“On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns were stilled in what was then the bloodiest war in history. A century later it’s worth remembering that while the armistice ended a world war, it also set the table for the next, thanks to the misguided idealism of its author, President Woodrow Wilson.
The Allies had no military reason to stop the fighting.The German army had been badly beaten in a series of battles and was streaming homeward in confusion. The British and French were at the point of exhaustion after four years of constant slaughter, but Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, wanted to turn the German retreat into a rout. His forces had taken a bloody nose in the Argonne Forest, but they were still fresh—and growing in numbers. By the start of 1919 Pershing expected to have more than a million men in the field. Completing Germany’s defeat, even advancing to Berlin, would put the U.S. in a position to dictate final peace terms. Germany’s unconditional surrender would allow America to shape Europe in ways that would guarantee Americans soldiers need never die there again.
But Wilson demurred. The president had entered the war pledging “peace without victory.”His objective was to create a new world order. When the new German government sent a note to Wilson on Oct. 4 asking for an armistice, he saw an opportunity to achieve his aims without further bloodshed.
…Only one military leader dissented from the armistice agreement: Gen. Pershing. Although in the end he bowed to his commander in chief and his fellow Allied generals, he never gave up his belief that total military victory was the key to lasting peace. “We never really let the Germans know who won the war,” he said in 1923. “They are being told that their army was stabbed in the back, betrayed, that their army had not been defeated.The Germans never believed they were beaten. It will have to be done all over again.”
It was. The armistice spared Germany the final defeat it had earned.Its army remained battered but intact, and the “stab in the back” myth took deep root in the interwar years. It eventually contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler, who identified the Jews as the perpetrators of the betrayal.America and the world would have to fight yet another, even bloodier war, to prove him wrong…”
Yet, surprisingly, the lesson must still be relearned, as when inaccurate, highly emotional press coverage in the First Gulf War of the supposed “Highway of Death”…
…led George H.W. Bush to let Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards off the ropes, thus allowing Saddam to continue stirring the pot in the Middle East while his Republican Guards stepped up their campaign of slaughter and terror against Iraq’s Shiite and Kurd minorities. More importantly, it ensured the unfinished task of taking down the Iraqi dictator would fall to another President Bush, at the cost of countless billions of dollars and untold thousands of lives.
As George Santayana so famously observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Unfortunately, those who bear the cost of the reeducation are most often innocent civilians and members of our Military.
We don’t give Douglas MacArthur credit for much, but he was right when he observed, “There is no substitute for victory”. And we’d add a war lost is only slightly worse than a war half-won.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing at NRO, Kevin Williamson recounts life in…
“Just before the election, an Andrew Gillum intern named Shelby Shoup was arrested and charged with battery after assaulting some college Republicans on the campus of Florida State University. It was rather less exciting than that sounds: She went on a rant about “Nazis” and “fascism” — Gillum’s Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, finished up at Harvard Law and then joined the U.S. military and helped to fight actual Jew-hating totalitarian thugs in Iraq, in case anybody cares about the facts— before dousing the Republicans with chocolate milk.
There isn’t much of enduring interest in that story: Feckless and hysterical young Caitlyns have been going all rage-monkey from coast to coast for a good bit now, and one might get a feel for the level of maturity at play here by meditating on the fact that a grown-ass woman of legal voting age was walking around drinking chocolate milk. Caitlyns gotta Caitlyn, I suppose.
Of course Shoup should be convicted on a misdemeanor battery charge, this being a fairly open-and-shut case supported by video evidence. Her actions are also a serious violation of the university’s code of student conduct, which could entail punishment up to and including expulsion.Kicking her out of the university would be excessive, I think, and she’s obviously in need of further and better education. I’d suggest having her write a 40-page essay on the works of Russell Kirk or F. A. Hayek, or maybe Ludwig von Mises on the actual Nazis and totalitarianism.
Spilt milk, indeed.
This sort of behavior should be understood as being on a spectrum.
The assault on Tucker Carlson’s home by Antifa thugs this week was a much more serious episode.It was an act of political terrorism directed at the family of a journalist and commentator with the goal of intimidating him into silence. “We know where you sleep at night,” they chanted as they vandalized his home and his wife hid in a pantry. (He was not at home during the episode.) They also broke his front door in what may or may not have been an attempt to illegally and forcibly enter the home. A mob of 20 or so thugs trying to kick in the door, a mother by herself hiding in a pantry: The next time somebody asks you why anybody really needs a semiautomatic rifle,here’s your answer.
Imagine a line that measures the moral distance between Shelby Shoup’s battery in Florida to the Antifa assault on Tucker Carlson’s home, and then extend that line by the same distance in the same direction. Where are we then? Arson? Bombs?The kind of massacre James T. Hodgkinson was trying to pull off when he shot Steve Scalise and fired on other Republicans? How long until we arrive at Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden — both of whom earnestly believed that their acts of terrorism were morally imperative in the face of tyranny and evil?
Shoup and Antifa flatter themselves that they are what stands between the United States and fascism or Nazism. This is, obviously, absurd. It’s pure tribalism: President Obama authorized the extrajudicial killing of American citizens as a national-security measure; President Trump is an angry tweeter. But it is the latterrather than the former that apparently presages the rise of a Falange Americana. That is how you know that this is a fundamentally unserious point of view…”
In other words, they’re angry, ignorant, misguided, pampered pieces of…
Next, courtesy of Townhall.com, Matt Vespa explains how…
Sorry, we’re confused. After running what was at best a lackluster campaign, McSally lost to a bisexual former member of the Green Party; why on earth would you want to appoint a loser with a history of close calls to a Senate seat she’d likely give up in the next election? Why not name someone, male or female, Black, White or Brown, with the solid Conservative record and charisma to keep it?!?
Since we’re on the subject of politicians stepping aside for the good of the country, given the results of the Texas Senate race, Ted Cruz should be considering a similar scenario. Cruz is a brilliant, committed Conservative…but with the outward appeal of Snidely Whiplash…
Don’t misunderstand us: Cruz would make an outstanding SCOTUS justice, or, particularly if Matthew Whitaker’s appointment runs into trouble, an outstanding replacement for Jeff Sessions. But his future in national politics, i.e., his continued electability to the Senate, let alone as President, is severely limited by physical characteristics he cannot change. And while one should never judge a book by its cover, given the landslide with which Greg Abbott was reelected compared to Ted’s 3% margin of victory, a significant portion of Texans who voted for Abbott yet didn’t pull the lever Cruz may have done just that…which should be cause for concern.
Moving on, as Beth Baumann details at Townhall.com, the Borderline Bar shooting may be yet another case where those who’ve sworn an oath to serve and protect may have…
“…Back in April, police had a run in with Long. They were called out to his Newbury Park home that he shared with his mom when neighbors heard loud crushing coming from inside.
Police were dispatched after Long shot a round from his handgun into one of the walls. He then barricaded himself inside. Police spent hours trying to get him to peacefully come outside, The Wall Street Journalreported. “They couldn’t get him out for a long time, like half the day,” neighbor Richard Berge told WSJ.
Mental health specialists were dispatched to the scene but they determined that he wasn’t a threat and didn’t qualify for an involuntary psychiatric hold.
According to neighbors, his mother, Colleen, said he was “hell to live with.” They also said Colleen lived in a perpetual state of fear because of her son.
Although California hasstrict “red flag” laws, which allows police or family members to temporarily remove firearms from a person they deem a threat to themselves or others, it’s unclear why Long’s firearms were not removed back in April…”
Just as with illegal immigration, why have laws if authorities aren’t going to enforce them?!?
And in the follow-up segment, Best of the Web‘s Jim Freeman reports on The Left’s latest attempt to twist the Constitution:
“The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will soon have to consider what America owes to a CNN television correspondent named Jim Acosta. Today he and CNN filed a lawsuit asserting that unlike almost every other person in the country, Mr. Acosta has a constitutional right to a “hard pass” allowing him to enter and exit the White House unescorted and uninvited. Whatever one thinks of his novel legal theory, both in his lawsuit and at his appearance last week at the White House, Mr. Acosta has mischaracterized recent events.
…Here’s how the lawsuit describes the scene as the President showed up to share his thoughts on Tuesday’s midterm elections:
President Trump delivered opening remarks and then invited questions from the media in attendance.Acosta, sitting in the front row, raised his hand. President Trump called on Acosta to “[g]o ahead” with a question.Acosta was one of the first reporters the President called on for questions.
Speaking through a hand-held microphone, as did all the White House journalists who asked questions, Acosta asked a question about one of President Trump’s statements during the midterm campaign—namely, whether a caravan making its way to the United States from Central America constitutes “an invasion” of the country, a significant feature of the President’s messaging during the just-ended campaign.
This is not an accurate rendering of what happened. A video recording of the eventshows that after four reporters took their turns asking questions, the President called on Mr. Acosta, who made it clear that he would not simply be asking questions and seeking information as reporters do but intended to provide a rebuttal to recent comments made by the President. “I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign—in the midterms,” said the CNN commentator.
…The First Amendment prevents the President or anyone else in the federal government from restricting the ability of citizens to report and publish. Does it also require the President to listen to ill-informed lectures for as long as the lecturers choose to speak? Obviously if everyone had the right to refuse to surrender the microphone at press conferences the result would be fewer members of the press corps having an opportunity to ask questions, not more.
…UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh said the White House doesn’t necessarily need to have a powerful reason to keep Mr. Acosta out. More recent First Amendment case law suggests that the president could win by convincing a judge that the decision was merely reasonable, according to Mr. Volokh.
The key for the White House, he said, is showing that it took action against the CNN reporter not based on his reporting or critical views about Mr. Trump but because of his conduct at news conferences.
His conduct last week was reason enough. Yet again and again the suit demands special constitutional treatment for Mr. Acosta. (How like a Liberal!!!)How exactly does one qualify as a member of the entitlement estate?“
Evidently, at least from the “facts” offered by CNN in their suit, by lying through one’s teeth. Really, when you’re a Progressive propaganda outlet that’s lost Bob Woodward, it’s game over.
Though we must confess we’re left wondering why Trump called on Acosta in the first place, not to mention why he still had a seat in the front row? After all, given his history, could he not have been consigned to the back of the room and never called on again? That is, unless The Donald relishes the continuous confrontation.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Editor’s note: With all due respect to the brilliant Michael Ramirez, the degradation of honest, impartial contemporary journalism began with Uncle Walter and his biased account of the Tet Offensive in January 1968.
Finally, speaking of problems, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this from out of the West Texas town of El Paso:
“A Texas man thwarted his own burglary attempt Tuesday evening after bleeding to death inside the home he had broken into, police said.
…The homeowner told responding officers he had found the would-be burglar after discovering a broken window and pools of blood, police said in a news release.Investigators determined the man had slashed his arms on the broken window and died from loss of blood, according to the release…”
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