Let’s face it.  If Europeans could vote in our election, John Kerry would be president today.

We’d also be mired in the same social statis of “don’t look, it couldn’t be happening to us” and the same tertiary phase of moral amnesia.  To say nothing of complete military abandonment and historical stupor.

Thus, it came as no surprise that Hosanna (sometimes pawning himself off by his mortal coil of Barack) Obama went to the Middle East and Europe to preach his brand of weakness and socialism, and guess what?  All he found was converts!

Gee, if you want to be just like them, of course they’re going to love you in Europe, and in the Middle East, you muffle enough sound bites and it suddenly appears as if they all wanted you from the git-go.  Where were you in 2003, Saint Barack?

The story that got me is so transparrent and ridiculous that I don’t believe the agenda-less (har de har har) American media even ran with it.

Picture: Hosanna Obama planting a note bearing a prayer between the cracks in the Western Wall in Jerusalem as cameras roll.  A real private moment of prayer, right, Barack?

By Peter Zeihan
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting

Since the Soviet fall, Russian generals, intelligence chiefs and foreign policy personnel have often waxed philosophic about the inevitability of a global alliance to hem in U.S. power — often using the rhetoric of a “multipolar world.” Central in all of these plans has been not only the implied leadership of Russia, but the implied presence of China.

At first glance, the two seem natural partners. China has a booming manufacturing economy, while Russia boasts growing exports of raw materials. But a closer look at the geography of the two paints a very different picture, while the history of the two tells an extraordinarily different story. If anything, it is no small miracle that the two have never found themselves facing each other in a brutal war.
 

By George Friedman
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues. 

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting

At the stroke of midnight on July 8, the Denver Water Board closed the road over Dillon Dam in Summit County, Colorado, citing security concerns. The board’s decision, which was implemented without advance notice to local governments and citizens, has not been well-received. It has sparked protests by enraged residents and has even prompted officials from Summit County, three affected towns nearby and the local fire and rescue department to file suit in state district court in a bid to force Denver Water to reopen the road.

The road is one of only a few traversing Summit County, so residents are understandably upset at the inconvenience caused by the closure. Local fire and rescue departments also say closing the road negatively affects emergency response times. This not the first time the road has been closed, however. The road was shut down for a week in January after a report of suspicious activity in the area — activity investigated by authorities and found to be nothing more than two men from Denver filming a music video. The Water Board has spent several million dollars to improve security for the mile-long dam road, and in May it even hired a private security company to conduct 24-hour armed patrols of the dam.

Denver Water has said the decision to close the road was not made in response to a specific threat, and we tend to believe this. With the heat they’ve received over the issue, they surely would have cited evidence of a specific threat to assuage public anger if there had been such information.

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting

A July 7 attack on the Indian Embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul that killed two high-level diplomats has all the signs of a targeted assassination versus a strike aimed at the building itself with the goal of incurring a high body count.

The morning of July 7, 2008, began normally enough at the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Afghan citizens began to queue up on the dusty street outside the fortified compound in hopes of obtaining a visa, while shopkeepers nearby offered refreshments, visa photos and other administrative services to the aspiring visa applicants. One by one, the Indian employees of the embassy began to arrive at work and pass through security checks at the gate. 

At around 8:30 a.m, as two embassy vehicles were in the process of entering the compound, the stillness of the morning was shattered when a suicide operative rammed his Toyota Corolla into the second of the two embassy vehicles and then activated the powerful improvised explosive device (IED) concealed in his car. The powerful blast destroyed the two embassy vehicles and blew the gates off the embassy’s outer perimeter. 

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart 
Courtetsy of Strategic Forecasting

Late on the night of June 22, a residence in Phoenix was approached by a heavily armed tactical team preparing to serve a warrant. The members of the team were wearing the typical gear for members of their profession: black boots, black BDU pants, Kevlar helmets and Phoenix Police Department (PPD) raid shirts pulled over their body armor. The team members carried AR-15 rifles equipped with Aimpoint sights to help them during the low-light operation and, like most cops on a tactical team, in addition to their long guns, the members of this team carried secondary weapons — pistols strapped to their thighs.
 
But the raid took a strange turn when one element of the team began directing suppressive fire on the residence windows while the second element entered — a tactic not normally employed by the PPD. This breach of departmental protocol did not stem from a mistake on the part of the team’s commander. It occurred because the eight men on the assault team were not from the PPD at all. These men were not cops serving a legal search or arrest warrant signed by a judge; they were cartel hit men serving a death warrant signed by a Mexican drug lord. 

Jesse Helms, the stubborn but conviction-motivated Republican conservative Senator from North Carolina, joined John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as being famous American politicians who passed away on July Fourth, succumbing yesterday.

Helms earned the moniker of Senator No for opposing and frequently outright stopping in their tracks any bill, appointment or initiative he didn’t agree with.  In fact, he was the only senator to vote against the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday.  He reckoned that King was nothing but a Marxist.

I didn’t always agree with Helms, and he didn’t represent me or my state, but I loved how he stood up and said "no" in the face of bureaucratic aggrandizement (except in his home state) and to measures of political expediency aimed at getting votes without ever taking the measures’ bad consequences into account.

Was he a racist?  Of course he was, but he was open about it while the rest of us just go about living our segregated ways and not connecting the dots of our life choices. 

Let’s face it:  How many white Americans would move into a solidly black or Latin neighborhood no matter how grand the house, low the price or sweet the deal?  How many whites would likewise move farther away to the suburbs or exurbs if their neighborhoods started turning to brown or black? 

I rest my case.

Meanwhile, bring on more Senator No’s, whether matter liberal, moderate or conservative.  Just say no, and we’ll all be better off.