Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Robert Kagan to discuss his new book, The World America Made, the importance of America’s military muscle, and how the world may change if America is no longer the world’s superpower.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Buy The World America Made on Amazon
The importance of U.S. military might shouldn’t be underestimated
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
Robert Kagan at Brookings

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter

Subscribe to The Transom

From NPR:

Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University says in the next decade, new oil in the US, Canada and South America could change the center of gravity of the entire global energy supply.

“Some are now saying, in five or 10 years’ time, we’re a major oil-producing region, where our production is going up,” she says.

The US, Jaffe says, could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That’s compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa.

Jaffe says those new oil reserves, combined with growing turmoil in the Middle East, will “absolutely propel more and more investment into the energy resources in the Americas.”

(more…)

Astronauts are stranded on the space station. America’s once-mighty Space Shuttle fleet has been disassembled and mothballed with nothing to replace it. The Russians, once the inferior player in the space race, is the only hope left to rescue the stranded astronauts. No, this isn’t the treatment to a B-list summer movie — it is playing out before our eyes.

It never had to be this way. When historians look back on the American space program over the past 5 years, they are bound to scratch their heads and wonder, “what on Earth happened?” Where were our bold strokes of genius that propelled us to the Moon, created a fleet of shuttles that were the workhorses of space — where was the leadership that ensured America’s technological dominance in the world? Why did we throw in the towel?

With President Obama allowing the Space Shuttle program to die and laying off thousands who worked lifetimes solidifying its success, we had to turn to our old rivals – the Russians. This week, the Russians launched a Soyuz rocket filled with supplies bound for the space station. The rocket exploded scattering smoldering debris for miles. The Soyuz is the world’s last chance to travel into space. Yes, a rocket designed in 1966 is our last modern operating manned space vehicle. Pathetic.

It was President George W. Bush that realized the shuttles had run their course, and he set a date to replace the program. Instead of the low-orbiting shuttle, America would build the world’s largest and most powerful rocket to return to the Moon, build a base there to launch more ambitious missions — go to Mars, where the presence of ice indicates the ingredients of alien life. But, when Atlantis rolled to a stop at Kennedy Space Center, we had no way forward. Obama cancelled the Bush plan, and no one was quite sure where we were headed. The only certainty is that we would layoff over 4,000 unique and highly trained American space experts – in both the public and private sector.  America’s space program is a metaphor for much of what ails the nation, the President left us listless and adrift with no plan to move forward.

(more…)

He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

It is going to be a long hot summer as Congress and the Obama Administration debate how best to bring down America’s $14 trillion debt. Our crushing debt is as much a national security threat as it is an economic disaster. Many nations own our enormous amounts of debt, some of these entities are nefarious in nature – like China, Russia, and OPEC. If these nations sell off our debt, they can wield great power over America.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said last year, “The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.” The Obama Administration must find a way to cut trillions – not billions – when it comes to our crippling debt. America is at a crossroads, where we can act boldly now, or put our security at risk by doing nothing.

According to President Obama’s own budget, interest payments for the national debt will quadruple from $186.9 billion in 2009 to $768.2 billion in 2020. That equals $2,500 for every man, woman, and child to pay off just the interest to our national debt every year. The American taxpayer will be drowning in the interest we pay. Remember, the $768.2 billion Americans will be paying in 2020 does not bring down our national debt; it just pays off the interest the debt has accrued!

(more…)

We are hearing a great deal about a budding “Democracy movement” spreading throughout the Middle East. Many are calling it an “Arab Spring.” The belief is that after centuries of totalitarian oppression, the Arab street is suddenly pining for more freedom; rebelling against the elitist ruling class of kings, emirs, despots and tyrants. This is most likely true for a great number of those filling the streets of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain and myriad other Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim nations. But there is a less than honorable component amongst the rebellion that simply waits for the “right” to a democratic vote. Contrary to how the idea of a move to Democracy presents, in the volatile Middle East there are elements in play that could make it a move in the wrong direction.

Each and every day we hear the misnomer that the United States of America is a Democracy. We hear it from the average man on the street, the mainstream media and even from those we have elected to office. But the fact of the matter is this: we are not a Democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic. A thorough and convincing exhibit of the facts surrounding this reality is presented in Notes on Democracy: And the Republic for Which It Stands. The fact that this issue is even in need of address is a scathing commentary on the constitutional illiteracy of the American electorate and serves as a sobering reminder that, often times, what sounds good – what “feels good” – isn’t always as it presents.

The distinction – between the benefits of a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic – is incredibly important, and while some describe our nation as a Democracy in an error of ignorance, others – some with schemes of political opportunism – do so with a nefarious purpose and bad intentions.

James Madison, recognized as the Father of the US Constitution, said this about factions and Democracy in Federalist No. 10:

“Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people…From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”

Why is this important in the context of what is happening in the Middle East at this very moment?

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Thomas de Waal to discuss the modern Chechnya in a post-war environment where suspicions are high and cultures crash.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Chechens I Used to Know
‘Chechnya’s bin Laden’ Killed by Russian Troops
Clashes in Russia’s Caucasus kill 10 rebels
Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus: An Introduction
Putin’s czarist vision

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Thomas on Twitter

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the commodity crash last week, and the rise of cyber warfare and the cybersecurity industrial complex.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Coffee & Markets: Commodities, Unemployment, and the Debt Ceiling
The rise of the cybersecurity-industrial complex
Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy
Booz Allen Hamilton gets Naval cybersecurity deal

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Francis on Twitter

I believe that Americans are the smartest and most innovative people in the world. If we weren’t how could we become the greatest economic, cultural, social and military superpower the world has ever seen? It puzzles me though why we sometimes refuse to learn from our mistakes.

Case in point; energy independence; the oil embargos of the 1970s crippled our economy. Apart from creating the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, we did painfully little over the last 40 years to make sure that oil could not be used as a weapon against us. If anything, we made oil a more powerful weapon. In 1972, we imported 28% of our oil from foreign countries. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest figures (from 2009), 62% of the oil we consumed that year came from other nations.

In July 2008, OPEC reminded us of the power of oil as a weapon when the price of a barrel of oil reached $147. The tactics had changed from the 1970s – OPEC manipulated the supply to jack up the price versus imposing an outright embargo – but the results were eerily the same; Americans struggled to pay high gasoline and home heating oil prices, and America’s economy teetered on the brink of recession (our weakened economy would eventually be pushed over into the Great Recession by the collapse of the subprime housing market).

What was America’s response to the crisis? Nothing; or to be fair, we did nothing to increase our domestic production of oil and natural gas. In fact, the Obama Administration recently made oil an even more powerful weapon by banning oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico thereby shutting down another 11% of our domestic oil production. So, here we are in 2011 more heavily dependent on foreign oil than ever before and watching helplessly as the price of oil climbs towards $100 a barrel thanks to the unrest in Egypt.

(more…)

As we embark upon a new year of trying to save this country and restore its founding principles, I have spent much time contemplating questions of readers — most important of which is that given the massive problems we continue to face, and would face even with the most principled conservative Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, what can be done?

But in order to deal with our current struggles, we must recognize that they are symptoms.  The cure to these symptoms lies in dealing with their root causes.  However, even before dealing with our struggles and their root causes, we must ask, what is our vision for America, and what is the role of government in helping to ensure it rather than dooming us to never reach it?

My view of America is a country in which people are free to pursue their greatest good as they see it, or as the founders put it to create a land in which people can pursue their happiness.  This system presupposes that the people are protected.  Before people can partake in mutually beneficial trade and activity, they must be reasonably secure in their persons and their property.  As such, free markets and the free people that create these markets require strong national defense.

So the vision should be clear — government’s role is to lay the foundation for people to be free, furnishing and preserving prosperity by providing defense for it, both against external aggressors and internal ones by providing a set of stable laws protecting private property and contracts specifically and the individual generally.

Where we stand today is that the government, created to ensure these things is instead imperiling them.  Rather than securing private property it consumes and redistributes it.  Further, at every avenue government creates barriers to the free voluntary exchange of goods and services that heretofore have provided such unparalleled levels of comfort for us all.  Rather than defending us from foreign enemies it cuts deals with them, concedes to them and generally submits to them out of political correctness, moral relativism and an inane commitment to multiculturalism.

(more…)

Anne C. Heller’s critically acclaimed and best-selling 2009 book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, is new in paperback (we’re tempted to say that it makes a great Christmas gift, though it’s clear that Rand didn’t believe in the holiday or the altruism that attaches to it!).

Reason’s Nick Gillespie talks with Heller about Rand, whom the biographer says remains the great explicator of capitalism’s virtues and remarkably undervalued by the literary establishment.

“How many novelists of ideas do we have in post-war America?” asks Heller, who says the most surprising thing she learned about Rand during her research was her fearfulness. From double-locking doors to wearing heavy rubber gloves while washing dishes to avoid germs, Heller argues that Rand bore the scars of a Jewish childhood spent in the virulently anti-Semitic confines of czarist Russia and the fledgling Soviet Union.

As Gillespie noted in his review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market, Heller’s biography is a rich, sympathetic treatment of a major cultural figure that simultaneously analyzes and humanizes Rand’s major, continuing influence on 20th- and 21st-century America.

(more…)

Yesterday, Andrew Breitbart launched his newest web venture, Big Peace. It will do for national security, what Big Hollywood has done for culture, Big Journalism for the media and Big Government for domestic policy. It has also caused me to climb into the way-back machine.

In 1985, I was an exchange student at a gymnasium (high school) in Bremen, West Germany. It was an anxious time; with renewed leftist terrorist attacks and hijackings throughout Europe. (The TWA airplane which took me to Frankfurt was hijacked about a week later.)  The Middle East was, predictably, tense. The Soviet Union looked as strong as ever. America was coming out of an economic and psychological malaise, but much of Europe, and U.S. political and media elites, were openly worried about a “warmongering” US President who didn’t understand complex foreign policy and might just start a war for kicks.

For those readers under forty, the political debates at the time centered on MX and Minuteman missiles, nuclear disarmament and small dust-ups like the Contras in Nicaragua. One night over dinner, my otherwise gracious German hosts, along with some of their friends, berated me for US foreign policy. Most every problem in the world could somehow be traced back to the U.S. They were particularly incensed about US Government support for the Contra rebels, fighting the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

America should stay out of the affairs of all other countries, I was lectured. It shouldn’t interfere in any of the domestic squabbles in other nations. I replied that I understood that, but the Sandinistas were communist dictators who were supported by the Soviets and Cuba, so it was probable we would be involved.

Support for the Sandinistas from other countries was immaterial, I was told. America should be better and never involve itself in another country’s affairs, they argued.

So, I replied, what about that Berlin Airlift?

Oh, America had to do that, my German hosts replied. That was totally different.

It always is.

(more…)

I have a frequent nightmare:  In the year 2011, with the full support and complicity of their shadow ally, Russia, the Islamofacist regime in Tehran announces that they have developed a deliverable nuclear weapon(s).  That any attempt by any nation to dismantle their program through military force or draconian economic sanctions will be viewed as an overt act of war.  That they will view any such act of war as justification enough to deploy a nuclear weapon against Israel…regardless of what nation is behind the initial response.

They will cite classic anti-Semitic mantra, such as the myth that international Jewry controls the Western powers, etc. as their reasoning for labeling Israel the chief culprit by default.  More to the point, when push comes to shove they know that President Obama harbors no love of the Jewish state (as his harsh treatment of Netanyahu shows) and will have no stomach for a war to protect it.

[Meanwhile the Russians let it be known through diplomatic back-channels that relations between Tehran and Moscow have recently thawed and any retaliatory military strike against Iran for its actions against Israel could be viewed as an attack on Russia.]

The West, assuming it is even motivated to respond at all, is now put in a precarious position for a now-nuclear Iran looms over the Strait of Hormuz like a Colussus.   This narrow sea lane is by far the world’s most important oil chokepoint due to its daily flow of 16.5-17 million barrels, or roughly 40 percent of all seaborne oils (20 percent of oil traded worldwide).  At its narrowest point the channel is only 21 miles wide.

(more…)

Alexander Litvinenko was a hero in the mold of Mosab Hassan Yossef, the so-called “Son of Hamas,” who the US is sickeningly threatening to deport.  In fact, their fates may be quite similar if this is to happen, as in 2006 Litvinenko as you may recall was poisoned with Polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive substance, and essential ingredient to early nuclear bombs.

Why was he poisoned?  Litvinenko, a former KGB/FSB agent who left the service and defected to London was a staunch critic of the Putin regime, and apparently knew too much for the Kremlin to bare.  For Litvinenko implicated the Russian government in a variety of terrorist attacks, abroad for example through their training of Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998, and disgustingly at home through an attempted bombing of an apartment complex in 1999, and the infamous 2002 Moscow theater and 2004 Beslan school attacks.

I recently read his book Allegations, which in light of recent events is proving quite prescient.

One argument he makes that should resonate with all of us regards political resistance to the criminal Russian government:

There is no need to break any law, even most cruel one, in order to remain humans and citizens.  All we need to do is to take a civic stance, to demand that the authorities strictly obey the constitution.  Putin and his propaganda team know this, so they try to divide us, to set us against each other.  In doing so, the Kremlin strategists appeal to the lowest instincts, using every ethnic, religious or property differences we may have.  That is exactly why we must understand that our common enemy now is Putin’s regime (Allegations, 100).

Is this not precisely what we are witnessing today?  Our citizens are peacefully demanding a return to the Constitution, while our Progressive Putins try to spark racial and class warfare to divide and conquer us.

(more…)

The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the crowd in charge of U.S. tax policy. Not only does Russia have a 13 percent flat tax, but the government has just announced it will eliminate the capital gains tax (which shouldn’t exist in a pure flat tax anyhow).

Here’s a passage from the BBC report:

Russia will scrap capital gains tax on long-term direct investment from 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev has said. …Mr Medvedev told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that long-term direct investment was “necessary for modernisation”. …Its oil revenues fund, which has been financing the deficit, is expected to end next year, and the government wants to attract more foreign investment to boost the economy.

(more…)

If we are to stop the march of this nation towards socialism, it is imperative that we understand and educate our fellow citizens as to what socialism is like.  This need not be limited to distant readings of history books about the gulags in Russia.  Indeed we get a very gripping modern-day reminder of the horrors of socialism from a recent article in the New York Times on North Korea.

The piece begins:

YANJI, China — Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

Such is the horrifically arbitrary nature of communist regimes.  With the swift stroke of a pen the fruits of one’s labors can be reduced to nothing overnight.

(more…)

Today the leading Austrian economic think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute held a conference at the University Club in Manhattan in which Marc Faber, famed contrarian investor and publisher of the “Gloom, Boom and Doom Report” gave his perspective on the financial crisis and his outlook for the future.

Below are his main points and entertaining quotes:

• Central banks will never tighten monetary policy again, merely print, print, print
• Bubbles used to be concentrated in 1 sector or region in the 19th century, but off of the gold standard this concentration has ended
• “The lifetime achievement of Greenspan and Bernanke is really that they created a bubble in everything…everywhere.”
• “Central banks love to see asset prices go up,” and their policy reflects their desperation to perpetuate this
• US housing bubble that Greenspan could not spot (even though he has recently spotted bubbles in Asia) stands in stark contrast to that of Hong Kong in 1997, where prices fell by 70%, yet none of the major developers went bankrupt; this was a result of a system not built on excessive debt like that of the US
• “You have to ask what they were smoking at the Federal Reserve,” during the housing bubble, as prices were increasing by 18% annually when interest rates started to steadily rise in 2004
• Over the last couple of years, when the gross increase in public debt has exceeded the gross decrease in private debt, markets have risen, whereas when private debt growth has outpaced public debt growth, markets have tanked
• The next 3-5 years will be highly volatile

(more…)

If you will, imagine Slobodan Milosevic, during the early part of his reign, threatening to wipe Great Britain off the map. Imagine further, that after he made that statement, he announced that he was in the process of obtaining nuclear missiles.  Undeterred by such comments, the UN, appoints Milosevic’s country to its Commission on Human Rights.  Great Britain, understandably angered by such comments and a lack of World action, calls for renewed diplomatic action and increased sanctions.  Shortly thereafter, The Prime Minister of Great Britain visits the United States.

The President of the United States, however, agrees to only meet in private and refuses to take a picture with the Prime Minister.  Thereafter, the President calls for a loosening of the sanctions against Milosevic and says not a word about the appointment to the Commission on Human Rights.

I suggest to you that if that had come to pass, not only would Great Britain be beyond outraged, but US allies around the globe would sink back in their chairs and wonder if the US could be trusted as an ally at all.

As difficult as that scenario was to imagine is not near as difficult as it is for Israel today.

(more…)

On Saturday morning, I was stopped short by a text message-  a plane crash had killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 others.  Immediately, I called and asked the location… Russia.

With tragic irony, the Polish Presidential delegation was wiped out while enroute to memorialize the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre.  During World War II (April 1940), the Russians murdered 22,000 members of the captured Polish Officer Corps. On Stalin’s orders, the Russians killed captured Polish military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals, including lawyers, physicians, teachers, professors, engineers, priests, rabbis and other professionals.  By “liquidating” the Polish Officer Corps and much of the professional class, the Russians eased future “communization” of Poland.

The Russians had never apologized for the Katyn Massacre and for 50 years had denied culpability.  Scheduled for last weekend, the memorial event was meant to extend a hand and unclench a fist.  Instead, the Polish State aircraft crashed nearly at the same site.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was hated by the Russians;  he was blunt, and a tough negotiator.  As a friend of Lech Walesa, member of Solidarity, and former mayor of Warsaw, President Kaczynski had been jailed while resisting communism.

The historic Polish motto, “Our Freedom is Yours”, is deeply ingrained in the national political culture.

(more…)

On the foreign policy front, the Democrats for years have blamed America for the actions of rogue nations and dictators.  Indeed, as Mona Charen pointed out at length, in her book Useful Idiots, the Democrats have been all too willing to Blame America First for the actions of others.  So the storyline goes, when Russia armed itself, it was a justified response to the American arms buildup – as if Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were otherwise peace loving souls.

No mere academic cheer for Democrats, they have campaigned on their Blame America First theme for years.  In the minds of those Democrats, rather than display arrogance, America must be more humble, except blame for World troubles and not seek to impose its view on the world.  The latest iteration of that, of course, was Obama’s campaign.

According to Obama, following 9/11:

Millions around the world were ready to stand with us. They were willing to rally to our cause because it was their cause too – because they knew that if America led the world toward a new era of global cooperation, it would advance the security of people in our nation and all nations.” According to Obama, however, the Bush Administration “squandered that opportunity . . . [and]  . . . World opinion has turned against us.

What is the cure for such “mistakes,” according to Obama? As we have seen, it is to apologize on his world tours for American actions, to promise to talk directly to dictators, to abandon missile systems, to speak softly in the face of phony Iranian elections and crack downs on dissent, to bow in front of dictators, wear a thin mustache in front Middle Eastern leaders in Egypt, preach global responsibility, promise to close Guantanamo, give rights to Interpol over US territory, and on and on.

(more…)