In Flanders fields…
Veterans Day
Veterans Day began as World War I’s Armistice Day — a celebration of peace at the end of President Wilson’s “war to end all wars.” The US military suffered 116,516 deaths (63,114 in the 1918 influenza epidemic, 53,402 in combat) and approximately 320,000 sick and wounded. President Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on a platform of keeping the country out of the war. He broke that promise so that J.P. Morgan and the other Wall Street banks that had lent heavily to the allies for munitions would be able to collect their debts at war’s end. This would have been unlikely had Germany won. Wilson also promised Germany benefits if it ended the war — promises that also weren’t kept, embittering Germans and facilitating the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party.
Roy Moore
Roy Moore with the Ten Commandments plaque that made him a celebrity
Feminist accusations of decades-old sexual misconduct charges have become the new Salem witch hysteria. The rush to judgment over Roy Moore on the basis of accusations by Amazon’s non-stop anti-Republican newspaper, the Washington Post, may already be falling apart. Stephen B. Presser, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, also weighs in. The fact that Senate Majority McConnell has joined Senator McCain in the rush to judgment does not increase McConnell’s credibility in the face of accusations that he is abetting Senate Democrats’ obstruction of Trump nominee confirmations.
Rand Paul vs the yellow/brownshirt press
Senator Rand Paul
An op ed in today’s New York Times confirms Founders Broadsheet‘s charge yesterday that the pro-Democratic media were deliberately trivializing a felony assault on a Republican Congressman. The Times op ed makes no mention of the seriousness of the injuries inflicted, the insidious nature of the attack from behind on the unsuspecting Senator, and speculates with zero evidence that the incident was an incident of “yard rage” over clippings blown onto the attacking neighbor’s lawn. Democratic-allied media’s soft-glove treatment of the Rand assault mirrors their soft-glove treatment of assaults by Antifa and student hooligans against conservative speakers on university campuses. In the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. we are beginning to see the rise of a new optical phenomenon: a yellow press suited up in brown shirts.
Republicans, protectionism, again
In the face of the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, Japan is doing its best to hold together that organization — minus the US — to resist Chinese economic domination of East Asia.
Woodrow Wilson (“He kept us out of the war.” Later: “A war to end all wars”)
History is repeating itself. Republican stupidity over protectionism (the tariff issue) created a split of the party in the 1912 election, enabling Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency, create the income tax and the Federal Reserve, and sacrifice tens of thousands of American lives in WWI. His administration was also the beginning of Big Government as a fact of political life in the US.
The Fed’s policy of tight money in the late 1920s and early 1930s destroyed the US banking system, created the Great Depression, and brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power. Big Government made another leap forward under FDR, and the worldwide depression created by the Fed led to the rise of the Axis powers and WWII.
God bless our veterans. May they rest in peace and forgive the foolish politicians who doomed them.
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