The Everlasting Phelps

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Obama & Clinton

October 31st, 2008

Let’s see, what happened the last time a Democrat promised to lower taxes if we would just elect him?

$250,000… no, wait, $200,000… no, wait, $150,000.  It’s so weak a promise, it can’t even make it to the election date without being discounted.  I’m sure it will be completely extinct by Inauguration Day.

Update: Down to $120,000!!!

Where Racism Still Exists

October 23rd, 2008

12 white kids commit actual vote fraud in Ohio. They get no charges on the “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that” defense.

Jamar Barksdale fraudulently registers 18 people in Philadelphia, and he gets charged and held on $150,000 bail.

Anyone want to bet that Jamar is not white?

Jamar deserves to be charged.  He doesn’t deserve to be held on $150,000 bail (which requires his family to come up with $15,000 cash just to borrow the rest from a bail bondsman.)  And the 12 felons who visited Ohio (allegedly) to commit thier crime sure as hell don’t deserve to walk.

Support the Innocence Project.

The media would have destroyed me

October 21st, 2008

Truer words could not have been said:

What sort of scenarios could we be talking about?

Well, there are a few. The most obvious is Iran. This could happen both ways (and maybe should be counted as two.) We know the Iranians think that a change in power in the US is the time to change strategies. They knew Carter was a pushover, and pushed on him. They didn’t think Reagan was, so they stopped pushing when he took office. It is as simple as that, and Ahmadinejad was one of the ones actually doing the pushing. It’s pretty obvious that he will handle the same situation the same way thirty years later. So, dirty bombs, nuclear devices smuggled into America or Israel, chemical attacks, you name it. The sky’s the limit there.

But the other side has to be looked at. Israel is going to want to stop that. If Obama is elected, they are going to want to hit Iran immediately. (Before they become the “you name it.”) They will ask Bush for cooperation. He won’t give it, because that is not how lame-duck American presidents do things. Unless Iran forces it (and they aren’t that dumb) he will wait out his term, and drop that turd in Obama’s lap. Obama will catch it with both hands and squeeze. He will either not cooperate with Israel (which won’t stop them and will set American/Israeli relations back, oh, 60 years) or he will cooperate, which will cause his anti-Israel (and significantly anti-Semetic) base to howl, just like Biden warned. Obama doesn’t have a good choice there. He’s painted himself into a corner.

Pakistan is the other place he has painted himself into a corner. He has all but pledged to invade this ally. Nothing could serve the Taliban’s purposes (and by extension Al Queda’s purposes) better than to have a war break out between the US and Pakistan. It would make it virtually impossible for any Muslim country to trust us again. We could expect to be expelled from everywhere we are hosted currently in the Middle East except Iraq (assuming he hasn’t already pulled us out of there and pissed in that bed) and Israel (assuming that he hasn’t already refused to cooperate with them above and pissed in that bed.) That would leave us to prosecute a war against Pakistan from a (now truly) occupied Afghanistan and… uh… Diego Garcia and Japan. No secure supply lines, no air route through the Middle East over Turkey, and no quick way to evac casualties to our best equipped hospitals (in Germany, Hawaii, and North America.)  We would be trying to figure out how to supply our troops with a hostile Muslim world on an already over extended air-cargo system.  Here’s a hint: look at a map of Afghanistan and identify all the ports.

So who else is going to push him? North Korea is obvious. They did pretty well lying to Bill Clinton and George Bush, and they were both already thought to have pretty good foreign relations and military chops. Obama is going to be seen as a neophyte on both fronts (and if he handled the two situations above poorly, rightly so.) They aren’t even going to bother being sly with him. They are going to just outright lie to him, promising him full cooperation and then doing whatever they like as soon as the cameras are off. Given their desperate economic situation, there is a good chance that they will bet on him surrendering South Korea and retreating in the face of an attack, and invade South Korea. Again, Obama has no good choices here. If he holds the line, we have a lot of American deaths (potentially more than we’ve had so far in the War on Terror — not 50K like Vietnam, but 2-10K are well within reason — 10K is 20%) and hideous losses for the South Koreans, both in lives and from the inevitable complete destruction of Seoul from NorK artillery.

Putin, of course, would go wild. He’s moved on Georgia with the “warmonger” Bush in office. If Obama is elected, Ukraine, Latvia, hell, even East Germany are potential invasion targets. As soon as Europe says peep about it, “oops”, there goes your oil and natural gas supply. Have a nice February — in the cold. There is absolutely no way that Obama will respond effectively to this, given his bungling of the Georgian response, and I’m saying that as someone expecting him to make the right call on the Israeli situation above and supporting them.

And that brings us to the real danger. If I were in Taiwan, I would consider moving if Obama is elected. (I would also buy any computer parts you want before November.) I personally think that Obama has the will to side with Taiwan over a Chinese invasion, but I’m an eternal optimist. If Taiwan is invaded, either we defend them or we don’t. If we defend them, the best case scenario is that diplomatic and economic ties between the US and China are ruined, as in, set back to pre-Nixon levels. The most likely scenario is that we end up in a blue-water naval battle with them and lose a carrier, maybe several. The worst case scenario is that our Navy is pounded with nukes, and Hawaii too for good measure. That’s an uppercut that they wouldn’t be able to pass up, both to disrupt resupply through Pearl, and to hit Obama in his heart. Without Hawaii, we have no effective deterrent in the Pacific.  None.  That is why the Japanese hit us there, and that is why the Chinese would do it in that situation.

I think that a Chinese invasion would only happen after the other scenarios above, but that is exactly what makes it dangerous. If Obama has handled all of the above well, we have an American left that is furious about him siding with Israel and becoming Bush 2.0, we have no bases to operate from on the Saudi peninsula because of our invasion of Pakistan, Japan is scared shitless because of the Korean situation and giving only tepid support if any, Russia is not only cold to us, but actively hostile, and Hawaii is in the theater of battle. In fact, I would say threats against Hawaii would be the opening salvo of a Chinese move on Taiwan.

We could end up in a simultaneous war with Russia and China at the same time. That is the classic World War III scenario, and our chances don’t look good in that show. We could very well end up fighting WW3 with a president from a state that doesn’t even exist once it starts.

All of these are dangers, regardless of who ends up in the Oval Office. The difference is in the minds of our enemies, not Americans. Do we elect the candidate who looks strong and defiant, making these longshot schemes with huge downsides on failure, or the candidate who looks sycophantic and appeasing, making even complete failure relatively manageable?

The most sickening part to me is all of the people who want to elect Obama because he will “improve our image to the world.”  Yeah.  Great.  Our enemies will think that we are chumps to be pushed on, and our “friends” won’t have the will to help us.

I’m sure that warm fuzzies are bullet and explosion proof.

Update:  I’ve come up with a scenario that doesn’t leave us with four years of turmoil and strife.  It goes like this.  November 5, Israel knocks on the White House door and says, “yoo hoo, we’re attacking Iran, you want in?”  Bush picks up the phone and calls Obama.  Obama and Bush meet, come up with a plan, and Obama gets on television and says, “together with Bush and Israel, we have come up with a joint plan to remove Iran’s ability to threaten the Middle East.  I’m Barack Obama, and I support this attack.”

That would give us the situation that Biden warns about, where Obama’s supporters go purple livid over his decision, and would go a long way towards dispelling the notion that Obama is a pushover in the eyes of our enemies.  He would be seen as Bush 2.0, which would cause our enemies to stop any wild plans (and go back to their regular nefarious plans) and cause Obama to lose pretty much all of the support he had from the public and any notions of a mandate for change.  But, Obama would be president, which is all he ever really cared about in the first place.

One more update: You can’t rule out this possibility.

The Everlasting Phelps
