Category: Opinion
The purpose of this section is intended for opinion, blogging on general topics/issues and features of FOCM members.
American system precludes a Hilter-type leader
Saw a longer version of this in an email from my brother and on a Facebook post. Shortened it here:
The idea of comparing an American president to Hitler is just as absurd …from any angle, in any context. The American system ITSELF pretty much prevents “Hitlers” from showing up. And America ITSELF is anathema to what Hitler was trying to create. An American ANYTHING or ANYONE is hard to fit into the Hitler model. It’s just not apples to apples.
There are some fundamental things to understand about Hitler:
1. He took over a small, failing state that didn’t have separated government functions, enumerated powers or checks and balances. It’s difficult for a guy like that to show up here, in this system.
2. His entire political career was violent from the beginning. There was always death in his wake. He didn’t just suddenly “turn” violent. It was a pattern …as it always is with sociopaths. This is THE most important thing to watch; the violence. I always keep an eye on who is rioting …breaking things …throwing rocks and bombs. It doesn’t make them Nazis. But it signals how far they’re willing to go.
3. He entered office with his own personal military construct (the SS) with allegiance to him ONLY. They would carry out things the regular military would never carry out: i.e. the murder of private citizens and political opponents. Nothing like that exists or COULD exist in America. We simply wouldn’t allow it.
4. He didn’t start out just killing Jews. He started out euthanizing people with special needs …for the betterment of the care-givers’ lives.
5. He disarmed the population, then nationalized healthcare and education.
The list can go on and on. But the deal is this:
Hitler was a real life murdering sociopath. He wasn’t just a charismatic speaker who incrementally fell into bad behavior. He wasn’t just a racist corrupted by unfettered power. In other words, you or I probably couldn’t end up being Hitler. A garden variety KKK leader probably couldn’t end up being Hitler either …or a community organizer …or a New York real-estate tycoon. It’s not that easy or simple.
NONE of our American presidents have ever been Hitler. But the people of Germany certainly thought FDR was a murdering dictator when B-17s started dropping bombs on them. This is why you have to KNOW what you believe and why you believe it. Good guys and bad guys are often in the eyes of the beholder. And they often look similar in the fog of conflict. I would imagine Japanese Americans in internment camps wondered if their president was Hitler-like. Nope. Not a nice thing to do, but not close to Hitler.
Now, people are comparing Donald Trump to Hitler as some compared Obama or the Left to Hitler. I get that someone who is combative with the press and who wants to vet refugees and shut down open immigration fits the bill some are always looking for when it comes to finally getting their “Hitler” villain.
But if you study enough about it, you realize the guy vetting and banning refugees is probably not Hitler …the guy CREATING refugees probably is. If we keep looking for Hitler in every United States president we disagree with, we’re not going to recognize the real one when he actually shows up …in a different country.
Example of Irony
It was reported that in the early days of Trump’s run to be the Republican nominee that it was a publicity stunt to increase the Trump brand. The thought was that he could get free publicity to help increase demand and interest in a new season of The Apprentice/Celebrity Apprentice, even if he stayed in only for a month or two. Now that he’s gone further than he expected and is in fact the Republican nominee, it appears that the publicity is hurting his business. Since Trump has brought out such strong negative feelings from a significant percent of the population, it’s hurting his brand. This will give his kids the opportunity to manage/promote in a crisis. It appears that people don’t want to be associated with it. For example:
…meeting planners and industry insiders say, the name — and the property’s association with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — is likely to be the largest sticking point for the 263-room hotel, which opened to the public Monday.
“This hotel is the new shiny penny in Washington — the only problem is that Donald Trump has his name on it,” said Chryssa Zizos, president and chief executive of Live Wire Media Relations, whose clients include the Carlyle Group and Raytheon. “People are really, really nervous about utilizing the hotel’s bigger spaces because it’s so polarizing. There’s a lot of stigma attached to it.”
Trump name bad for his business?
Google Search is Biased
By now I have seen enough proof of the political bias of Google Search. It’s easily proven. Go to yahoo search and type “hillary clinton cri” and see how it suggests what you’re looking for based on the most common searches like that. You get “crimes”, “criminal”, “criminal charges” and “crimes list” as the most common. Do the same in Google Search and you get “cries” and “crisis of character”. See below example based on recent Colin Kaepernick quotes. I’ve started using other search engines as a result.
“You have Hillary who has called black teens or black kids ‘super predators,’ you have Donald Trump who’s openly racist,” Kaepernick told reporters. “We have a presidential candidate who has deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate. That doesn’t make sense to me because if that was any other person you’d be in prison. So, what is this country really standing for?”
So Kaepernick believes Hillary Clinton has used racially insulting terms and belongs in prison.
NewsBusters conducted a Google News search using the terms “Kaepernick, Trump and openly racist” a day later and got 48 results. Yet a search using the terms “Kaepernick, Clinton and prison” returned just four. The only item on the Clinton remarks to appear in a major press outlet was an article in The Washington Post, according to NewsBusters.
The Associated Press ran a story noting Kaepernick’s description of Trump, but left out his remarks about Clinton.
Election Year Observations
My family has long subscribed to Readers Digest and I continue to get it. Here are a few comments made in a recent issue that seem relevant during this unpredictable presidential election.
Americans over the age of 40 are the only citizens with even the dimmest adult memories of the presidency of George H. W. Bush …[so] close to 100 million eligible voters have no firsthand recollection of a time when things worked in Washington. That might be a starting point for understanding the crippling cynicism that hangs over contemporary politics.
Walter Shapiro, political columnist in a blog post
The basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
Marilynne Robinson, PhD, novelist and professor of writing, New York Review of Books
Forcing public figures to instinctively fear saying anything even remotely offensive doesn’t encourage argument or intellectual rigor or even honesty. Instead, it compels people to stick to bland sound bites and safe topics.
Sophie Gilbert, culture writer, The Atlantic
The entry above appears to be followed by everyone in this year’s election, which may be why it’s causing such upheaval and strong feelings.
Protected: To Trump or not to Trump
New hotbeds of pollution spotted from satellites
Saw this article on Reuters:
Researchers in the United States and Canada have located 39 unreported sources of major pollution using a new satellite-based method, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
The unreported sources of toxic sulfur dioxide emissions are clusters of coal-burning power plants, smelters and oil and gas operations in the Middle East, Mexico and Russia that were found in an analysis of satellite data from 2005 to 2014, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.
The analysis also found that the satellite-based estimates of the emissions were two or three times higher than those reported from known sources in those regions, NASA said.
Hillary Has to Change Tactics
Chicago Tribune article by Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View writes a good article on the Inspector General report regarding Hillary’s emails.
While the report doesn’t find an email with Hillary writing: heh, heh, heh, they’ll never FOIA my emails NOW!!!!” — what it does lay out is deeply troubling, even though her supporters have already begun the typical defense of “nothing to see here, move along.”
It lays to rest the longtime Clinton defense that this use of a private server was somehow normal and allowed by government rules: It was not normal, and was not allowed by the government rules in place at the time. Hillary Clinton broke the rules in her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, according to a report by the State Department’s inspector general May 25, 2016. (Reuters)
It also shreds the defense that “Well, Colin Powell did it too” into very fine dust, and then neatly disposes of the dust. As the report makes very clear, there are substantial differences between what the two secretaries of State did:
– Powell says he set up a private email account, in addition to his internal account, because at the time the State Department “email system in place only only permitted communication among Department staff. He therefore requested that information technology staff install the private line so that he could use his personal account to communicate with people outside the Department.” This is a quite plausible reason that, around the turn of the millennium, a secretary of state would have wanted to use his own account. Powell seems not to have done enough to ensure that those records were maintained, which is a problem (though it’s not clear that he was aware that he should have turned those emails over). But as far as I can tell, the most plausible explanation of Clinton’s behavior is that she set up her email server expressly to keep those emails from being archived as records (and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests), which is a great deal more problematic than setting up an inadequately archived email system because there’s no other way to use an increasingly vital communications technology.
– Powell had an outside line set up in his office, into which he plugged a laptop, which he used alongside his State Department computer. The IT department was, in other words, aware that this was going on, and it seems to have come up in discussions of his drive to get everyone at State access to the Internet at their desk. While the quality of information about Powell’s Internet usage is not as high as it is about Clinton’s (after 10 years, memories fade, people become hard to contact, and records degrade), there’s no indication that he was less than transparent with staff. But folks at State clearly had no idea what was going on with Clinton’s email server and, troublingly, at least two people who asked about it were apparently told to shut up and never raise the subject again.
– Three things have changed pretty dramatically since Powell’s day: the magnitude (and appreciation) of cybersecurity threats, the quality of the State Department systems and government rules surrounding both recordkeeping and cybersecurity. One can argue that Powell should not have used a private computer during his tenure, but he seems to have done so in consultation with the IT folks, at a time when the policy surrounding these things was “very fluid” and the State Department “was not aware of the magnitude of the security risks associated with information technology.” By 2009, the magnitude of the risks was clear, and the policy was also much clearer. As far as the OIG could determine, Clinton took no action to ensure that she was in compliance with that policy, which, in fact, she emphatically was not. Officials at State told the OIG in no uncertain terms that they would not have approved her reliance on a personal email server.
– The OIG found only three instances in which State employees had relied exclusively on personal email: Powell, Clinton and Ambassador J. Scott Gration, U.S. emissary to Kenya from 2011 to 2012. Gration, who served under Clinton, was in the middle of a disciplinary process initiated against him for this email use (among other things) when he resigned. So it is impossible to argue not only that this was somehow in compliance with State’s guidelines but also that Clinton might have thought it was in compliance, unless she somehow failed to notice when or why her ambassador to Kenya went missing.
– The OIG found evidence that the server was attacked and that Clinton’s staff members (and presumably Clinton herself) were aware of it. (Clinton at one point seems to have expressed concern that people might be trying to hack her email.) These incidents should have been reported to computer security personnel, but OIG found no evidence that they were. Clinton’s supporters have offered the wan defense that “attacked” doesn’t mean “actually hacked,” but of course, since they didn’t report it, there was no timely investigation, so we don’t really know what happened, or even whether her server setup and/or server administrator were sophisticated enough to detect a penetration had one taken place.
– This is the most profoundly amazing part of the whole story: Clinton’s server administrator was hired by State as a political appointee, from which position he continued to provide support to Clinton’s private email server during working hours, without telling anyone this was happening:
Why is Clinton being held to a lower standard? Well, because she’s a Clinton, and the Clintons have always acted as if the rules applied only to others. And given that Democrats boxed themselves into her name on the ticket so early on, Team Blue had little choice but to rally around and pretend that this is just a minor peccadillo, like forgetting to date the signature on your FEC filings. Lord knows, this election cycle, there’s good reason to view this sort of behavior as the lesser of two evils.
But it isn’t minor. Setting up an email server in a home several states away from the security and IT folks, in disregard of the rules designed to protect state secrets and ensure good government records, and then hiring your server administrator to a political slot while he keeps managing your system on government time is unacceptable behavior in a government official. If Clinton weren’t the nominee, or if she had an R after her name rather than a D, her defenders would have no difficulty recognizing just how troubling it is.
That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to prefer Donald Trump to her. Back when I was surveying #NeverTrump voters, I heard from more than one conservative intelligence type who basically said “I think Clinton should be in jail for what she did, and I still think she’s a better choice than Trump for the presidency.”
Politics is not simply a team sport, and good government is possible only if we’re willing to call out misbehavior no matter who does it. Even if we still hold our nose and pull the lever for the misbehaver come November.
#HiLIARy #HiLIEry
The Serial Rapist Awards?
Is this picture from a serial rapist award ceremony? Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby – America’s most notorious and long lasting serial rapists.
FOCM Political Discourse
Within FOCM Networking are several sub-groups, one of which is the political group. These “discussions” take place via email and occasionally we have them at this website but we put a password on the discussion group so all can feel free to state their opinion in private. So to give you an idea of what the FOCM political email discussions can look like, here’s a recent exchange, with all names removed:
FOCM Political Member A
All this would all be so much funnier if it wasn’t so serious! He is the biggest moron. All smoke and mirrors as far as his “success” and the biggest liar in the public eye. He makes the others look like Honest Abe! And all his supporters are proof of the complete failure of the American educational system!
Hillary 2016!
FOCM Political Member D:
Good Lord, no to Hillary – she’ll hurt the drug companies which will hurt my livelihood and that’s the only thing you should be concerned about – me! Although I actually have no idea what Trump will do.
What worries me about Hillary is what America would look like in 4 years (if she has a Democratic Congress) –
Long lines at men’s rooms due to a shortage of them – having to convert some to Men who are transitioning to Women; Women who are transitioning to Men, Now Men were Women, Now Women were Men (what about the international symbols for such bathrooms – oy vey!)
Availability of abortions for up to the day before birth
Holding down pharma company profits – breaking one of America’s best industries; stifling innovation
The same access to healthcare for everyone (lowering the quality and increasing the price)
Socialized Medicine (see above – lower quality, longer wait times)
Taxing caucausians to pay remunerations to descendants of slaves and Native Americans
Only Liberal free speech allowed
FOCM Political Member B
A Hillary supporter questioning anyone’s educational level makes me chuckle (and throw up in my mouth a little). Honestly, the woman could strangle a kitten on live tv and her supporters would still vote for her and claim she had nothing to do with it.
I honestly don’t get what is to admire. Her hunger for power at all costs? I don’t see her at all as a woman who has forged her own way. I see her as opportunistic at best. As a woman, working mother, wife and veteran, she stands for nothing I hold in esteem. I can abide a buffoon far more easily than an intentional manipulator who seems to have a compulsion for lying.
FOCM Political Member A
Love Kasich. I blame the slimy media that more people don’t know why he’s the best candidate. All they care about is hype and Trump is a media darling. It’s a shame since he is the only qualified Republican.
FOCM Political Member B
But the resounding rationale I hear for supporting her and calling those with differing opinions uneducated is simply that she isn’t as bad as the other guy……followed by dismissive laughter.
Don’t expect any clear reasons beyond that she isn’t Trump. If Trump is no longer in the picture I, like so many others, will be waiting with bated breath to hear about all of her astounding leadership and fight for the common man or woman (with whom she has zero in common).
Trump might not be presidential in demeanor, but you’re right on one thing….he’s showing up the racket for what it is. So is Sanders. Neither of them would have any traction if not for Hillary. Kasich is taking the higher ground in many respects. Cruz has his fair argument to make.
FOCM Political Member A
No one lies more than Trump. And I don’t vote for buffoons.
Hillary 2016!
FOCM Political Member B
No one leaves more ambassadors to die and makes up fake cover stories than Hiilary.
Hillary for prison 2016!
FOCM Political Member A
Trump is a criminal, a narcissist, misogynist, racist, pathological liar, has no plan AT ALL and no idea how to run a country. He’s a complete joke.
Trump for prison 2016!
Hillary for president 2016!
FOCM Political Member C
John Kasich is the one to vote for.
The one good thing Trump has done is release this country from the shackles of PC speech. We are once again free to say what we believe! However he is not presidential material and neither is Hillary.
Why she believes she has the moral authority to demand lower CEO pay when as a multi-millionaire she demands more for a ONE hour speech than the average US CEO makes in a year. Her rationale for charging this much was that she was just doing what previous secretaries of state had done. Given her wealth I see that as nothing more than pure greed on her part. Every day I struggle to understand how she can be worth $30+ million and have only left her secretary of state job 3 years ago…. that’s about $10 million per year…sounds like CEO pay to me. Please, someone, anyone, help me understand what economic added value enterprise she was running for the last three years that justifies that kind of income.
I’d love to read her Wallstreet speech transcripts. Even the Huffington Post thinks she is afraid to release them. But, as with anything else her supporters don’t like, heads go into the sand and fingers get pointed at others to somehow justify it all.
FOCM Political Member B
Hopefully, someone will reply to your question with a logical justification, but I doubt it. A vote for Hillary is a vote for the status quo.