Thursday, October 2, 2014

A special School is needed in DC

A special school should open in the District of Columbia with affiliates in every State of the Union to teach aspiring American politicians how to avoid the toxic effect of the organized loafers who call themselves lobbyists or some such name, and come from the local scenes or the international ones to give advice in what they say are their areas of expertise.

The theme of the curriculum to be taught will be a simple one, and will address questions of the past as well as those of the future. The intent of the lessons will be to show the students how to develop a kind of moral mace they will carry in their heads, and will spray in the face of the loafers who will come pretending they know how history would have developed if this or that were done in the past. Or they know what will happen in the future if this or that will not be done now.

The fact is that nobody can tell how things will have developed because human affairs are different from inanimate matter where the laws of physics say that for every action there is a known reaction that can be measured and described with exactness. By contrast, every action in human affairs causes a multitude of reactions, some overt and some covert, some instant and some delayed – that will cause secondary reactions numbering in the millions, each of which will in turn repeat the cycle to infinity. With the exception of a very few primary reactions, none of the others will be predicted because human responses are mostly random.

Examples will have to be given and used as case studies to demonstrate how the organized loafers package their presentations and deliver them. This will equip the student with a method by which to differentiate between the genuine experts who come to help, and the fake charlatans who come to advance a hidden agenda. One of those examples will have to be the article that Mario Loyola wrote under the title: “Send them Back” and the subtitle: “Without American troops in Iraq, the Middle East will keep falling apart.” It was published on October 1, 2014 in National Review Online.

The sophistication of this writer is demonstrated by the fact that he makes an admission at the start of his presentation intending to win the confidence of the readers. He then rams through his agenda. Here is the admission: “The 2003 invasion of Iraq traded one set of problems for another … by toppling Saddam, we created a vacuum.” And here is the agenda: “By 2008, a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq had become indispensable to the stability of the whole region.”

In other words, this man is saying: We made a mistake in 2003 whose consequences we did not predict at the time. By the time five years had passed, it became clear that we needed to have a long term presence in Iraq. Now, six more years after that, we can predict that if we don't go back to Iraq and stay there “the region will fall apart, threatening a much wider calamity.” It is the old: we were wrong then but we are correct now – trust us.

Having made these arguments early on, he continues to develop his dissertation by reviewing history in such manner as to strengthen those arguments. The result is that he mutilates history by butchering it in the Jewish style. That is, to make a point work for him, he goes back in history to where he can pick instances that do the trick when truncated and presented out of context. Loyola does that by tracing the history of the region from the time when Saddam was deposed by a previous President to the time when the current President decided to intervene in a measured way.

Unhappy with a decision that does not fulfill his agenda – one that is no longer hidden – he rewrites the history of the period while basing his approach on the pretense that he knows how history would have developed in the past, and the prediction of what will happen in the future.

Here is the prediction for the future: “Don't be fooled by the Arab states' support for current operations … America's relations with its allies can only worsen.” And here is the pretense that he knows how history would have developed: “The war that he [Obama] thought he was ending has started as a result of his withdrawal.”

Quick, pass the moral mace, and shut him up into an everlasting silence.