Thursday, July 2, 2020

Did you hear the other shoe drop?

It was only yesterday that we heard the sound of the first shoe drop. Look at the article below the one you’re reading on this website, and hear that sound again. It came under the title: “The Herbert Raymond Don Quixote Syndrome,” dated June 30, 2020. What follows is the sound of the other shoe dropping.

Today, we are served with Clifford May's contribution to the sham pretense that free speech guaranteed for all, is defended by those who rape free speech for all but for themselves. They do so as readily as the Weinsteins and the Epsteins rape the vulnerable women who literally and not so literally work under them.

This time, Clifford D. May wrote: “Meet the global leadership restrainers: Making America second-rate again,” an article that was published on June 30, 2020 in The Washington Times, and meant for the July 1 edition of the publication. The Clifford May article is a review of the essay that was attributed to H.R. McMaster, and published in the Foreign Policy online magazine.

Disagreeing with his idol Winston Churchill who said that jaw-jaw was better than war-war, Clifford May got in lockstep with McMaster by siding with George Orwell, a contemporary of Churchill who said that, “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” May took this to mean that wars are meant to continue till one side vanquishes the other. He thus rejected the eventuality that Orwell may have meant to convey the notion that, “The quickest way of winning a war is to never start it”.

Be that as it may, whereas H.R. McMaster spoke of the pacifists who are calling on America to retrench its worldwide military effort, Clifford May has modified this view, preferring instead to speak of the pacifists restraining America's military from doing the work that he says is vital. To expand on these ideas, he says he'll highlight some of the points that came up in the McMaster essay, and add a few more of his own.

So, here are some of the points that Clifford May says are his addition:

“I ask: What might a restrained response to 9/11 have looked like? To which I answer: Probably like the responses that followed al Qaeda's attacks on America's embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the bombing of the USS Cole. Washington's restraint achieved nothing. President Obama implemented a policy of restraint when he pulled all US troops from Iraq. That didn't end the endless war in that country. It just made possible the Islamic State's rise. President Trump seems conflicted. In his recent address at West Point, he proclaimed: 'We are ending the era of endless wars.' Yet he also praised such resolute warriors as George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, saying the latter 'knew that the American soldier never, ever quits'”.

This is exactly the kind of talk that demonstrates how confused Clifford May and those like him are. He says that President Trump is conflicted for saying America is ending the era of endless wars, but then praises warriors Patton and MacArthur for never quitting. Well, the truth is that Clifford May's confusion comes from the fact that he does not see the difference between two kinds of wars. There is the guerrilla war that's ongoing between the Jewish establishment and the Muslims kids, whom the wacky establishment keeps provoking into one war after another … and there is the cut-and-dried war that Patton and MacArthur waged and won because they never quit.

A Patton or a MacArthur response to 9/11 would have prompted either of them to demand that the government of Afghanistan turn Bin Laden over to America or suffer the consequences. Had the Afghanis refused to do so, the American warriors would have gone in to capture Bin Laden. Failing to find him, they would have caused considerable damage to the Afghani government, and would have returned home. This is not what America did under the presidency of George W. Bush. What it did is what provoked the attacks on America's embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole, and everything else that came after that.

Unable to see things the way they are and construct theories based on empirical observation, Clifford May has slumped into the usual routine of speculating about the intention of the people he hates, and building fantastically paranoid scenarios based on false information generated in the dark corners of his mind. At times, he puts all of that into a series of questions, which is what he did this time. Here is a sample:

“Would it be in America's interest to cede the Middle East to Iran's regime, which develops nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles? Will the terrorists pose more or less of a threat if we rein in our efforts to foil their plots? Can anyone believe that the rulers of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran would become good neighbors if we choose to spend the remainder of the 21st century as a second-rate power?”

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the world has watched America perform over the past three quarters of a century –– from the Korean and Vietnamese wars to the Iraqi and Libyan wars –– and the world has determined that humanity will be better off if the Americans left everyone alone, went home, stayed there, and minded their own business.

Yes, my friend, America should heed the advice given it over and over by people everywhere; advice that goes like this: “Yankee go home and stay home”.

For the sake of a continued life on Earth, heed that advice, America.