During President Obama’s first two years in office, we have seen him do nothing but fumble on the world stage.  He often seems to sit back and watch major changes occur – making no effort to be a part of the solution or reassert America’s position in the state of world affairs.

Bruce Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities, joins us to discuss his book, “The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.”

His ultimate advice for the President?  Listen to what Islamists say, and believe they meant it.  We cannot bribe them–with education, money or democracy–because they will never trade spiritual things for physical things.  Ultimately, he argues that there will be no resolution outside of force.

Thornton also discusses the downfall of the democratic city-states of Ancient Greece, who, because of the “destructive pursuit of short term self-interest,” were unable to unify against a common threat.  Thornton argues that for a democracy to survive it must maintain civic virtue – character that is worthy of freedom.

The topic of appeasement draws some disturbing parallels between Chamberlain and Hitler and many of our modern politicians.  Pacifism and internationalism weren’t just popular movements in the 1930s and 1940s.  Remember, internationalism is defined as the idea that it is possible to create harmony of interest and solve all problems through diplomacy.   Sound familiar?

Watch the full episode here:

(more…)

You can tell the Democrats are desperate this election cycle.

While facing a probable political tsunami in the U.S. House of Representatives and a possible tidal wave in the U.S. Senate, Democrat incumbents in both houses of Congress find themselves hampered by their own voting records.

Democrat incumbents are unwilling to boast about their accomplishments to voters who are angry with the hodgepodge Obamacare, runaway government spending, deceptive tax proposals, unemployment hovering around ten percent, record home foreclosures, and a socialist agenda that shocks even big government European nations.

So what’s a liberal-left candidate to do since bashing George W. Bush doesn’t appear to bear fruit anymore? Denigrate and defame their Republican opponents with tired old cliches and images of Swastikas, German soldiers and goose-stepping jackboots, that’s what they do. It’s almost expected that Democrats will invoke the tired old — and grossly fraudulent — image of “Nazi = conservative Republican.”

So imagine the surprise when a liberal Democrat running for reelection in North Carolina uses a photo of World War II German soldiers in a campaign advertisement designed to highlight his support for members of the American military.

fix combat –

State Rep. Tim Spear (D-2nd Dist., North Carolina) is probably fuming with his campaign team for promoting his support for military service members using an image of World War II German soldiers.

(more…)

Former Clinton Secretary of Transportation & Energy Federico Peña was stumping for Rep. Betsy Markey in the Denver area.  As Ms. Markey looked on, Sec. Peña told the crowd:

You know we’ve seen in this country historically, when strange things happen because people get carried away with the media, and they get carried away with myths, and they get carried away with fear.  We saw what happened to Asian Americans in this country, very very long ago with the Asian exclusion laws, and everybody thought that was the right thing to do.  And then during WWII, we put Japanese Americans in camps all over the county, thought it was the right thing to do.  Everybody got carried away with the emotion of the day. We thought they were somehow, you know, terrorists… And we see this happen in other countries, I won’t give you the history.  And that’s happening in our country today.

Upon finishing his speech with the Obama campaign Spanish catch-phrase, Sí se puede, Peña embraces Candidate Markey, who is clearly unfazed by the former Clinton cabinet member’s patently offensive historical comparison.

Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years.  Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial issue . . . albeit the important issues that are dividing us are clearly a symptom of our woes.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

(more…)

Barack Obama’s infamous phrase “Just words.  Just speeches” keeps ringing in my ears.  While the U.S. economy crumbles and the world teeters toward war, the President busies himself with words and speeches (not to mention photo ops and vacations and parties).  Appalling, yes.  Surprising, no.  To quote Yogi Berra: “This is like deja vu all over again.”

Today’s leaders of the Democratic Party are not at all progressive.  In fact, their ideology is regressive – a throwback to an ideology popular in the 1920s and 30s and 40s.  Their vision is that people they consider the “ignorant many” should be governed by people who see themselves as the “enlightened few.”

At the core of this socialist outlook on life is what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit.”  That’s a person assuming that, if he were given unlimited power, then everything would be perfect.  He projects that government employees would act on his behalf.   He sees government employees as a proxy for his own egotistical fantasies.

A faceless bureaucracy is too impersonal, however, for some socialists, who prefer a proxy with a face.  These people prefer to focus their aspirations on a charismatic leader, who attracts hordes of followers, all dreaming that the great leader would, in fact, impose their own will on society, if only He were in charge of everything!

Relieved of the burden of having to think for themselves, these fanatics can easily find their political passions unrestrained by reason.  This fascist mentality can produce the thuggish brutality of a Benito Mussolini regime.

(more…)

Today, in 1941, FDR signed the Lend-Lease Act, allowing the United States to ship supplies on loan to nations fighting Nazi Germany. At the end of 2006, Great Britain made its last annual payment ($83 million) to the United States, paying off its debts to the US arising from WWII.

This week, President Obama took the unprecedented step of personally chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. In an address to the General Assembly the day before, The President of the United States, with American power and influence on the decline around the world, declared yet again that, “No world order that elevates one nation… over another will succeed.”

It seems lost on the American President that he was not elected to create or perfect a world order, but to elevate the interests of the United States. He was not selected by a world assembly but by Americans, who extracted from him a sworn oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign or domestic. That same Constitution calls the president the Chief Executive of the Untied States. Imagine if the chief executive of Wal-Mart attended an economic forum and suggested a willingness to make his company less successful in the interest of promoting the perceived success of his competitors. It is unlikely that he would remain CEO for long… (more…)