Morning Joe 1/8/2013 -- What about Hagel?

The Obama administration is expert at creating diversions to take heat off more important issues for which they should be made to answer. Benghazi is slipping out of the public's memory or concern. The fact the fiscal negotiations resulted in higher taxes and no real spending cuts is pushed to another showdown a few months away which Obama has already said he will not participate in.

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to the Department of Defense is the latest diversion, and it's what the Morning Joe crew discussed this morning. The Left can't understand why McCain, who once praised Hagel, is now questioning him. The Left criticizes neocons for saying they will block the Hagel nomination. There are voices on the left, though, who are criticizing the Hagel nomination, but it's the Right's backlash which is condemned in the MSM. All the fuss is a distraction, because Hagel will do what Obama wants done. Some are pretending that Hagel is a non-interventionist, and that Obama can finally end the Afghanistan War like he has wanted to, and that Obama can now move America away from militarism/interventionism.

I haven't seen any evidence that Hagel or Obama are non-interventionists. Obama voted against the Iraq War, but his history of interventions over the past 4 years shows that it was the Iraq War only that he opposed, not the doctrine of interventionism. Hagel voted for the Iraq War, then he turned against it when public opinion changed and it looked like the war might fall apart. Hagel is an ambitious politician who wants to show statesman like qualities by going against the Republican Party on issues that are easy to go against. I haven't heard or read Hagel criticize Obama on his drone policy, or criticize Obama for insane actions in Afghanistan as the soldiers we train there continue to turn on our soldiers. Hagel is no objective hero, he just shifts with the political winds.

It doesn't matter if Hagel becomes Secretary of Defense -- actually, the more troublesome nomination is Brennan as head of the super-secretive CIA. Hagel will be an Obama-puppet. What matters is putting pressure on government to control the military/industrial policy and to develope a sane foreign policy, especially as it relates to the mideast. The sooner we leave the mideast, the better off America will be. With all the money we're wasting in the mideast, and on military bases protecting countries that should protect themselves, we can build defense systems superior to anything ever imagined, and we'd have enough left over to put back in the private sector so that real productive jobs are created.

I'm glad we could help

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/CombattingviolenceagainstwomeninAfghanistan.aspx

In 20 more years we should se significant progress.

Morning Joe 12/11/2012 --

Joe Scarborough and other pundits on Morning Joe are continuing the critique of the Republican Party post-election. They just can't get enough of the Monday morning quarterbacking, priding themselves on 20-20 vision looking back. Everything Republicans do now to harshly criticize Democrats is seen as Limbaugh-style Republicanism, but what they're really saying is that the establishment Republicans must take control.

Yesterday Scarborough made fun of those who called the recent jobs numbers what they are. It was amazing how Scarborough ridiculed Republicans who said that the lower unemployment rate was due to people leaving the workforce. Scarborough said sometimes you just have to take good news and math and accept it for what it is. That's what the critics of the job report were saying, though, the facts and math are that employment is not getting better -- it's getting worse as 350,000 workers dropped out of the workforce. Scarborough obviously would rather live in Democrat fantasy world so he's seen as cooperative and enlightened.

This morning Scarborough said radio talk show hosts and bloggers don't understand Hayek and Friedman. This is amazing since Scarborough has promoted policies and compromises that Hakek and Friedman would oppose. The crew talked about manufacturing jobs coming back to America, but that they are lower pay than the old $30 an hour union jobs which chased US jobs to China. The great economist Scarborough couldn't defend why these jobs are good other than they are better than nothing -- real Hayekian that. No one on the panel made the argument that if pay goes down across the board to competive levels in the global market, then if government doesn't intervene to make sure prices rise, with everything being relative, lower prices will be a good development -- what really matters is what's left over after paying the basic bills, and we shouldn't be afraid of natural, free market deflation.

There's one area of agreement that I've had with the Morning Joe gang, and that is getting out of Afghanistan. Scarborough and company don't uphold non-interventionism in foreign affairs as a principle, but they sure see the futility of staying in Afghanistan, and they see it correctly as a political war now designed to protect Obama from being the President who faces the consequences of our interventions in that country. Every new death is on Obama's hands.

What did we gain from the Iraq War?

It appears that Iraq hasn't changed much and that one dictator was removed while another was placed in power.

The same can be said for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and every mideast country in which we intervene. To start the 21st century move toward peace and prosperity, let's first leave the mideast.

Update on Saturday, October 27, 2012 at 08:14PM by M. Farmer

I forgot this.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/iraqi-insurgents-unleash-string-of-bombings-kill-40-during-muslim-holiday/

A great move toward peace

In the midst of political turmoil, as the election approaches, the divisions between statists and anti-statists has never been greater. We now have a long history with nation-states -- the wars of the 20th century and now going into the 21st century show us that it's past time to begin a long path toward peace and free trade. If we allow the rest of the world to push us into civil war after civil war, the world will stupidly move toward global war, and the civilized nations have come too far to allow that. Regardless of how difficult it is to admit that Afghanistan is a no-win situation, it's still a no-win situation, and it will be tomorrow and the next day and the next, on and on.

9/11 certainly called for a clear response, and, although looking back we could have responded in more effective ways, our response has been noted by the world and especially by the region of the world out of which came the terrorist attack. While some hawks are claiming that the recent death of the Ambassador in Libya shows us al Qaeda is alive and well, I suspect that Amb. Stevens's death has more to do with our government's interventions, schemes and incompetence than with any renewed strength regarding al Qaeda. We shouldn't even have a consulate or an emabassy in Libya. We should have no relations at all with Libya, not until we know what they value and what their intentions are.

I have no way of knowing if either political party in the US will lead the move to peace and free trade, but I do know that the American people have to be involved, and that we can be the guiding force to start such a move. We as a people have to demand that our troops are brought home as we re-group and make different plans as to how we'll relate with foreign countries in the 21st century. In spite of the conservative call for American domination in global affairs, because, ostensibly, we will lead the world more benevolently than other nations, this is an old idea that we should no longer allow to guide us. We can lead by example not intervention and manipulation.

From at least WWI on we've learned that foreign entanglements lead to negative unintended consequences. We can debate the pros and cons of intervention, such as stopping Hitler, but if we trace effects as best we can back to original causes, we see that if we and others had made a few different decisions most wars could have been avoided. Hindsight is 20/20, but the point is we have the advantage of our history now, so we should begin avoiding wars that could be in our future if we blindly react to international affairs, and if we put ourselves in situations which are really none of our business. I believe that national security is government's primary concern, but entanglement in foreign affairs only puts our national security at risk. We've learned this. The problem is that although national security is the government's primary concern, it's also the State's major tool to expand power and control its citizens. We have to maintain clear heads when considering national security -- fear should never cause us to surrender our individual rights.