The Migration Crisis in a nutsehll: Somebody Goofed up

This harrowing image of a toddler who drowned while his family sought asylum
from ISIS is spreading around the world as a debate ignites about the migration crises.

They are fleeing ISIS, repression, death, and destruction.

On ships and boats, often overfilled with desperate humanity, across the Mediterranean, they are coming. On bicycles and on foot down from the Arctic Circle they are coming. Through any hole they can find in the nation of Hungary’s new razor-wire fence they are crawling, a swarming mass of refugees, in the worst crises of mass migration of human souls since the Second World War

In Eastern Europe, while countries desperately try to figure out what to do, with Germany offering asylum to up to 800,000 refugees, and Britain accepting so far a few hundred, although promising to take 20,000 more, there is no coherent plan to deal with this.

The Greek islands have been overrun with refugees from the Syrian Civil war and those fleeing from ISIS, while the nation of Greece itself is in the middle of political upheavals, a disastrous economy, and an inability to cope with much of anything right now, let alone the swarms of hundreds of thousands of desperate people who are swarming or trying to swarm into Europe.

The response from the industrialized countries has been incoherent at best; with Hungary building its razor-wire fence that is over a hundred miles long, Britain taking a few hundred refugees, and Germany taking hundreds of thousands, while calling on others to do more.

However, in recent days many minds have been changed by the harrowing images of a young Syrian boy, just three years old, who drowned and whose body was washed ashore after the boat he was on capsized as his family fled from the unrest in the Middle East. Since then, there has been a mad scramble by politicians the world over to prove that they have a heart.

While America has not done much so far, yesterday the administration promised that in the weeks and months ahead they would be developing a strategy to try and take more refugees, while at the same time trying to vet and be certain that no members of ISIS or any other terrorist organization was not using this crises to infiltrate Western civilization and attack us. At the same time, former Shadow Prime Minister in the UK Edward Milliband has said that America should probably take about 50% of all the refugees.

The West has always been and continues to be the world’s cornerstone of stability, with strong, capitalistic economies, democratic forms of government, (in recent years, at least) and massively strong armies. We in the west have economic disasters from time to time, but we don’t have coups. We argue with each other, but we don’t kill each other. We throw out our governments at election time, but we do it with votes, not bullets. And our leaders are supposed to be the best the world has to offer.

But they goofed this one up.

The reason these migrants are coming to us and not going farther east, into Iran, or countries like that is because they know in the west they will be free. They may have to worry about their kids getting good grades, but not about getting their head chopped off for not bowing to the twisted, semi-Islamic “religion” of ISIS.

Of course, this is not a problem that has grown up overnight. It has festered for a long time, with more and more people coming in, until suddenly it has exploded over into a breaking point, like water over a dam, and nobody knows what to do.

But that was not where they goofed up, not in the beginning. For the migrant crises, like a line of dominoes knocking each other over, is a direct result of the rise of ISIS, and the inability of America and its coalition to do much about it.

It could be argued that countries like Germany and the UK should have been and should still be more involved in the fight against ISIS, but the American president is called the leader of the free world for a reason. And Mr. Obama has been woefully slow and ineffective in mobilizing the west and the developing and stable members of the eastern world into a real force that ISIS needs to reckon with,

Turkey is not fully engaged, and other middle-eastern nations stand idly by. And while we can debate about how this crises is best fixed in the short term, the only way we are going to fix it in the long run is by this administration showing real leadership in the fight against ISIS, and building the sort of global, massive coalition there was a more than a decade ago when we fought Iraq. There does not need to American ground troops, but there can be Syrian rebels that are armed and trained by us, Turkish troops who do not want to see this spill over into their homeland, Iraqi military who are taught to stand their ground and fight, and Kurds, who have good reason to fight ISIS.

The fix won’t be fast and it won’t be easy, but destroying ISIS, and putting real energy behind the fight so that ISIS finally falls, has to happen. If we don’t fix it, no matter if Hungary takes down its fence, or the UK takes half a million refugees, this is only going to get worse, and worse, and worse.

Our leaders goofed up by not taking ISIS seriously enough, and they haven’t help things very much by letting the wound fester, and now a vast migration rivaling that of the German hordes pouring into Rome, running from the horsemen from the east, has begun. The only way to stop this migration is to kill the horsemen, to destroy ISIS.

Andrew C. Abbott

Avoid Obfuscation: Going down the road to Watergate

Whatever the original scandals were, whatever Nixon may have had to do with the break-in at Watergate,
or Secretary Clinton may have said that was embarrassing in an email or two, the cover-ups afterwards
only made things worse for both of them, and for Hillary, the story goes on.

On June 17^th, 1972, there was a break in done by five men at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters that was stationed in the Watergate hotel. While there, as they attempted to steal campaign documents and plant bugging devices so members of the Republican “Committee for the Reelection of the President” could gather information on their “enemies,” they were caught and arrested.

The Watergate Scandal was born.

In the months and years that followed, a chain of lies, deceptions, purposeful confusion, or obfuscation, was forged, until those very chains strangled and killed the presidency of our 37^th president, Richard Millhouse Nixon, making him the only President of the United States of America in history to resign his office.

But the thing that brought down the presidency was not the break in to the Watergate Hotel, indeed, it is doubtful the president ordered it or had any hand in the burglary, which really amounted to not much more than a petty break-in of itself. The thing that brought down Nixon and his “palace guard” was what happened afterwards.

As Nixon desperately tried to defend those who ordered the break in, including former US Attorney General John Mitchell. When that did not work Nixon attempted to throw Mitchell to the sharks while keeping those higher up the food chain unaffected. Of course, in the end, this all led to the discovery of Nixon’s tapes, proving he had a hand in the failed attempt to hide Mitchell’s involvement, and thus involved Nixon in charges of obstruction of justice, which forced him to resign.

Now, more than forty years later, another high elite, this time a woman, and this time named Hillary Clinton, is treading down the same path.

It seems that perhaps, , a crime of some sort was committed. However, we don’t know, because Clinton kept the thing which would have housed any evidence, her email server, in a bathroom.

After keeping the evidence for herself, (while handing some of it over selectively to the proper officials) Clinton then destroyed it. Currently of course, there are attempts to retrieve that evidence while Clinton continues to complain that this is a Republican conspiracy to destroy her. One wonders where else one has heard similar sounding charges before, until when returns to the tomes of Watergate, and finds that Nixon often said Watergate was cooked by his enemies, (mostly Democrats) to destroy him.

Whatever the original scandals were, whatever Nixon may have had to do with the break-in at Watergate, or Secretary Clinton may have said that was embarrassing in an email or two, the cover-ups afterwards only made things worse for both of them, and for Hillary, the story goes on.

 

The drip-drop of the Clinton story continues, with recent findings that some of the information that passed of the former secretary of state’s server was probably classified from the beginning, and also with the revelation that she paid a non-department employee to keep the server. But Clinton did not come clean about these things in the beginning. Drip-drop.

The longer the story continues to grow, the longer the water continues to come in through the hole, the more public trust erodes, and the more we need to turn our eyes not to what happened before the fact, but, rather, in the cover-up that happened  afterwards.

It is obvious to even the most casual observer that Clinton has not always been forthright with the American people about her motives and activities, (case in point: she said she only had one mobile device, we now know she had two) it is, of course, not a crime to lie to a TV camera, if that were true ninety percent of pundits would be in jail for their bad predictions.

But what we need to look for is evidence that probably exists that not only did Clinton obfuscate with the American people, she also stonewalled and obstructed justice with the investigators.

She apparently thought that she could protect herself by handing over emails she wanted to hand over, in effect, the edited version of the tapes. But now of course the entire server is in the hands of the law, although she claims she wiped it. (Burning the tapes, something even Nixon wouldn’t do.) And now the recovery process begins. 

If Clinton had come clean in the beginning, none of this would have happened, and there would have been no possibility, as very real one now exists, that American school children will wake up one day to an image of America’s once most admired woman, standing at the door of a helicopter, giving a defiant symbol of the letter “V” for all the world to see.

Andrew C. Abbott

Why the Doctor is doing so well

Los Angeles, CA - Every two years, when election time rolls around, many people, some of my friends included, go to the polls and vote for protest candidates. People who have little or no chance of winning, but because the electorate feels like nothing is being fixed, they choose not to vote for either major party.

Sometimes they vote for Mickey Mouse, or Bugs Bunny, this year they are voting for Donald Trump. Trump is the voice of the angry Americans, people so fed up they are willing to try anything at all to fix the system.

Some of Trump’s supporters say they want revenge on the establishment for years of lies, others tell me they want entertainment, and some just like to hear Trump continue to bash the political correctness that many on both sides of the aisle are getting tired of. (Perhaps this is why nothing short of shooting Bambi will cause Trump to fall in the polls.)

However, not all Americans are angry at the establishment or want revenge. They are hurt, tired, and disillusioned and they don’t want payback, they want healing. But they don’t naturally turn to the bombast of Trump, but rather to gentler, kinder, some might even say gifted, hands; those of Ben Carson.

Ever since he announced his candidacy, the mild mannered Republican and former neurosurgeon has been a longshot candidate, however, he has managed, save for a few scrapes at the beginning of his run, to avoid incendiary and controversial rhetoric, and, for the most part, and instead talk about his vision for America.

And that approach seems to be helping Carson along quite well, in a poll a few days ago in Iowa; Ben Carson became the first person, since July, to at least tie Donald Trump in any poll anywhere for the nomination. Trump and Carson are, in that poll, tied at 23%.

While Carson is still a long shot, (he has less than half of Trump’s support nationally, and way less money than many other candidates,) at a time when pollsters tell us America is more divided along political lines than at any time since the Civil War, he, a black Republican in a party accused of not liking minorities, a non-career politician at a time when American’s are fed up with career politicians, and a man who came from rags to riches at a time when Americans feel the ruling class does not care about the plight of the less-advantaged, Carson could possibly feel a lot of slots and begin a surge of patriotism across the country. While he seems to be weak on economics and foreign policy, it is not hard to see, at least at first glance, what Carson’s supporters are looking at when they say his name in surveys.

It is almost as if he is another form of Donald Trump, because Carson is certainly a crazy politician, to say the least. His ideas are far out from the norm, and his stances are far right of the center. But he isn’t brash or loud about it, and for all of the Americans that really think the country could use a doctor right now rather than a Trump card, they feel that Dr. Ben Carson is their man.

Andrew C. Abbott

The Congressional Fall

 

Los Angeles, CA - Fall is almost upon us. For many of us we will be eating pumpkin pies, smelling spices, looking at beautiful colors with an unusual amount of orange and red surrounding us as the beauty of spring and summer give way to a beauty that Autumn has all its own.

But in Washington DC, it will not be sugar and spice and everything nice. Just the opposite, in fact. In exactly one month from now, the US Government will shut down if Obama and the Republicans in congress cannot get their act together and end the funding of the extremist far-left group Planned Parenthood.

In October, Hillary Clinton will testify before congress on Benghazi, and of course, her email controversy. That should cause firestorms and excitement not only in the District but also across the country and around the world, although Hillary is unlikely to suddenly reveal something that either silences critics or turns off her base. However, what is possible is that, while what Clinton says is not likely to be super exciting, the ways she says it, (i.e. if she blows up at Gowdy, starts screaming, etc.) could really make some headlines.

And coming soon, although the vote will take place before fall actually starts, is the final battle over the Iran Nuclear Deal. Although the vote must take place by the seventeenth of this month, the battle could well last into Autumn as, if enough Democratic Senators jump ship from the president that a filibuster is unable to be upheld on the floor of the senate, the president will of course veto it, setting up a potentially close vote to overturn the veto, although, in the senate at least, it unlikely that that will happen.

As if the government shutting down and Clinton being investigated were not exciting enough, all of this happens against the backdrop of the ongoing race for the White House, more GOP debates, and the start of the Democratic debates, none of which have direct influences of congress, but members on both sides will certainly be aware of what the talking heads of their party are saying, and which candidates are getting support for their rhetoric, all of which congress men and women will be filing away for their own upcoming reelection races.

There is some real, nonpartisan business that also need to get done. In July a stopgap funding bill of three months duration was passed on the highway bill. A new measure will have to be passed, although it does seem possible that an amendment could also be added to that to defund Planned Parenthood, causing even the seemingly innocuous act of making sure the roads we drive on are repaired a major Washington showdown.

Foreign guests will also be coming, the communist and authoritarian head of China, and the pope.

Further excitement on capitol hill will also include the final up-or-down vote on the president’s free trade agreement. Republicans seem likely to back it, while Democrats, who were against fast-track authority, seem unlikely to be able to keep it from passing.

And another important thing about this fall is that it is Obama’s last as a president with real power. By this time next year his cabinet will be busy resigning, Obama will be a lame duck president, and the news coverage will be all about the two people fighting to succeed him at 1600 Pennsylvania.

This is the president’s last chance to get kicks in, and get them in he will, if he has anything to say about it.

Andrew C. Abbott