America is still "Nixonland" (book recommendation)

A kindly old lady from Whittier CA had this to say about a Republican candidate. "I know it's against religion to hate anybody, but I just can't help hating that man." To whom was she referring? Not Donald Trump, not Ted Cruz, but... wait for it... Richard Nixon. The quote is taken from the opening pages of Rick Perlstein's monumental book Nixonland (Scribner, 2008), which Walt commends to anyone trying to make sense of this year's campaign.

Mr. Perlstein chose to write about Nixon and his times in 2008, 40 years after he was elected President, because (as the cliché goes) history repeats itself. Over and over again. The book, you see, is not really about Mr. Nixon so much as the disintegration of the liberal consensus of the Kennedy-Johnson years and the polarization of American politics. The 1968 election pitted the friends of Nixon against the enemies of Nixon. The author writes:

Nixonland...is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans. The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon, are the spiritual heirs of [Adlai] Stevenson and [John Kenneth] Galbraith. They take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumph, America itself might end.

The second group are the people who...believe, as did Nixon [himself] that if the enemies of Nixon triumph -- the Alger Hisses and Helen Gahagan Douglases, the Herblocks and hippies, the George McGoverns and all the rest -- America might end.

The [Democratic National Committee] was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. "Nixonland> is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years.

Let's see. 1968 plus 50 years brings us to... 2018. Who will be POTUS and Leader of the Free World then? Whether the Republicans pick Mr Trump or Senator Cruz, or the Democrats pick Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton, is immaterial. In November supporters of both candidates, red and blue, will be utterly convinced that if their enemies win, America will end.

Talk of uniting the nation is rubbish. The cracks in American society and politics which appeared with the Watts race riots of 1965, have grown wider and deeper. The nation needs a catharsis. But will it get one? That's up to the voters, who, Mr. Perlstein says, are the real heroes of his book. Read it.

Apartheid comes to USA: UConn opens segregated dorm

We begin a new month with a story which has to be true, because you couldn't make up something this ironic. Half a century after LBJ's great "civil rights", designed to end once and for all discrimination against anyone on he basis of race and ensure equality for all -- especially as regard accommodation in housing -- a blacks-only dormitory is being built at the University of Connecticut, with the official endorsement of that school's "progressive" authorities.

The segregated accommodation -- separate but equal, you understand -- will be called "SCHOLA2RS House". "SCHOLA2RS" stands for the "Scholistic [sic] House Of Leaders who are African Amercian [sic] Researchers and Scholars". Of course these "schola2rs" have a website. Here's a screen grab.

You may think that a couple of them don't look, errr, African-American, but you don't have to be black to get into the dorm. You only have to "identify as African American/Black". You know, like Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the NAACP in Spokane WA, a white girl who somehow felt black.

You might wonder why, in an America where (according to the Prez) great strides have been made in overcoming racism, a "black living space" would be not just tolerated but deemed a necessity. Dr. Erik M. Hines, Faculty Director and Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at UConn, has the answer. The good doctor says it's because blacks do so poorly at academics that he believes they will do better "in an African-American environment."

Walt kids you not. He really said that, and somehow managed to escape being hauled in front of a "human rights" commission. What would have happened if Mark Steyn had said it? But Dr. Hines is no Mark Steyn! Dr. Hines is a certified (or certifiable) progressive. He explained that "African-American males graduate at a lower rate than their peers."

He went on to say that SCHOLA2RS House is "a space for African-American men to one, come together and validate their experiences that they may have on campus. [sic] umber two, it’s also a space where they can have conversation and also talk with individuals who come from the same background who share the same experience."

Translated into plain English, Dr. Hines is actually sayings that just being in the presence of whites somehow makes blacks do poorly at school, and that the only way this can be remedied is for blacks to have their own dorm. Need we add that all the UConn students and academics who turned out late last year to protest what they called "white racism" have remained completely silent on this project, which reeks of black racism.

Thanks to Agent 3 for alerting us to the original report in The New Observer.

Why America must (not?) save the world from ISIS

Not long after posting "US invasion of Syria begins; Walt predicts the outcome", I found on a shelf of my lower level library a dog-eared copy of The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America, by Arthur Herzog (Simon & Schuster, 1973). In the chapter headed "Historical Analogies", the author warns us to beware of dubious lessons supposedly learned from history which lead us -- our political and military leaders -- to make bad decisions for the present and future.

Historical analogies, Mr. Herzog writes, can be reduced to what Aristotle called "the fallacy of accident", which arises when you take an accidental property for an essential one. He gives the example of Vietnam, which General Matthew B. Ridgway thought was a second Korea. "And so did General Mark W. Clark, who learned from Korea, 'The sure way to maintain the peace is to be strong militarily and unafraid politically, and to let the enemy know that we will use that strength to maintain the security of the United States.'

"Eugene V. Rostow, of the Yale Law School, remembered the Soviet-Finnish conflict before World War II, and claimed that if the United States did not maintain its position of dominance in Southeast Asia it would be reduced to the status of Finland -- subject to Russian will.

"Secretary of State Dean Rusk continually compared Vietnam to Munich. An American withdrawal, he said, would lead to further aggression like Hitler's. Lyndon Johnson himself compared North Vietnam's actions to those of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and believed that the American Actions in Vietnam would be justified on the same grounds as our involvement in World War II."

Mr. Herzog was writing in 1973, before the Paranoid States of America lost the first war in its history. That's if you ignore the War of 1812 and the Korean War, both of which can be said with charity to have been fought to a draw. No such thing can be said about Vietnam. It was a stinging defeat for the USA, the soi-disant greatest military power in the world, inflicted by a smaller gang of ill-equipped but super-motivated Asian peasants.

Did the leaders of America learn anything from the egregious error that was Vietnam? Apparently not. Every president from Bush the Elder right down to POTUS has fallen into the same logical trap, drawing the wrong conclusion -- that the USA is responsible for the security and freedom of the whole world -- from the lessons of history. And so America is doomed to learn the same lessons once again.

3 more NATO soldiers die in Afghanistan

Just over 24 hours ago, Walt wrote "Let's quit while we're behind", advocating (like Ron Paul) the immediate withdrawal of NATO forces from the Afghan sandpit.

That's the same advice given by Senator George Aiken to LBJ while the Vietnam war was raging. But no American president has ever listened to pleas to stop waging war.

Now, NATO says separate bomb attacks in Afghanistan's south and east have killed two of its service members, while a third died of non-battle injuries in the south. All of this happened yesterday, around the same time as Walt's post.

No details -- such as the nationalities of the soldiers -- have been made available by the US-led military. So far this month -- this month alone -- 40 coalition members have died in Afghanistan, bringing the toll for the first four months of 2012 to 131. How many more must die before we do the sensible thing and get out?

Let's quit while we're behind

Item: Earlier today, in eastern Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed 10 members of the local police, while they were travelling home from a ceremony.

Item: Also today, in southern Afghanistan, two Taliban militants hiding small guns in their shoes [not turbans? Ed.] slipped into a provincial governor's compound, setting off a fierce gun battle that left two security guards and both attackers dead.

Item: As reported here earlier this week, Prime Minister Harpoon says if Canada is asked by the USA to extend its hopeless "mission" in Afghanistan beyond 2014, he will "consider all the options".

Suggestion, from Walt to Messers Obama, Harper et al. Isn't it about time to declare victory in Afghanistan and get the hell out?

Precedent: When the undeclared Vietnam War was at its height, with the US military spinning its wheels, all the while piling up American as well as Vietnamese corpses, Lyndon Johnson called an old Senate colleague, George Aiken. The prez asked his friend, who had been in the Senate since 1941, what he should do about Vietnam. Senator Aiken's advice? Claim victory and get out. Did Mr. Johnson listen? Noooooo...

Congressman Ron Paul, among others, have given the same advice to Al O'Bama. Enough already! Let's quit while we're behind!

Bombs started to fall on Kabul eleven years ago, the announced objective being to oust the Taliban. Well, as noted above, the Taliban are still there. When they get pushed out of one area, they retreat into another, or cross into Pakistan, or melt into their Afghan community.

Meanwhile, the Americans, Aussies, Kiwis and even Canucks fight on to support the Karzai government, which is not only thoroughly corrupt, but also irrelevant beyond the outskirts of Kabul. In the provinces, warlords again run the show. And Afghanistan's neighbours -- Pakistan, India and Iran -- have their own agendas, which NATO members can't begin to understand, let alone affect.

The Prez keeps saying US troops will be drawn down swiftly in 2013 and gone by 2014. Should Americans believe him? Last weekend, Washington and Kabul drafted an agreement that would see the USA supporting the Afghan government for a decade after combat forces leave. That would stretch the U.S. commitment from 2001 to 2024.

The mission after 2014 period will be to building democratic institutions and develop Afghanistan's economy, once all the opium poppies are killed. The estimated cost is $4 billion... per year! The US would put about $2.7 billion of taxpayers money on the Persian carpet, while the begging bowl will be passed around at the NATO heads of government meeting in Chicago in three weeks, to collect the remaining $1.3 billion.

But no matter how much money we pore down the Afghan rathole, once our forces leave, Afghanistan is almost certain to enter a period of fracture marked by political instability and ethnic conflict. Some would say, in light of events such as today's, that a civil war has already started.

So what we're doing is throwing good money -- not to mention precious western lives -- after bad. No matter what we do, Afghanistan's future will be shaped by domestic forces and pressure from nearby nations over which NATO will have little or no control.

Afghanistan has seen outside powers -- Persia, Britain, Russia, now America -- come... and go. Yet Afghanistan hasn't changed. Nor will it. The American war against Afghanistan -- let's not kid ourselves that NATO would be there if it wasn't for America's pushing -- has unclear goals (now that Bin Laden is dead) and only two chances of success: slim and none. Time to go.