Obama and Foreign Policy

This man wants to be our next president. He also wants to provide a new and unprecedented direction for our foreign policy, a policy that would allow him to engage in talks with our enemies with no pre-conditions. To be kind let me say that this is very naive on the part of the Senator.

I am a critic of our foreign policy because I believe that we are not very good at it. Part of the problem lies within the State Department itself. Civil Service people, that can't be fired unless hell freezes over and that's in their contract, have their own agenda. Richard Nixon, love him or hate him, knew the State Department and upon becoming president let it be known that he was going to be his own Secretary of Defense. This department is full of people who believe they know best and have been know to overrule the president's wishes.

The other problem is who we are. We have been the big kid on the block for a very long time. We were aware of that and as such we have backed off of issues involving foreign policy because we were concerned with not offending our friends or having others call us an imperialistic nation. The fix is not to go belly up and pander to others. Someone has to be strong in a crisis.

In a previous blog I noted the failed diplomatic efforts of Woodrow Wilson in his handling of the peace. Wilson is interesting in that he skillfully kept us out of the war albeit he did make some errors notably favoring England and not acting on the Lusitania incident. His actions after the war, particularly showing up at Versailles with the intent of running the show was a tragedy. The English and French officials took him to the woodshed and showed him the way of the world. Moral of that story, send the Secretary of State or someone else to prepare the way.

If Wilson were the only president who erred in foreign policy we could end right here but he wasn't. FDR's record is bad on the peace as is Truman's. JFK got beat up by Khrushcev in Berlin and over Cuba. LBJ did not do a good job in handling Viet Nam and Jimmy Carter messed up in Iran. I believe that judgement is still out on Reagan and the mess in Lebanon and George H.W. Bush's actions in the first Gulf War. However, from FDR to Bush, all of them had one thing in common, they did not jauntily walk into the lion's den and say let's talk because they all knew what had happened to Wilson. His actions caused him not only the loss of his dream, the League of Nations, but we ended up signing a separate peace with Germany.

Now comes the Senator from Illinois who wants to sit down with the likes of Chavez, Castro, and Ahmadinijad. He wants to do so without any pre-conditions on the meetings. This isn't even close to a win, win scenario. This is what we will get if we put a man with unrealistic expectations into the White House in 2009. Senator Obama will have his head handed to him just as Hitler did to Chamberlain.

Sam's Club and Rice

I want all of you to realize that this entry is a direct result of a news story declaring that Sam's Club, and certainly it is only a matter of time before other grocers join in, has rationed rice that comes in 20lb. bags. Someone, I presume at Sam's or maybe the evil Wal-Mart, has come to the conclusion that folks buying rice in large quantities are hoarding and trying to escape the escalating price of food. God forbid you should decide to take care of you and yours. There was a time when this would have been considered frugal behavior. Indeed, it is my understanding that those who belong to the Mormon religion ask their members to keep a couple years of food on hand in case of hard times.

Rationing is something we usually associate with shortages. If we do have a rice/food shortage we must ask why. Let me give you two words, government subsidies. We have been subsidizing American farmers for one reason or another ever since the depression. We are at it again in that we are subsidizing them to grow corn so that we can turn it into ethanol and burn it. I thought it was dumb to use petroleum to make polyester and plastic and wear it. This ethanol thing is one of the stupidest things we have ever done. Why are we doing this? We are engaged in the War on Global Warming or Climate Change, the latest war in the strategy of the Progressives.

Government officials would tell you that we subsidize agriculture because we want to save the small farmer. I would suggest that the small farmer disappeared with the Romans. What we are really doing is subsidizing Big Farming and bad agricultural practices.

In reality we probably have too many farmers in the country who continue to do the same things they have been doing since World War I. They grow crops. If the farmers in an area have a good crop that year in that region they all have a good year. Price for the crop in a surplus year will go down because there is too much product. In a bad year all the farmers will be low on product but price will be up. Unfortunately the farmers will not have a lot to sell. Costs, meanwhile, continue to go up for equipment and those fluids needed to run that equipment. Right now there are farmers growing corn for ethanol and they are not making money because the price of gasoline and diesel is through the roof. Meanwhile commodity prices are going crazy and the speculators have pushed those prices through the roof. Do the farmers consider growing something other then corn or whatever the major crop is for their region. Seldom do they do this. I live in Pennsylvania. My wife and I have put in a garden this year. Summer and winter squash, tomatoes, peas, carrots, radishes, zucchini, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, are but a few things in our garden. Farmers' fields will be full of corn, soybeans, and hay. Talk about your diversity and forward thinking.

Are we really looking at a food shortage? Are food prices going to make gas prices look like a good deal? Are we going to continue to allow the hoax of Climate Change? Isn't Al Gore's green hedge fund enough proof of what this is all about? Are you going to let them buffalo you on the ethanol matter, a fuel that requires 100 gallons of petroleum to make 90 gallons of ethanol a fuel that will give us lower mileage per gallon and is dirtier then what we have?

We subsidize farmers and the price of food goes up. We subsidize oil companies and they don't drill for oil or build refineries. We subsidize schools and test scores go down. We subsidize colleges and the cost goes up as the money goes to the likes of Ward Churchill. Without subsidies Ward Churchill would not be a professor and Colorado University would not be there. Can you find the common key here? Keep in mind that it is today's Progressives, Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Reed, and indeed compassionate Bush, are up to their eyeballs in this. Take a close look at the picture on this entry, it is cat food. Is it the meal of the future for you and me