assumption that Iran is no longer interested in longer based offensive missiles.  You read that right, Obama is trusting Iran against the advice of Bush era advisors,

4) The decision leaves the U.S. without a long range system for the Eastern Seaborg – You are on your own NYC – don’t worry it can’t happen twice,

5) The Decision tells Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, that you better defend yourself, i.e. it could/will start a local arms race.

6) It was an obvious caving into Russia without a serious, tangible benefit, and

7) It is in keeping with his other defense cuts which send a strong message when you consider his weak rhetoric.  Dean Acheson, who turned his back on South Korea, which led to the Korean War, could not be more impressed.

All in all, when it comes to the nuclear world, ignoring Jefferson’s advice that “Weakness provokes insult & injury,” seems beyond a bad policy decision – it is his worst policy decision.

So there they are – the 6 worst.  Stay tuned, however, the worst may be yet to come!

This was odd, because the occasion we – and by ‘we” I mean the western press, opera dignitaries, the local nomenklatura (party bigwigs and apparatchiks), the East German Stasi officers assigned to shadow us, and their KGB bosses – were there to witness was the celebratory re-opening of the great opera house, destroyed for the second time on the night of Feb. 12-13, 1945 “by Anglo-American bombers,” as the commemorative poster helpfully reminded us.  (I have my copy, suitably framed, on the wall of my home.)  If memory serves, Honecker, however, had very little to say about Semper or the opera house or the work we were about to hear, Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been playing the night the city was incinerated.  Instead, the little party boss – I had run into him in the Bellevue Hotel across the river, where the westerners were staying, and was pleased to see that he was as unimpressive in person as he was on television – went on a prolonged rant about die Sternkriege, the so-called “Star Wars” program that even then was setting off protests among the “peace demonstrators” in western Europe, England and, of course, at home as well.

As we stood there, shivering and bored, my colleague and friend, John Rockwell of The New York Times (who, like me, spoke fluent German) leaned over and said: “Personally, I think Star Wars is bullshit, but it really has these guys scared.”  John was right: Star Wars pretty much was bullshit, especially at the time, but it nonetheless terrified the technologically backward Soviets and their satellite marionettes, and it set off the inexorable forces (as Marxists like to say) that just four years later would bring down the Berlin Wall.  Reagan was playing poker with a lot of chips but lousy cards, raising the rear ends off the morally, culturally and fiscally bankrupt Soviets.

After a trip to the Soviet Union the following year, writing a Time Magazine cover story about the pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, it became manifestly clear to me what was utterly invisible to the CIA and the State Department: that here was a dying society, which needed only one swift, hard kick to cause the whole rotten edifice to collapse.  I even wrote a book proposal about the inevitability of German reunification, which naturally was turned down by every publisher in New York.  There were lots of reasons why it wasn’t for them, as the rejection-letter boilerplate goes, but the two principal ones were: a) the Soviet Union would never allow it and, b) the United States would never allow it.  Luckily, neither country had a choice in the matter.

That kick came three years later at the Austro-Hungarian border on August 19, 1989.  As one of the few foreign countries citizens of the German Democratic Republic were allowed to visit, Hungary was filled with East German holidaymakers that summer, heading for their usual haunts in Héviz and Lake Balaton.  But this summer was different.  Thousands of East Germans, restive after forty years of misery, economic hardship and outright state-sanctioned murder, had taken refuge in Hungary and on the night of Aug. 19, a few brave souls broke through a barbed-wire gate and fled into Austria.  The world waited for the shots that never came.  Over the course of the next few weeks they were joined by thousands of others, packed into their little Ladas and Trabants, queuing up at the border, waiting.  And when, on Sept. 10, the Hungarian foreign minister announced that the travel restrictions would not be enforced, they breached the Iron Curtain and fled to freedom.  At the time my family and I were living in Munich, so it was a simple matter to hop in the car and head for where the action was.  Six hours later I was watching and interviewing men and women, falling on the ground in Austria with tears in the eyes, unable to believe that their long national nightmare was finally over.

The last act played out just a couple of months later when, on the night of Nov. 8-9, 1989, die Mauer finally toppled.  By the time I got to Berlin, entrepreneurs were renting out sledgehammers.  I grabbed one, took my forty whacks and collected my chipped-concrete souvenirs of the ultimate end of any fascist state: one that imprisons its own people lest they learn they have been living a lie.  There were gaping holes, through which you could reach out and shake hands with the Vopos, the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) and with soldiers from the Volksarmee.  People danced atop the wall, music played – it was the biggest street party in Europe since the Liberation of Paris.  A few months later, when the Wall was well and truly down, I had the pleasure of watching my year-old daughter play on the newly cleared ground between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate; where once the barbed wire and machine guns ruled, now a little American girl frolicked in the brave new world that, like her, had so recently been born.

Two years later, the Soviet Union itself fell.  Russians don’t play poker, they play chess.  Reagan, although no longer in office, had bluffed them.  And so, faced with what appeared to be certain ruin, they did what chess players do: they surrendered, to the total astonishment of the American media, Langley clowns, and the striped-pants set.  My Zelig-like luck held out til the end:  I left the country just two weeks before the attempted coup against Gorbachev, in August, 1991, and by Christmas the USSR was no more.

Twenty years on, how quickly we forget.  Some former East Germans openly grumble about the loss of “social cohesion” that naturally attends life in a well-regulated police state, and of course the Soviet Union has never lacked for apologists, either in the cradle or in the grave.  To this day, the evil that it did lives on in the form of its fellow travelers – now apparently well represented in the Obama Administration – in its penetration agents and, most sinisterly, in the hidden moles of its continuing “illegals” program (Directorate S of the old KGB First Chief Directorate), which surreptitiously identifies, supports and boosts the careers of native-born Americans – no Boris Badenovs need apply – who are sympathetic to socialism and Marxism-Leninism, and work diligently to undermine their own countries.  At the time, I was friendly with one of the KGB’s most famous officers, whose brother ran the illegals program, and he told me that an American illegal had risen to the rank of ambassador.  Whether they have had greater success since then is the subject of much speculation.  The struggle between liberty and tyranny, to use Mark Levin’s phrase, continues apace, and eternal vigilance really is its price.  Whether we still want to pay it is open to question.

Oh yes – the name of the KGB’s principal officer that night in 1985 in Dresden?  Vladimir Putin.

John Loudon at Berlin Wall

I admit that I am a little unique.   As a fairly young child, I poured through every issue of Time magazine, which is like our version of the German magazine, Die Zeit.  Jimmy Carter was the President.  He talked of peace while cutting our defense spending.  I remember being very scared seeing charts and graphs comparing our defense systems including war planes, ships and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  The American armaments were blue and the Soviets vastly superior forced were Red.  Here my story gets really odd.  I was 12 years old when I read George Orwell’s 1984.  The year was 1979.  I was so struck by what I read and the parallels to the modern Soviet Union, that I picked up a copy of the Communist Manifesto. What I read made me nearly shriek in fear.

The Communist manifesto holds that communism cannot work unless the World is communist. The other fact I read, was that every time in this Century that America was attacked, a Democrat was in the White House, downsizing our military.  So it was clear that the nearer the Soviet empire came to economic collapse, and had superior military capabilities, the more likely it was that they would attack.  They were aggressively building up while Carter, the face of America, was downsizing our military.  I often had trouble sleeping at night for fear of the Soviet missile attack.

Then we elected Ronald Reagan.   He became the new face of America to the World.   My German friends did not like him.  He moved fast and completely changed the course of America.  He began rebuilding our military and he delivered that famous speech in Berlin in which he challenge Soviet President Michael Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” My teenage German friends kept arguing that Reagan was a war-monger and that while Americans were good people, our President was bad.  I tried to explain that in our political system, you cannot separate the two.  Our President is us.  The President cannot go to war without the American people.  But he will go to war to protect you.  He wants to use American tax dollars to place a missile defense system in Western Europe to protect you, because he felt a moral duty to you.

One of the most momentous experiences in my life was in June of 1990.   I was back in Germany!   Now I was married and my new wife, Gina and I were making a fast trek through Europe on our way to Berlin.  On Saturday, June 16, 1990 I had the amazing privilege to chop on the wall.   I got very emotional and still do to this day, at the realization that I was literally tearing open the cage that imprisoned my fellow man.  This was of course a symbolic move, although we wondered whether Gorbachev would change his mind or become the victim of a coup and the Wall chopping would stop.  So I joined hundreds of people, mostly Germans, I rented a hammer and chisel and I chopped.   The real satisfaction was that I had helped to elect a President who valued the individual lives of any human being, without regard to geography, religion or people group enough that he would risk everything to set them free.

Now we have a new face of America.  We elected Barak Obama, and he does not feel that moral duty to you as Reagan did, at least not enough to stand up to the shrill American voices that hate the American military.  So he will not be there on November 9^th to Celebrate the Fall of the Berlin Wall.  I do not think he sees it the way you do.  He will also not participate in the festivities on the campus of my College.  Westminster College, in my State of Missouri, is where the great Allied leader Winston Churchill gave the Iron Curtain Speech.  He told the World how millions of our fellow human beings were being stuffed into the cage, the very cage I was privileged to help dismantle.  He had a way with words.  On the campus of another American College he gave his shortest speech “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give in.”  But I digress.

Our new President believes that you are on your own.  As the KGB agent-turned-billionaire, puppet master of the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin conducts war games of an assault on Poland, Obama has decided to tear down the American missiles from Poland.   We knew that he cared less as he promised to remove our protection from the Iraqi people.  150 of them were slaughtered just this week.   He really wants to find a way out of Afghanistan and pull our soldiers out just as you are pulling your U.N. workers out right now.

So my new President will not be there with you, like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were there for you.   He has other priorities.   I really wish I could be there to celebrate with you.  Unfortunately, with the passing of time, I have five children, our economy is bad, and I too, have other priorities.  So I am sorry that my President, the American face to the World will not be there for you.   I feel just a little better knowing that you asked America to give him to you.  I hope you like him.