Monthly Archives: April 2017

Who’s Trying to Bully?

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Tom Perez, the new Democratic National Committee Chairman, which makes him the functional head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, has gone hysterical over his party’s loss of the Presidential election five months ago (see, especially, the opening of the video at the link to get the full flavor of his irrationality).

Donald Trump, you don’t stand for our values. You didn’t win this election[.]

Aside from the utter denial of facts about who won the election, it is true that Donald Trump doesn’t stand for DNC values, which center on their fundamental belief that

the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

That, after all, is what Hillary Clinton was saying when she said millions of Americans were irredeemable and deplorable.  That is what Barack Obama said when he dismissed millions of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country.

No, Donald Trump’s values are much closer to American values than they are to Progressive-Democrat values.

And this bit:

We have a bully in Washington in the White House[.]

Actually, no.  The bully wannabe has left the building.  Wannabe because a bully can’t succeed without the willing acquiescence of his intended victim—bullies being, fundamentally, cowards, after all.  And too many Americans refused to be cowed by Obama’s threats and slurs.

When Perez isn’t being hysterical, he’s merely projecting.

Contrasts

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As the Trump administration begins to shape its policy on drugs, tension is growing between a treatment-focused approach, embodied in a new commission on opioids headed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and the aggressive prosecution of drug crimes promised by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

There need there be no tension because there is no contradiction.  The two approaches—nail hard those who prey on the vulnerable and the addicted—and working to free the addicted from the controls of their addiction (“free from the controls” because an addict never loses his addiction; he can only reach a point where he can say reliably, “not today.”  That’s where current medical technology has us) rather than simply jailing them, too, potentiate each other.

But what about the user who pushes, also?  He certainly needs help getting his addiction under control, and jail won’t help that.  But he also deserves jail for that preying on his fellow addicts—he knows firsthand the damage he’s doing.  But the two can occur sequentially.

Continued Veterans Administration Failure

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Dr Dale Klein is, formally, on the Veterans Administration payroll—to the tune of a $250,000/yr salary—but he’s not employed by them, and so his pain management skills are actively denied our veterans who would benefit from them.  Klein blew the whistle on his proximate employer’s—Southeast Missouri John J Pershing VA facility—secret waiting lists and wait time manipulation practices.  Now he’s shunned by his employers and banished to a room by himself where he’s denied access to his patients and patients are denied access to him.

VA management is continuing to refuse to clean up its act, preferring to serve their employed bureaucrats rather than, and at the direct expense of our veterans.  This has to stop, and the only way is to disband VA and commit its budget—all of it, including overhead—to vouchers for our veterans with which they can see doctors, clinics, and hospitals of their choice.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Public Servants and Respect

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A Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor last week revealed a problem in the Federal bureaucracy, but not the one the writer intended.  The writer wrote in part,

While Peter Hoekstra in his March 16 op-ed Can Americans Trust Their Spies? clearly states the problem of intelligence leaks from spies employed by the US, he stops short of mentioning a broader issue of morale and trust that is at the heart of a national problem and has stalled our government. Public servants, like all of us, want to feel they are respected and supported by those in high office and that their efforts are taken seriously by our government. When this doesn’t occur, information leaks develop. Modern cyberspace warfare requires the trust and support of our spies and an understanding of who our enemy is.

What this letter writer has ignored is that the right answer to such lack of respect—whether real or imagined—is not for the public “servant” to violate his oath of office by leaking confidential information, nor is it to commit felonies like unmasking the incidentally surveilled.

The right answer is for the public “servant” to resign his position and go to work somewhere else where he can feel properly appreciated.

Full stop.

NATO and Mutual Defense Alliances

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Europe at the end of the week, and among other things, he pushed for NATO member states to honor their decades-old commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.

Germany, among other members, insisted that honoring their commitment was “unrealistic.”

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said demands for 2% of GDP spending were “totally unrealistic.” He said that to meet the US target, Germany would have to increase spending by some €35 billion ($37 billion).

After all, Gabriel has argued,

…a strong defense isn’t enough to ensure security.

That’s a cynically offered straw man, though; no one is arguing that a strong defense is sufficient, only that it’s necessary.  Gabriel will have to play with his dolly without me.

There are others who agree that the nations need to boost their own spending—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, for instance, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.  But it isn’t sufficient.

We need to be developing a mutual defense alliance that includes eastern European nations, anyway.  Maybe the result of that development should be a separate alliance, not an expansion of NATO.  Perhaps even the result should replace NATO, or at least our role in the new alliance should replace our role in NATO, since so many of the nations of NATO have so little interest in their own treaty responsibilities.