That which is known.

How can you tell if you're living under one-party rule? Your media aren't going to tell you. Your government isn't either. Your schools are part of the mob monopoly. But there are signs: the biggest one is that open scandals and crimes have no consequences. We all know Holder is a perverse attorney general, that the EPA is run by scientific know-nothings, that Wall Street has high-level lines running into this administration, that "green technology" contradicts the known facts of physics, and that "catastrophic climate change" is a self-serving farce.

"Dangerous Times: Obama's Perversity." By James Lewis, American Thinker, 6/29/13.

Insufficient Will

Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury cites this somber yet irrefutable assessment of America's engagement in Afghanistan:

Two days before the U.S. military mission in Iraq formally ended in 2011, I left with the last convoy of Americans from Contingency Operating Site Kalsu, south of Baghdad. Safely crossing the border into Kuwait meant that we had accomplished our most important mission: getting out of the country alive, without any strategic blunders. If the U.S. troops in Afghanistan also can attain this goal, which will not be easy, they will have achieved the best we can hope for in that country.

Now, as in the last days of Iraq, U.S. hopes are muted. Previous aspirations for democracy and freedom have shrunk, and most of us will be happy if the United States can extricate itself quietly without further damage or embarrassment. The cornerstone of the plan to exit Iraq was the training of Iraqi police and military forces, enabling them to create a safe environment during and after our departure. It’s the centerpiece of operations in Afghanistan, as well.

As the months march toward the end of the major U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, the stresses on units will grow. Life becomes increasingly austere at the end: creature comforts vanish, food quality worsens, mail stops. Tactically, the focus alters. Yesterday’s top priorities — defeating the enemy, building up the indigenous forces — become less important than leaving with each soldier safe. It becomes clearer by the day that, barring some deus ex machina, the U.S. endeavor will make no strategically significant gains, though the potential for significant losses increases by the week.

Please read the whole thing.

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As matters stand, the Taliban is set for a swift return to power in Afghanistan. It will be buttressed in its resurgence by support, both material and moral, from Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and other militant Islamic organizations. It will resume its oppressions and depredations upon the Afghan people as if they'd never paused. The American legacy in Afghanistan will be approximately nil.

We won't even be able to say "at least we tried." We didn't.

American families that lost sons in Afghanistan will ask themselves why their children had to bleed and die. American veterans who returned from that theater maimed, physically or emotionally, will demand to know why as well. And all of us will be left to wonder why we were mulcted for so many billions of dollars to no discernible purpose.

How many celebrated commanders have told us never to enter a war without the ironclad determination to win it? Was Vietnam so long ago that we can no longer remember it? Did we go into the field unwilling to be sufficiently violent, sufficiently bloodthirsty, and sufficiently thorough yet again? Did we deliberately empower an administration that would pull America's punches against the Taliban and its affiliates, or were we deceived into a hopeless quest to impose freedom on a people incapable of appreciating it, much less sustaining it?

How did the mightiest nation in human history, twice the savior of the world, winner of the Cold War, possessor of a military equal in power to all the militaries of Europe and Asia combined, lose its will to win?

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Perhaps the largest ingredient in this recipe for an expensive catastrophe was our unwillingness to recognize the enemy for what he is. Americans were told that our adversary was the Taliban: Mullah Omar and his boys, a relatively well-defined group that had imposed itself upon the rest of the Afghan people. That made it possible to believe in a short war: defeat that one, relatively primitive group, declare victory, and go home.

We were not told that our forces would be used in yet another "nation-building" scheme. I don't know whether President Bush had that in mind from the beginning of the expedition, or whether he was talked into it after we had displaced the Taliban from power. In hindsight, it appears that "nation-building" displaced the extermination of Islamist opposition rather early in the game. Finding and destroying the tyrant and all his supporters gave way to winning hearts and minds. That formula worked no better than it had in Vietnam.

We were told that we had won long before any such evaluation was possible or prudent. We went on to treat Afghanistan as if it were another Japan. But the aftermath of a war that thoroughly won doesn't produce casualties to the victor an order of magnitude greater than those that occurred during combat.

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Our enemy was never the Taliban alone. The Taliban is an outcropping of a far larger and more dangerous enemy: the worldwide militant-Islamist movement. We can see it in motion in Egypt, Syria, and a dozen other places today. Indeed, it stirs everywhere there are Muslims, for militancy and an unending drive for absolute power over all persons, places, and things are inherent in core Islamic doctrine.

Militant Islam is a Hydra. Cutting off a head can only slow it briefly. Refusing to admit its breadth and acknowledge its unrelenting hostility to all things outside Islam is a guarantee of defeat.

There are Muslims who are not militants. They are irrelevant to this struggle, for while they have not taken up the sword against us, neither will they side with us against the militants. They see their co-religionists as the more deadly to them. Worse, many of them secretly approve of the jihadists' aims. Some of those even approve of the militants' methods; they're merely uninterested in sharing the associated costs and risks.

There is only one way to win a war against a religiously motivated foe. We applied it in Germany. Nothing else will suffice to defeat militant Islam.

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Our men in Afghanistan will soon be brought home. We can pray for their safety until then. Given Washington's many missteps to date, we can do nothing more...for them.

For us? Mike Hendrix has a suggestion:

We probably ought to consider not fighting any more wars for any reason, unless and until we decide that “victory” will no longer mean “overextending our stay so as to be able to present barbarian savages a pre-cooked democracy that they are neither capable nor inclined to appreciate on a silver platter, and hoping to civilize a country that isn’t remotely civilized and only barely qualifies as a country.”

I concur.

The ongoing farce.

America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.^[1]

A great cartoon during the Carter years had two beefy, exhausted men with rolled up sleeves briefing a two-foot high Carter looking at a map of Afghanistan. "Oh, I get it," exclaimed Carter. "The Russians are bad guys!"

Our own malevolent naïf's membership in the Choom Gang and his two drop-in senatorial gigs appear to have been an inadequate preparation for the business of conducting serious statecraft as president of what was hitherto considered to be a country to be reckoned with. Clueless – one can only hope – as to the basics of economic growth and fiscal sanity, Mr. Obama has also rushed to intervene in every pestilential backwater south of Sicily and east of Cyprus. He has embraced the hateful Muslim Brotherhood and championed the interests of millions of third-world illegal immigrants over those of his own people. There simply are NO federal policies today that are not remarkable for the absurdity of their goals, the destructiveness of their effects, or the malevolence of their formulation.

This is a president who plays at being president, assuming that another phone call from Percy Sutton, one more tirade from Al Sharpton, or one more presidential speech to some class of rapt fifth graders or liberal suckers will silence all critics and set things back on track. Hillary brought the "reset" button to the wrong world capital. Vladimir Putin for sure didn't have to call a cabinet meeting to name the genius who thought up that painfully naive "idea" for bringing forth a new era of lemonade and candy canes in U.S.-Russian relations.

Obama backed forces in Egypt, Libya, and Syria that were formless, faceless, and amorphous and whose ad hoc, shifting leadership provided no assurances -- and could provide no assurance -- of any advantage to the U.S. in exchange for its support. Mel Brooks was kidding when he used a stage production "Springtime for Hitler" in "The Producers." When Obama fell in love with "Springtime for Egypt," he wasn't.

Frat boys at drunken initiation rites would have done better in devising the foreign or domestic policies of this absurd, tragic joke of a president. The Middle East will go up in flames, Russia and China will surge into the vacuum left by our kiddie president, Iran will be emboldened by its capacity to smuggle a dirty bomb into any U.S. city, or we'll alienate the now-dominant Egyptian army for the foreseeable future. It's a clean sweep for radical leftist Democrat lunacy and Barry's still playing at being a grownup.

Notes
^[1] "America’s Problems in the Middle East Are Just Beginning." By David P. Goldman (Spengler), PJ Media, 8/15/13.

Let's Pretend!!

We just recently returned from a 5500 mile cross country road trip from north Georgia to the west coast and back. We have been doing these trips semi regularly since the middle 1980s to maintain contact with family and friends. Leonidas refuses to run the TSA gauntlet at the nation's airports. During the last 5 years the changes, I should say the deterioration of the quality of life, in middle America have been impossible to ignore. We endeavor as much as possible to avoid the large metropolitan centers and the interstate highway systems.

Beginning in 2010 we found it to be nearly impossible to avoid being stopped by the local or state traffic police for various infractions; usually such heinous crimes as failure to secure a seat belt or for proceeding at 4 miles per hour over a ridiculously low and recently reposted speed limit along a sparsely traveled rural highway.

Regular readers of this humble bolgster are aware that he is a retiree from the profession formerly known as "peace" officer but commonly referred to of late as "law enforcement". For that reason, a road tax invoice traffic citation is rarely issued unless of course such transgression is perpetrated within the borders of Colorado. Extra care must be exercised along surface roads which cross state lines as posted speed limits for the obvious purpose of revenue generation will change abruptly even as highway conditions remain unchanged.

In spite of media attestations to an improvement in the official economic statistics regarding the general economy, subsequent journeys through smallish towns in such states as Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia reveal the proliferation of closed and or abandoned homes and businesses. Although anecdotal, these conditions are nevertheless astounding. Indeed, as our vehicle requires being refilled with diesel fuel at 500 mile intervals the closing of former fuel stations now requires either an on board emergency supply or a recalculation of truck stop locations.

The descent of our formerly prosperous nation into conditions formerly evinced in the third world we have visited while cruising aboard our sailboat is troubling. These conditions are not only evident in the observable living conditions of the populace but the attitudes of the ruling bureaucracy. As an example I refer to the stationing of 4 sandinista soldiers at traffic intersections in Nicaragua to enforce the 4 way stop signs. Vehicles were required to come to a full stop at the intersection. If a driver's front tires touched the limit line the soldier ordered her to reverse and stop short of the line before proceeding. This procedure of course did not apply to official government or Communist party vehicles.

We now note that our formerly prosperous and "free" nation not only exhibits the economic characteristics of a banana republic but the political practices as well. Although the legal niceties are adhered to, the courts' proceedings and jurists are often "secret" as a matter of "national security".

In spite of the above, this humble bolgster remains optimistic of the final emergence of liberty in this fair land. This optimism is not based on any belief in a miraculous awakening of the citizenry resulting in the restoration of the republic. The return of liberty will be the result of the financial bankruptcy and accompanying default of various collectivist governments and the revelation that a society based on theft and violence cannot be sustained.

cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™

The Un-Franchising: Civic Virtue And The Decline Of the Republic

Geez, I have to take a day off for real one of these days...

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John Hinderaker of PowerLine presents us with a sample of Democrat hate-campaign tactics:

This email arrived yesterday from MoveOn, whose communications are generally indistinguishable from those of the Democratic Party. The subject line was "New York Times stunner."

Republicans are trying to steal control of the U.S. Senate by making it harder to vote.

Pitch in to help defend the right to vote and stop Republicans from stealing the 2014 election.

This plea requires a certain chutzpah, as stealing elections at the polls has always been a Democratic specialty. I think what they are actually referring to is Republican efforts to ensure honest voting so that Democrats can't steal elections.

Well, yes. But behind the obvious assault on the trustworthiness of American elections lies a subtler assault on our understanding of the legally created, defined and constrained privilege of voting. That attack dovetails with an even deeper and more threatening attack on the very concept of rights.

You might be nodding at this point. The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch tend to be much more intelligent than average – anyone below IQ 130 would be unable to grasp most of what's posted here – and correspondingly quick on the uptake. But there’s a trap in that: an increased likelihood of "skimming" out of excessive confidence. So: Do you think you read and comprehended the previous paragraph accurately?

If you answered "yes" without rereading it slowly, the rest of this post is for you specifically. Take your time over it.

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When the Republic was young, a would-be voter had to present evidence of certain criteria:

• He had to be a citizen.
• He had to be at least twenty-one years of age.
• He had to own real property -- land.
• He had to have been a resident in the district where he proposed to vote for a legally stated minimum interval -- usually, one year.

Those qualifications had a very pointed point: They constituted prima facie evidence that he would take a sober interest in the consequences of the elections in which he wanted to vote. In a sense, they were a proxy for an attestation of civic virtue.

No, those qualifications are not infallible proof of civic virtue. But then, whether a man possesses genuine civic virtue is a very tough thing to certify with perfect confidence. Even those who know him personally can get it wrong.

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Civic virtue might be the hardest of all the virtues to practice routinely. It consists of the ironclad resolution not to use one's legal privileges -- note: not one's rights -- to one's own advantage at the expense of others.

The privilege of voting is the most important venue for civic virtue in our time. That so many Americans vote their personal interests at the open and obvious expense of others --"ObamaPhones," anyone? -- is a dead giveaway that we suffer a severe general deficiency of civic virtue, at least around election time.

In his early award winner Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein famously proposed that the vote should be conditioned upon prior honorable military service. Heinlein believed that to expose oneself to the rigors and hardships of military service better certified civic virtue than the legal qualifications enumerated earlier -- and he might well have been correct. But then, Heinlein was already clear on a critical concept that the Left has done its best to obscure:

Voting is not and has never been a "right."

Needless to say, leftists and one-worlders generally detest Heinlein and all his works.

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If you have my sort of elephant's memory, you probably recall, from the 2008 elections, a seriously meant proposal to allow the citizens of other countries to have a voice in American elections. The argument was that since our federal government's decisions have an impact far beyond our own borders, owing to our military power, our "world policeman" role, and our many bases overseas, it's unfair that the many millions of non-citizens so affected should have no say in those decisions. By that "logic," it's only "right" that persons the world around should have some sort of influence over the selection of the persons who make those decisions.

As with so many other specious arguments, if you buy the unstated premise, you buy the consequent. The unstated premise is, of course, that merely being "affected" by Washington's decisions is a sufficient rationale for claiming the "right" to influence them, indirectly through the electoral process.

I could spend the entire day ripping that premise to shreds. Given your already postulated top-3% intellect, Gentle Reader, I'll pass on, having merely noted it.

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I'm not the first to pulverize this notion of a "right to vote," of course:

The followers of Rousseau's school of thought — who consider themselves far advanced, but whom I consider twenty centuries behind the times — will not agree with me on this. But universal suffrage — using the word in its strictest sense — is not one of those sacred dogmas which it is a crime to examine or doubt. In fact, serious objections may be made to universal suffrage.

In the first place the word universal conceals a gross fallacy. For example, there are 36 million people in France. Thus, to make the right of suffrage universal, there should be 36 million voters. But the most extended system permits only 9 million people to vote. Three persons out of four are excluded. And more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. This fourth person advances the principle of incapacity as his reason for excluding the others.

Universal suffrage means, then, universal suffrage for those who are capable. But there remains this question of fact: Who is capable? Are minors, females, insane persons, and persons who have committed certain major crimes the only ones to be determined incapable?

A closer examination of the subject shows us the motive which causes the right of suffrage to be based upon the supposition of incapacity. The motive is that the elector or voter does not exercise this right for himself alone, but for everybody. The most extended elective system and the most restricted elective system are alike in this respect. They differ only in respect to what constitutes incapacity. It is not a difference of principle, but merely a difference of degree. If, as the republicans of our present-day Greek and Roman schools of thought pretend, the right of suffrage arrives with one's birth, it would be an injustice for adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects everyone in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this; what the objections might be. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this nature. I wish merely to observe here that this controversy over universal suffrage (as well as most other political questions) which agitates, excites, and overthrows nations, would lose nearly all of its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be. In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

Under these circumstances, is it likely that the extent of the right to vote would endanger that supreme good, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would refuse to peaceably await the coming of their right to vote? Is it likely that those who had the right to vote would jealously defend their privilege? If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone's interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?

[Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1850]

Bastiat's logic remains crystal-clear, diamond-hard, and beyond refutation. Yet the Left is unaffected, for a simple reason: Leftists are determined to use government power as an instrument of plunder.

Reflect on the "Occupy" nonsense, and the millions who support Barack Hussein Obama in hopes of getting more "free stuff."

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Lurking behind the notion of a "right to vote" and all similar notions is the phantasm of human equality. He who proposes such a thing implicitly assumes that as we are all "equal," we "should" all have the same "rights." In the usual case, he lacks an understanding of all three quoted words. The exceptions are outright villains.

No two persons are "equal." Neither can we be made "equal," even under the utterest application of State power. The best we can do -- indeed, the absolute requirement of a free society -- is equality of individuals' rights:

• Recognition of each man's natural rights to his life, his liberty, and his honestly acquired property;
• Pace Bastiat, the constraint of the law to the protection of those rights;
• Absence from the law of any exemptions for particular persons;
• Absence from judicial procedures of any special allowances for particular persons.

The alternative is a class structure that awards different privileges and enforceable responsibilities to persons of different classes: what Isabel Paterson called a Society of Status. That's the antithesis of the American ideal. It exposes some to unbounded predation by and for others, and makes individual freedom effectively unattainable.

But we cannot have an equality of individuals' rights if we're unclear about what those rights are and whence they originate.

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In The Discovery Of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane observes trenchantly that "no one is born with an inalienable ballot." This is as true today as it was in 1943, when she wrote it. It's even more important in these days of rampant political predation in quest for electoral invincibility.

The original qualifications for the vote might have been flawed. Yet the motivation behind them -- the effort to certify an acceptable degree of civic virtue in the would-be voter -- was sound, and remains imperative. We cannot and will not return to Constitutional, freedom-respecting government unless a serious attempt is made to renew that effort.

Quite a lot of people must be taught that their ballots are not inalienable -- and the sooner, the better.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up Dept.

I’m beginning to think this will become a regular feature.

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1. Fashion?

From my Vietnamese-American sweetie Duyen comes the following:

Duyen: What do you think of those beauties?
FWP: Jesus H. Christ and His All-Girl Orchestra! Please tell me you didn’t just buy a pair of those.

Duyen: Relax, Flashy. I haven’t completely lost my mind. I just thought you’d get a giggle out of them. Only $114.99 per pair at Heels.com.
FWP: What imaginable outfit would go with those?

Duyen: No idea. But this is what passes for innovation in fashion today.
FWP: We’re doomed, aren’t we?
Duyen: Looks that way.

Duyen is a fashion marketing consultant. Her clients pay her gigunda bucks to stay on top of the trends. There are times I pity her.

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2. Horse Or Cart?

From Your Tango comes this bit of...research:

Like to keep your work and personal life separate? Well, the two may be more connected than you thought. There's a new discovery about how your job is affecting your sex life — and it's a positive one.

According to new research from the Institute for the Study of Labor in Germany, employees who have sex more than four times a week make 5 percent more than those who have less active sex lives.

The study looked at 7,500 Greek households and analyzed how many times respondents had sex per week, whether they were employed and how much they made. The link between sex and salary was highest among people between the ages 26 and 50.

Now wait just a minute! Let’s leave aside the quips about correlation versus causation. I want to know in which direction the causal vector points. Also:

• If prosperity causes increased sex, how much more would I have to make to get it every night? And would I have any discretion about that? I’m getting pretty old, y’know.
• If sex causes increased prosperity, what is the ratio between incremental sex acts per unit time and one’s annual raise percentage? I mean, my poor wife...
• Finally, does this include all behavior designated as “sex,” or is it confined to conventional sexual intercourse? It was a survey of Greek families, after all.

Nothing irritates me quite as much as these incompetent popularizations of important discoveries.

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3. What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Just yesterday I received the following in a promotional email from Amazon:

Words fail me. Yes, yes, I have railed loudly and publicly about the dearth of good science fiction being written today, but is Amazon really suggesting that the remedy is to buy and read my own books? Don’t get me wrong, now: I do like my own writing, but I’m already familiar with the tome, and besides, it’s a trilogy’s middle volume.

Oh, wait: a little later in the same email:

I suppose that covers it.

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Have a nice weekend, Gentle Readers. I expect to be away from the keyboard until Monday. Lawns, real estate, and assorted occupational travails impend. Pray for me.

All my best,
Fran

Concurrences

Michael Walsh, ironically but perhaps appropriately more often recognized as faux-Leftist David Kahane, puts the case most bluntly:

It's clear by now that if conservatives are ever going to even begin to roll back the overt, ongoing and worsening lawlessness of the Obama administration, they're going to have to go over, through, or around the Republican party first. The GOP "leadership," as presently constituted, is nothing more than the lesser half of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Government, content to munch its cud and occasionally low in the direction of constitutional propriety, and then resume its own modest but lucrative role in fertilizing the "two-party" system....

What [Senator Ted] Cruz and [Senator Rand] Paul realize -- and what the others don't -- is that their first order of business is to destroy or at least render completely impotent the current "leadership" -- to, in effect, reverse the equation under which the Republicans got defeated twice by a nobody from nowhere with no record of accomplishment except a huge chip on his shoulder. Under the old formula, the notion was to lie to the conservative base during the primaries (Romney’s instantly risible and now infamous "severely conservative" self-characterization) and then abandon it in the general election for a defanging and declawing makeover so as not to frighten the media. The theory was that after some grumbling, conservatives would "come home" in November and all would be well.

Please read the entire article. (Now and then National Review Online will still publish something of true import and impact, though I can't help but suspect that it's generally against the editors' will.)

From the Bush I Administration onward, the GOP has trended backward from Reaganist conservatism toward the "we can do it cheaper" posture of the administrations from FDR through Gerald Ford. There were few true conservatives in the public eye back then; the momentum was all on the side of the Compassionate State and its ever-expanding appetite for our liberty and property.

Given that long stretch of "Democrats Lite" non-opposition to the expansion of federal power, the public could be forgiven for forgetting the enormous successes of the deeply conservative Harding and Coolidge years. The Republican Party cannot be.

Some of the most highly regarded of nominally conservative opinion-mongers have collaborated in this betrayal. The late William F. Buckley, probably the best known and most courageous of the Dark Ages conservative commentators, said openly that the time has come for conservatives to make their peace with the welfare state. He received blowback from no one of comparable prestige. Indeed, he and his associates reached unprecedented (for conservative pundits) levels of vitriol in condemning the John Birch Society for differing with him.

Only a few, even today, realize the harm American conservatism has done to itself in this fashion. Republican heavyweights tend to sneer it away as minority carping and its chief spokesmen as "unelectable." Their undisguised attitude is "Away with all that philosophical nonsense about the Constitution and individuals' rights! We've got an election to win!"

Which is Argument One against any sort of committed partisanry.

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In commenting on the colossal failure and unflagging arrogance of the government-run schools, the great Thomas Sowell wrote that institutions exist to serve people, not the other way around. This is as true of political parties as of anything else. However, the GOP's kingmakers and master strategists appear to disagree. To them, party loyalty is the ruling principle. Who cares whether Republican elected officials actually cleave to their oaths and respect the Constitution's limits on government? The important thing is to get Republicans into office and keep them there; the rest will sort itself out in due course.

Whether compromising on every claimed principle is a way to get Republicans elected is open to dispute, more so now than ever before. Consider:

• No Republican attained the Oval Office from 1932 through 1951.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most popular general alive; his opponent practically defined the supercilious Ivory Tower intellectual.
• Richard Nixon defeated the wimpy vice-president of a monstrously unpopular Democrat who had declined to stand for re-election.
• Ronald Reagan was the first Republican since Harding to hold out a vision of Constitutionally constrained limited government.
• George H. W. Bush was Reagan's vice-president, and attained the presidency as Reagan's successor.
• George W. Bush had the advantage of running against the visibly tawdry and thoroughly corrupt Clinton Administration. He was still more fortunate in that Al Gore, his opponent, was both personally dislikable and a poor campaigner.

In short, with the exception of Reagan, successful Republican aspirants to the presidency could not have been elected had they not been massively fortunate in their opponents, the circumstances, or both. Yet the GOP's "leadership" is utterly committed to the notion that "Democrat Lite" / "we can do it cheaper" Republicanism will wrest the palm back from the Left.

Michael Walsh plainly understands this. So do Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee. Whether they and those who agree with them can dethrone the GOP's power brokers and move the party back to a sound, Constitutionally based stance, against the inertia and determined resistance of the Bushes, the Christies, the McCains, the Grahams, and the many "conservative" commentators who'd rather cut their own throats than back an actual conservative, remains to be seen.

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I am not a partisan of any party. I flirted with the Libertarian Party for a few years, but left it behind when I realized that its fringe elements had become dominant over the sober-sided sorts. Partisanry aside, I have more hope for the GOP than for any other visible political force. It can still be turned around and made formidable.

What will that take, other than a nationally popular figure around whom American conservatives will rally?

• Admission of previous errors and misjudgments, not only from the GOP's masters but from Republican partisans generally;
• Public courage about Constitutional principles and forthright condemnation of those who have betrayed them;
• The rejection of the Main Stream Media as reliable arbiters of "what Americans want;"
• The rejection of candidates who cannot or will not cleave fearlessly to all the above, and of elected Republicans who have governed as "Democrats Lite" (or worse) once in office.
• As always, time, energy, and money.

It's gird-your-loins time, fellow conservatives...if you concur with the above.

The Hacienda On The Hill: Timbers In Place.

The New Royalty has become unabashed about its pretensions:

A petition on the formal White House petitions website called for "gun free" zones to be extended to politicians, saying if it's good enough for children in schools and other places where otherwise legal firearm carry by private citizens is prohibited, then it should be good enough for our country's leaders, right?

Wrong.

Here is the original petition language:

Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

Here is the response of the White House:

Working to Keep Everyone Safe

Thanks for your petition.

We live in a world where our elected leaders and representatives are subject to serious, persistent, and credible threats on a daily basis. Even those who are mere candidates in a national election become symbols of our country, which makes them potential targets for those seeking to do harm to the United States and its interests. In 1901, after the third assassination of a sitting President, Congress mandated that the President receive full-time protection, and that law is still in effect today. Because of it, those who are the subject of ongoing threats must receive the necessary and appropriate protection.

You can’t make this stuff up, Gentle Readers. Take it from one who spends his minuscule leisure time and energy writing fiction.

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If there's a genuinely funny aspect to the White House's response, it's the citation of a law that mandates full-time armed protection for politicians.

A law! The Regime has invoked the Majesty of The Law! But isn't the current president well known for his many refusals to enforce the laws? Hasn't he made it plain, by implication at the very least, that he'll only enforce those laws with which he agrees?

You don't need to read yet another tirade about that, Gentle Reader. I merely wanted to note it, as a foundation for what follows.

Isn't a law that discriminates among Americans an inherent violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? If we defer that consideration, what about the implication that "our elected leaders and representatives are subject to serious, persistent, and credible threats on a daily basis," but that common American citizens are not? Finally, what about the intrusion into education represented by federally mandated "gun-free zones" around government-run schools. despite the complete absence of the words education, school, teacher, student, and the like from the Constitution of the United States? What does such a mandate say about the self-defense rights of school teachers, administrators, and other school employees?

Give that a spin on your mental merry-go-round while I fetch more coffee.

---

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, in their masterpiece The Bell Curve, noted that the ongoing striation of the American populace into classes separated from one another by differences in intellect presaged the emergence of a "Latin American kind of conservatism." Their symbol for this was the hacienda on the hill, surrounded by parapets manned by armed guards. Those walls and guards exist to protect a class order in which the aristocrats enjoy an elevated lifestyle and access to power, from disturbances from los peones below.

As I wrote some time ago:

A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.

Among the privileges medieval aristocrats enjoyed were that of bearing arms, and of employing others to bear arms at their command and on their behalf. Commoners were forbidden to possess a weapon, or to wield a common tool as a weapon, except when pressed into the service of the nobility. That the aspiring aristocrats of our time should seek to re-establish that privilege is entirely consistent with the sociodynamics of our increasingly fractious and violent age.

---

Education in America is in a terrible state. The steady elevation of school taxes to stratospheric levels has corrupted the entire trade, and has made it next to impossible to operate a private alternative to the government-run juvenile-warehousing system. Very few families are well enough off to be able to afford both to support the government schools and to pay for a private education for their youngsters. Only the wealthy and politically privileged have the power to escape the system. It's a power they use without the least hesitation or embarrassment.

Most parents of minor children are resigned to this, and struggle along as best they can. What they have a harder time swallowing is the notion that their children should be involuntary targets for a lunatic who's decided to get his name into the papers. After Columbine it became a cleavage issue. If we can judge from the prevalent response to the Newtown massacre, it's about to become a very hot button indeed.

That's all to be expected from a people accustomed to the concept that their well-being, and the well-being of those they love, lie principally in their own hands. What I'm waiting for beyond that is a general recognition of what truly lies behind their children's mortal danger: an ever more arrogant political aristocracy determined to maintain its class privileges -- the security and serenity of its haciendas -- no matter what risks it might impose on los peones.

The political elite's presumptions haven't offended enough of us yet. No density of scandals, usurpations of powers not granted, infringements on individuals' rights, nor ostentatiously expensive taxpayer-funded vacations seems adequate. What more will it take?

Commitment To The Regime

In the greater scheme of things, this might seem a small matter:

Officials at the Missouri State Fair are apologizing after a rodeo clown this weekend donned an Obama mask and asked people if they want to see the president "run down by a bull."

Here’s more from AP:

The antics led the state's second highest-ranking official, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, to denounce the performance in a tweet Sunday. He said it was "disrespectful" to the president.

"We are better than this," the Republican tweeted.

State Fair officials said the show in Sedalia was "inappropriate" and "does not reflect the opinions or standards" of the fair. "We strive to be a family friendly event and regret that Saturday’s rodeo badly missed that mark," they said in a statement Sunday.

It wasn't clear if any action will be taken against the performers.

...that is, until you reflect upon the ancient phrase lese majeste and what it portends.

---

Only this past Friday, I wrote:

There is no longer a Constitutional fence around the actions of the federal government. There is no longer "a system of checks and balances." There is no longer an "opposition party." And there is no longer the slenderest reason to hope that the normal mechanisms of American politics -- elections; legislative operations; judicial review -- will, or can, alter the course the Regime is following.

We are being ruled by unabashed criminals, their intent and their deeds naked to the sunlight.

It's not the first time in human history, of course. The pattern is a familiar one:

1. Men of evil intent get their hands on the levers of power.
2. They work to eliminate all sources of opposition, actual and potential.
3. To avert a popular uprising, they divide their subjects, setting some against the rest.
4. Others of low motives, "inspired" by the successes of the rulers, become defenders of the regime, in the hope of leavings from the table.
5. The tyrants cast off all pretense of circumspection or restraint and start erecting statues and monuments to themselves, while what opposition remains must either risk being targeted for elimination or "go underground."
6. Insiders grow fat; those outside the circles of power grow thin.

We're watching step 4 at the moment.

---

There is no longer any reason to think that Constitutional or electoral processes will bring about a near-term correction. Most dishearteningly, the gradual concession to the Obamunist Regime by the Republican Old Guard has shifted the battle lines to inside the GOP, as the young Turks strive to displace the traitorous seniors. Perhaps age and guile don't always triumph over youth and energy, but with apologies to Ecclesiastes, that's the way to bet.

To put our hopes in a third party is to imagine that, after the decade or two it would take to nurture such a force to strength, elections would still be sufficiently honest for the new party to win them...and that the Regime would respect the results. Given the Regime's demonstrated lack of scruple and the forces now available to it, that seems less than likely.

What other possibilities remain?

---

Grandmaster Savielly Tartakover, when asked by a fan how he approached the management of a seemingly static position, smiled and said that he would merely wait for his opponent to "get an idea." There's a lot of insight in that remark. The application to politics is relatively plain.

At this point, the Regime's major vulnerability is the growing conviction among its masters that victory is theirs. The sense of triumph can lead to enormous blunders. The Regime has already sidled close to "the line" a step over which cannot be retracted. If the Obamunists permit the approach of victory to elicit their full arrogance, they might yet commit a fatal mistake: a usurpation sufficiently unabashed and sufficiently presumptuous to trigger a Second American Revolution.

That's not a pretty prospect. Many lives would be lost. Nor could the outcome be predicted with confidence. But there yet remains hope of a middle course: an Obamunist blunder that's sufficiently outrageous to galvanize political opposition sufficient for victory, without bloodshed.

Obama almost committed such a blunder when he orated in public about taking executive action against Americans' right to keep and bear arms. The ground isn't yet ready for that. Perhaps his handlers had a better sense for the situation than he, and warned him off before he could commit himself.

If we survey the nation, noting the offenses against Americans' First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, the Regime's dismissive treatment of the executive's duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," its assiduous cultivation of an ever-growing population of dependents, and its unceasing stream of self-exculpating propaganda -- does anyone remember the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula? -- and gauge the degree of public outrage they've evoked, can we honestly say that there are many other such potential blunders?

---

Americans who still hope to restore Constitutional restraints on government without a bloody revolution have few avenues of attack left to explore. Now that the Republican Party has been neutralized as a significant opposition force, the job can no longer be relegated to electoral mechanics. Private persons, including many who are nominally disengaged from politics, must take the lead.

There's precedent for that, too; consider the Battle of Athens. But it won't come easily or cheaply. And there's a centuries-old warning to be heeded, addressed to men of all eras who dare undertake such tasks:

"So you plan to shoot at the King? A word of advice: Don't miss."

Thoughts?

Some Fiction Natterings

To those Gentle Readers who stop by only for the political tirades: Sorry, folks. I just can't bring myself to write about that crap today. If you like, you might blame it on my having busted my lawn tractor yesterday.

---

I recall, from a few years back, an exasperatingly supercilious article that condemned the thriller genre so many contemporary readers love as "a pornography of the nerves." The author and the various "literary authorities" he cited were utterly dismissive of story, and laid 100% of the emphasis on style. I also remember snorting in dismissal and thinking, "I'll bet he wishes his sales figures would ever get that high."

The thriller genre owes much of its popularity to its readers' desire to escape from the mundane. To satisfy that desire, it must provide the reader with a compelling reason to detach his attention from his daily routines and the pedestrian environment in which they're embedded. That demands a certain density of high-voltage crises and events: life-and-death stakes pursued by characters appreciably larger than life. Such crises and events are unlikely to resemble the sorts of problems ordinary people face in their normal affairs. More, they wouldn't benefit from the sort of self-glorifying, "Look Ma, I'm a literary writer" lucubrations the Style Uber Alles types deem superior to plot.

A story in which the crises and events are the central point must be told in a straightforward fashion.

That doesn't mean a thriller should be acted out by stick figures, nor that the author needn't concern himself with the fundamentals of good storytelling. It does command the thriller writer to eschew baroque involutions of wording, unnecessary devices and irrelevant descriptions, and lengthy musings that don't contribute to the elucidation or effectuation of the Marquee characters' motivations.

Ultimately, it's about the point of all fiction, whatever its genre: to provide the reader with a unique and satisfying emotional experience.

---

Two and three centuries ago, when the first English-language novels were being written and published, pastors in the English-speaking world condemned the reading and writing of fiction more often than not.

Surprised to learn that? I was. But it's consistent with the time and the milieu. Ordinary people didn't have the wealth of free time we enjoy today. Their lives were shorter and far more arduous. They often perched on the ragged edge of starvation. So their clerics wanted them to use what little leisure they had in religious pursuits and devotions. You were supposed to devote your reading time to the Bible.

The fictioneers of that time were just learning how to capture an emotional journey and convey it in an affecting manner. Many of the stories from then seem stilted, awkward, even clumsy by the standards of today. But just as writers of our time strive to do, those writers sought to engage the reader's emotions and take them for a ride. Because they wrote about contemporary events and people, they were able to deflect attention and affection from the dry, exhortative stories told in Scripture.

As is usually the case, those early fictioneers improved with practice, and left valuable lessons for their successors. Over time, clerics stopped trying to discourage the reading of fiction, realizing it was hopeless, and bent their efforts toward the promotion of storytellers who emphasized Christian virtues and piety. Even so, the need to capture the reader's attention with emotional evocation remained paramount; no virtue of any category can be effectively illuminated and efficiently encouraged by dispassionate exhortation.

---

About twenty years ago, a fellow libertarian storyteller and I were bemoaning the difficulty of promoting the importance and understanding of freedom in an emotionally adequate story. "How do you write a story whose central theme is the importance of the gold standard?" he lamented. I could only sympathize. (I had no solution for him. However, I rather suspect that he hadn't intended to write such a tale in the first place. Even so, it makes for an interesting challenge.)

It can take a while to get certain of the high principles of storytelling firmly seated in one's head. Neither my friend nor I had fully grasped one of the critical ones. I recall feeling a great light dawn when I first ran across it in its most compact form:

John Brunner's First Law Of Fiction:
The Raw Material Of Fiction Is People!

To write about freedom, you must write about protagonists who are passionate about freedom, not about the political imperative of freedom to all men everywhere.

One of the reasons -- probably the most important one -- that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is so popular on the Right is that Rand succeeded in personalizing the struggle for freedom. That is, she gave the reader attractive, passionate protagonists who were caught up in terrible crises that arose from infringements on freedom, and so dramatized the importance of freedom in an exciting, challenge-filled tale. The theme is freedom, but the story is intensely personal. Had Rand not managed to create such magnetic characters and embed them in a plot of such difficulty, she would have produced a mere polemic.

The same holds true for any imaginable theme. The theme of a story must be integral to the protagonists' passions and the challenges they must face. The events of the story must emphasize, albeit subtly and often indirectly, the importance of the theme to the solution of the protagonists' problems and their route toward the climax. It's about people, always people.

Brunner's First Law isn't a panacea, of course. The storyteller has plenty of work to do beyond what that recognition addresses. (Brunner's Second Law -- "The essence of story is change" -- helps a lot with the rest of it.) But until the fledgling storyteller has properly internalized the First Law, his stuff will leave the reader shrugging and muttering "So what?"

---

In just about every instance, when I write about fiction and its infrastructure, I'm mainly talking to myself. That's certainly true here, though I allow myself to hope that any other storytellers and aspirants reading this will get some value out of it as well.

In dark and troubled times, the storyteller's work waxes in importance. A good story well told has persuasive and instructive power beyond any amount of exposition or exhortation. It can propose approaches to problems the reader might never have considered. It can illuminate laws of human conduct that altogether too many of us haven't recognized, or are prone to forgetting. Best of all, it can refresh the reader's spirit and renew his hope.

The times in which we live are both dark and troubled. That's why, despite the difficulties and the frustrations involved, I write fiction, and not just these endless essays. I've come to think it's the most important work I do -- that if I have any prospect of influencing America's future course, it's far less likely to arise from the op-ed pieces here than from the stories I tell.

Reflections In A Weary Eye: A Sunday Rumination

"Man's got to know his limitations." -- Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in Magnum Force

There's really no age at which it's unimportant to "know thyself," but it becomes ever more critical as one ages. By the time you get to my age, it's approximately a matter of life and death, if only to keep the stress from bursting a few choice blood vessels.

In our era of pervasive unearned "self-esteem," far too many of us think we have a God-given right to:

• Like ourselves;
• Think well of ourselves;
• Think ourselves superior to others.

This is, to be maximally gentle about it, not guaranteed.

Why these observations this fine August morning? Well, let's just say some very recent events have compelled me to admit certain things about myself to myself that aren't all that palatable. Worse, I don't think I can do anything about them. However, if I can't change them, I can still avoid those situations and gatherings where they're likely to cause me to do things I'll regret later.

It's a given that no one has complete control over his circumstances. It's less well known, or admitted, that very few, if any, of us have complete control over ourselves.

---

I have had it up to the eyelashes with priests who conflate the religious obligations of a Christian with the adoption of a particular political stance. I'm not about to commit a murder, mind you, but I am getting pretty near to leaving my parish and finding another.

A priest who tells his flock, whether explicitly or implicitly, that it's their Christian duty to support or oppose this or that government program has departed from the teachings of Christ. "The things that are Caesar's" are matters of conscience: i.e., they're for each Christian to decide for himself. For to take a position on any such matter implies a consequent obligation to oppose the government in the event that events develop in the opposite direction. I don't suppose I need to elaborate on the potential consequences of such a course.

If your congregation suffers a relentlessly political cleric, the sooner you haul him up short, the better -- and don't take any backtalk, whether from him, or (if he's not the pastor) from his superior. He's doing damage to the faith, to the congregation...and to his own soul.

---

Time was, to name a price and have it met constituted a contract -- possibly not a legally enforceable contract, if the event was conducted privately and orally, but a contract binding upon one's honor nevertheless. Among the great captains of industry of bygone days were many who prided themselves on "deal by handshake." Once they'd shaken a co-bargainer's hand, the deal was set, and they would as soon attempt to renege as try to stop the rotation of the Earth.

I've had two such contracts sundered, against my will, in the past six weeks. Both were for six-digit amounts of money. Both involved significant negotiations and generous time horizons. It got me wondering whether there's anyone out there who still considers his word to be his bond.

Many persons experience such disappointments through channels such as eBay. Sellers who won't follow through on a contracted sale; buyers who bid and then won't pay; buyers and sellers who decide to meet privately so as to avoid paying eBay its agreed-upon slice of the take. Whether petty or grand, it's still larceny. If it's seldom prosecuted, that's mainly because there's so much of it going around.

People constantly fulminate, often in public, about how litigious a society America has become. But litigation doesn't spring up from nothing, like some sort of super-toadstool. It arises from dishonor: the desire to get what one does not properly deserve.

The legal "profession" -- yes, those are "sneer quotes" -- deserves a large share of the blame. Lawyers grow fat when there's a lot of conflict and starve when there's little or none. But their principal role is to act as seducers, holding out the promise of unearned gains through legal action. Were ordinary Americans less susceptible to such promises of payola, we'd be a lot less inclined to sue one another.

Christ might not have said anything directly relevant to this subject, though forgiving one's neighbor for his trespasses "not seven times, but seventy times seven" would appear to apply.

---

Moods come and go. Good ones and bad. Yours and mine.

No doubt you can tell that I've been in a funk recently. That's due to developments most of which are better kept to myself. I'm hoping the fog will soon lift, for it makes me less than effective at the many things I must do, I should do, and I want to do. I pride myself on my effectiveness; I dislike to have it impeded. I also feel much gratitude to those who, in their several ways, have helped me to bear up.

America is in bad shape. That's generally beyond dispute on the Right side of the political spectrum. But it's important -- nay, critical -- that conservatives and libertarians maintain their optimism. Once that's gone, hope will be gone as well...and despair is the sin for which one cannot atone.

The great Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, once said to me that the thing most obviously lacking from the larger liberty movement is hope. We need hope if we're to restore Constitutional, freedom-respecting government to these United States. When times are bleakest is when we need it most.

Similarly, when things are tough for us materially -- and how long has it been since so many Americans were having trouble making ends meet? -- hope is essential. Nothing worth having comes without effort, and no one can mobilize his forces without hope.

Finally, when one is politically untroubled and materially secure, one can still be lost emotionally. I've been there. You can feel the hope draining out of you as such an interval wears on. If you let that process continue, pretty soon you can't face others. In extremis, you can't even face the coming of a new day. You find yourself contemplating the most terrible thoughts...and presently the Eternal Footman is standing but a little way off, holding your coat and snickering.

There is but One to whom we can apply for hope's replenishment. Fortunately, He's always available and very easy to talk to.

Pray.

May God bless and keep you all.

The Slime Is Receding...

...by which I don't mean that the Obamunist Regime is growing less corrupt, but rather that its crimes and villainies are being ever less carefully concealed:

In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special "secondary screening" because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.

In a transcript from the committee provided to Secrets, a Ways & Means investigator asked: "If you saw -- I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group -- a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?"

The agent said, "At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy."

The committee staffer then said, "So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?" The agent admitted, "Based on my current manager's direction, uh-huh."...

Added a committee aide, "In plain English, the IRS is still targeting Tea Party cases."...

Camp, the Michigan Republican, told Secrets, "It is outrageous that IRS management continues to target Tea Party cases without any justification. The harassment, abuse and delays these Americans have faced over the last few years has been unwarranted, unprovoked and, at times, possibly illegal. The fact that the IRS still continues to treat the Tea Party differently and subject them to additional targeting is outrageous and it must stop immediately."

"Immediately." What a lovely word! But what does it mean? No, not to you and me; to an administration that has decided that it's above all the laws and need fear no repercussions from whatever it might decide to do?

Conservatives' and libertarians' Outrage Meters have been pinned for quite some time now. All the same, this latest demonstration of arrogance breaks new ground. And to think it's only a couple of weeks ago that the Regime decided to label this a "phony scandal!"

There are only two conceivable responses to our lawless ruling junta and its endless parade of extra-legal stunts:

1. Armed revolution;
2. Resignation to tyranny.

The first hasn't yet happened. What about the second?

---

Consider along with the above this trenchant bit of analysis from firebrand Claire Wolfe:

It’s dawning on a lot more people that a government run by secret spymasters is illegitimate even by the most conventional, mainstream standards. Among freedomistas, even those like the folks at DownsizeDC — who are usually pretty polite, mainstream, and hopeful of working within the system — are talking last straws.

Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA were a shock, though not a surprise. Now this week they’re followed by news of DEA operations that are top secret — but obviously, no doubt about it, are the result of collusion between the DEA and the NSA (“We’re only spying on you so we can keep you safe from brown-skinned furriners with scary religions, really!”). And these operations are resulting in arrest, asset forfeiture, and sometimes decades in prison for Americans.

And in another non-surprise, old-news revelation, Glenn Greenwald is now reporting that members of Congress — you know, those experts who were so diligently overseeing all those secret spy programs, bravely protecting our interests and Our Glorious Constituion — can’t even get information on the NSA or its bosom pal the FISA court no matter how much they rant or beg.

So yes. You’d have to be naive in the extreme to believe that a huge, secret level of government that answers to no one is a legitimate democratic-or-republican government. This country is now governed by an UberGoverment — Secrecy uber Alles.

Leaving aside the snark about "brown-skinned furriners with scary religions," the above is spot on. (My concerns are about the "scary religion," not the "furriners" nor the color of their skins. Your mileage may vary.) Moreover, the path is simple enough for a microcephalic idiot to follow:

• The administration is doing outrageously illegal things in secret.
• Congress discovers the outrages and screams "Stop it!"
• The administration smirks and says "Make me."
• Nothing changes.

Not only has the Executive Branch of the federal government escaped all legal and Constitutional restraint, our attempt to rein it in via normal processes is being dismissed and ignored -- and we have been put on notice that no further attempt to redress the abuses will be undertaken.

There is no longer a Constitutional fence around the actions of the federal government. There is no longer "a system of checks and balances." There is no longer an "opposition party." And there is no longer the slenderest reason to hope that the normal mechanisms of American politics -- elections; legislative operations; judicial review -- will, or can, alter the course the Regime is following.

We are being ruled by unabashed criminals, their intent and their deeds naked to the sunlight.

---

I'm about to give up. For all the sound and fury vented by similarly minded Web pundits, it doesn't appear to me that anyone plans to do more than rant and rave. As I can't do much on my own hook beyond adding to the noise level, I've been thinking ever more favorably about "going underground:" just trying to finish out my life, which doesn't have much longer to run, in the peace of anonymity.

The State has grown very strong.
It has cast off all pretense of legitimacy.
It's already sifting out enemies to its agenda.
Some of those enemies have already felt its lash.
And no one within its corridors is genuinely opposed to it.

I know I'm not the first to reach those conclusions. It's just that my innate optimism about this country has taken what appears to be a mortal blow, and I've slipped through the "denial," "anger," and "bargaining" stages into "depression." No doubt there are others who feel the same. Perhaps we could form a support group.

Were it otherwise, the revelations of so much executive-branch misconduct would be a heartening development. We could anticipate corrective action, perhaps a true restoration of Constitutional government. But too much has already been revealed. Too much has gone uncorrected: no alterations to ongoing operations and no miscreants punished. The threshold of resignation is only a step away. But resignation doesn't necessarily mean complete passivity. Grand but hopeless gestures are still available; that's the part that frightens me worst.

Does any Gentle Reader have anything to say that might cheer me up? I'm too old to be climbing clock towers with a sniper rifle, a thermos, and a bag of Oreos.

The Pact: An Exegesis

When I write something like "The Pact," I often feel as is I'm indulging a personal need: a yearning for an unrealizable fantasy world populated by superhumans and heroes. There's some truth to that. My protagonists are usually larger than life. I prefer to leave the dreary musings upon the fancies and failings of ordinary folk to the "literary" set.

All the same, a story such as "The Pact" expresses an important insight, one that today's gray heads of international relations and diplomacy will not suffer to be mentioned in their presence:

In relations between nation-states,
Power and the will to use it are all that matter.

Statesmen dispute this at their peril.

---

Power -- the capacity to compel, prohibit, and expropriate by the use of force and / or intimidation -- is the antipodes of freedom.

It's not as widely known as it should be that the Founding Fathers were extremely reluctant to permit the federal government a standing army. Standing armies had been for centuries the bane of the common people of Europe. They were seldom used in "defense of the realm," but rather as instruments of oppression and depredation against the very populations that were taxed to fund them. When Article I of the Constitution was finalized, the major reactions against it, from within the Convention and from persons outside privy to its deliberations, was that allowing Congress both the taxing power and the power to maintain a standing army constituted an obvious threat to the people's newly won liberty.

Hearken to Patrick Henry, orating to the Virginia Convention:

Congress, by the power of taxation, by that of raising an army, and by the control of the militia, has the sword in one hand and the purse in the other. Shall we be safe without either? Congress have an unlimited power over both; they are entirely given up by us. Let him candidly tell me where and when did freedom exist, when the sword and the purse were given up by the people? Unless a miracle in human affairs interposed, no nation ever retained liberty after giving up the sword and the purse.

Yet in a world partitioned into quarrelsome nation-states, each poised and ready to encroach upon the territory and prerogatives of the others, no security is possible without a substantial military establishment. Indeed, the much-discussed condition we call sovereignty is a consequence of the possession of such an establishment. A nation without the power to enforce its borders is not and cannot be sovereign. It exists solely at the sufferance of other nation, and will cease to exist upon the instant another nation perceives advantage in molesting it.

So long as nation-states exist, there will be standing armies, and navies, and air forces, and strategic deterrents, and war colleges to train their commanders, and intelligence establishments to inform them, and squabbles over just how much military the nation needs and can afford. A nation whose people are largely free and want to remain so must accept that, or confront the loss of all freedom to the first predatory nation under whose lustful gaze it comes.

Military fiction author Tom Kratman, in his recent novel Countdown: H Hour, put it most memorably:

"People band into nations, real nations -- not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations -- to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that."

There's more wisdom in those seventy-six words than in the entire Congressional Record.

---

If we go solely by the size and capabilities of its military establishment, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, indeed in all of history. But capability is not enough; it must be mated to the willingness to use it when the occasion demands it.

When I had President Stephen Graham Sumner say:

“The United States has seldom played the diplomacy game as well as your nation, Ambassador....We have this problem, you see. We’re habitually honest with others, even when those others have displayed no penchant for honesty themselves....But in the usual case, once we’ve discovered that we’d been lied to, we ceased to talk. I dare say you’d rather we kept talking, wouldn’t you, Ambassador? Considering the alternatives, that is?”

...he was articulating one of our severest deficiencies in international dealings: our desire to accept the other party as sincere in all his representations. We don't rise above that desire nearly as often as we should. In a typical diplomatic interchange between nations, the sincerity level seldom rises above 25% and never reaches 50%. Yet our diplomats habitually take the other fellow's word as reliable and sincere.

[If you'd like to read more about Sumner and his rise to power, go here.]

That desire to believe the other guy good-hearted has been our undoing on several occasions. We'd probably have fought half as many wars had our diplomats managed to pull off their rose-colored glasses at the appropriate times. That includes those occasions when the diplomat in question was the president of the United States.

A provocation such as the one described in "The Pact" is a probe: an exercise undertaken specifically for the purpose of eliciting a response to be analyzed. The aggressor nation seeks to gauge its target's willingness to court open conflict. If the will is there, the probe is unlikely to be repeated; if not, further, deeper probes are guaranteed, possibly culminating in a full-scale war.

“Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” -- V. I. Lenin

Whatever his failings as an economist, Lenin understood the dynamic that governs international relations.

---

Along with the view of international relations I've explicated above, I had another goal in mind with "The Pact:" to depict the conduct I want to see in a president of the United States when confronted with an aggressive probe. In recent years, only John F. Kennedy has exhibited firmness anywhere near that -- and he had to suffer a number of painful international humiliations to convince him that a strong stance was necessary if the U.S. was to thwart the threat posed by Soviet nuclear-armed IRBMs in Cuba.

A president with Stephen Graham Sumner's grasp of reality and a strength of will to match it would be a hero of a sort we haven't had since long before Kennedy -- and Americans are starving to death for a genuine national hero. The parade of sports poseurs and celebrities "famous for being famous" has failed to nourish us, as we should have realized.

In my view, any man who accepts the duties and responsibilities of Commander-In-Chief has made a pact with the nation that elevated him: to represent its interests fearlessly and in full confidence that the government, the military, and the people are wholly behind him. Many a president has failed not just one of those criteria but all of them.

Yet it was not always so. Before World War II, even men who disputed the wisdom of this or that international sally, or of our entry into this or that conflict, would close ranks behind the government while negotiations progressed, and behind our forces when a decision to go to war was reached. The presidents of those times could wage both diplomacy and war in confidence -- justified confidence.

May it be so again...and may we have presidents worthy of such wholehearted support.

Mishandled 2008 crisis, god-like bureaucrats.

The [United States Department of Justice] may also be attempting [in preventing a deposition of Mr. Bernanke] to preclude an open investigation that will show how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner mishandled the 2008 financial crisis. This is not a secret. Books by Sheila Bair and David Stockman, as well as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (by the FCIC) have already done so. Yet, the media continues to report how we "must thank Bernanke (or the others) for saving us from a nuclear winter." These advocates have avoided the evidence.

A segment of Bernanke's ignorance was discussed in "The Professor Who did NOT Save the World."^[1]

Mr. Sheehan chokes on the Department of Justice's claim that the proposed "deposition would interfere with Mr. Bernanke's important duties in managing the nation's economy and fiscal policy." All by himself. Managing the economy and fiscal policy. Here's a short take on the Fed's ability to to that. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the value of the dollar has declined by 95%. ^[2]

I'm so jaded by the avalanche of evidence of our cultural and moral decay and our complete indifference to the wholesale abandonment of the Constitution, I can't be bothered to place an exclamation point at the end of the sentence at the end of the preceding paragraph. If you had a dollar in the bank in 1913, the government stole 95 cents from your account in the intervening years.

And why is it again that we're so darn exceptional? Because we're a vigilant, independent citizenry jealous of our liberties? If the Central Nebraska Consumer Protection Product Safety Commission SWAT team (Jamaica Provisional) breaks down our door, well then, maybe . . . we'll rouse ourselves to defend our liberties.

Maybe. But certainly not before.

Me? I'm thinkin' it's way past time for a Chinese brewski.

Notes
^[1] "David Boies v. Citizen Ben S. Bernanke." By Frederick J. Sheehan, Authority Contrarian, 8/1/13.
^[2] "The contention that a central bank run by private banking interests would promote a safer financial system and a stable currency is laughable. The Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it have created three stock bubbles, the largest housing bubble in history, a bond bubble and the mother of all debt bubbles, while destroying 95% of the dollar’s purchasing power in the last 100 years." "Trying to Stay Sane in An Insane World – Part 2." By Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform, 8/4/13.

The Pact: A Short Story

     [History puts it beyond serious dispute that those who seek power value power above all other things. Many such cannot be satisfied by a fixed amount of power; they demand an ever-increasing sop to their world-bestriding images of themselves, no matter at whose expense it must come. Since World War II, it’s fallen to the United States to deal with such aspirants to empire...and we haven’t always done as well at it as we might.]

* * *

    The MiG-31 had launched from Klyuchi Air Base on the Kamchatka peninsula. It was equipped with range-extender tanks and two visible air-to-ground missiles. Even had it not been marked as a Russian warplane, its silhouette and radar signature would have made it plain to any interested observer.

    The observers along the Distant Early Warning line were more than merely interested. As the MiG approached the American reflex-defense zone, Elmendorf Air Base scrambled a pair of F-15E Eagles to meet it. Their orders were to warn it away from an airspace in which it was unwelcome.

    The pilot of the MiG had other ideas.

    As it approached the twelve-mile border at which the United States’ sovereignty begins, the MiG turned sharply to starboard. According to Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacDougall, the pilot of the trailing Eagle, the Russian flew tauntingly right along the border, as closely as a military-grade GPS might allow.

    The tactic is called “trailing your coat.” It’s not a military maneuver per se, but rather a statement of dominance over an international adversary. In its purest form, it involves sending an armed platform–a warship or warplane—into and through the periphery of that adversary, in demonstration of indifference to that adversary’s sovereignty and contempt for its ability to mete out punishment.

    An aggressive government will often use such a maneuver as a precursor to demands upon the adversary: for example, for trading privileges, for port accommodations, or for support in international fora. The aggressor power, having exhibited its superiority, might well threaten further and deeper incursions should its “requests” be denied. As such incidents have led to wars in several cases, it’s a tactic that’s seldom overlooked and unsafe to ignore.

    Undaunted, Colonel Tadeusz Warshovski, piloting the lead Eagle, decided to “show the Russian so-and-so a thing or two.” The consequences of his decision reinforced a pilots’ maxim of long standing: There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

    Colonel Warshovski zipped up to the invisible line in the sky, matched courses with the MiG, rolled his Eagle ninety degrees to port and held it there, showing his underside and armaments to the Russian in a counting-coup gesture possible only for an airman of the first quality. Warshovski’s ability to hold his Eagle in that posture while maintaining altitude, course, and speed was among the best-known marks of his proficiency. It was enough to cause the Russian pilot, a bare hundred feet away, to gawk in grudging admiration.

    Warshovski’s Eagle was still “riding its wing,” and the pilot of the MiG was still staring, when a pocket of turbulence seized the Russian fighter and slammed it into Warshovski’s.

    Owing to the planes’ munitions and the large quantities of unexpended fuel, the conflagration from the collision was visible for many miles. Shards from both aircraft were later found as far away as the Alaskan coast. There were no survivors.

    Such incidents, including the loss of life, were not unprecedented. Russian and American war platforms had collided several times before, though not in so dramatic a fashion. On previous occasions, the sequel had been diplomatic: cosmetically angry, though always with the fixed intention of averting war among all parties. But such a thing had never before happened on Inauguration Day.

* * *

    Stephen Graham Sumner, inaugurated the forty-seventh president of the United States only hours before, was greeted at the door to the Oval Office by the White House press secretary, the majority of his Cabinet secretaries, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their faces were uniformly tight with dismay.

    Sumner displayed no surprise. He waved the group inside, waited until all had found some seat or place to stand, and propped himself against the antique desk that had first graced the Oval Office during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

    “I’d thought I would have some time to get acquainted with the place.” He grinned. “From the looks of you gentlemen, that’s not going to be the case.”

    “Mr. President,” said General Leslie Maclaurin, Army Chief of Staff and JCS Chairman, “there’s been an incident.”

    Sumner’s eyebrows went up. “Details, General?”

    “A Russian MiG-31 was trailing its coat along the twelve-mile line when it collided with an Eagle out of Elmendorf. There were no survivors.”

    “Shit.” Secretary of State Ernest Tyszczenko’s face had turned a dark red. “On Inauguration Day? This wasn’t—”

    “Of course not, Ernie,” Sumner said. “Coleman prepared the ground for this months ago. Frankly, I should have expected something of the sort.” He drew himself up, crossed his arms over his chest, and scanned the gathering. “Your assessments, gentlemen?”

    “What’s there to say, Steve?” Secretary of Defense Isaac Guillory’s casual use of Sumner’s name drew starts and stares from the others. “It’s what the Russians do. They’re perfectly confident nothing will come of it...from us, at any rate.”

    “Then why, Isaac?”

    Guillory started to reply, but Tyszczenko leaped ahead of him.

    “It’s an intimidation play, Mr. President. Ragozin has promised his insiders the recreation of the Warsaw Pact, albeit not in name. The former satellites aren’t interested, and NATO has promised to react to any overt moves toward them, so he’s trying to weaken their resolve by a display of dominance over us.” Tyszczenko shook his head. “Though I doubt he intended it to cost lives.”

    “It happened whether he intended it or not,” Air Force Chief of Staff General Louis Laperrier growled. “Warshovski was one of my best. A thirty-year man with a spotless record and a long string of walks-on-water evals.”

    “No doubt,” Guillory said with a humorless smirk, “Ragozin will say the same about the MiG pilot. So what now?”

    “We do have a couple of things Ragozin doesn’t have, Mr. President,” General Laperrier said.

    “And those are?” Sumner said.

    Laperrier smiled coldly. “Eyewitnesses and film.”

* * *

    As the video ran to its anticipated conclusion, Sumner rose from his seat and turned to the Russian ambassador.

    “Well, Ambassador, are you satisfied?”

    Maxim Lichnowsky frowned. “Entirely so, Mr. President. Your pilot performed a most hazardous stunt at extreme proximity to our aircraft, which was entirely within its rights—”

    “If you want this conversation to remain pleasant, Ambassador,” Sumner said, “you will refrain from using the word ‘rights’ when referring to the deliberately provocative maneuver of your aircraft.” His expression was unreadable. “And if we’re going to be precise in these matters, the collision occurred within America’s twelve-mile air and sea zone of jurisdiction. By seventy-eight feet.”

    “Nevertheless,” Lichnowsky pressed, “had it not been for your pilot’s—”

    “Ambassador Lichnowsky,” Sumner growled, “you’re treading on extremely dangerous ground.”

    Lichnowsky’s eyebrows rose. He fell silent.

    “The MiG wasn’t on a joyride, was it?” Sumner said. “I’d find it hard to credit, at any rate.” He circled his desk, went to the fireplace, and gazed up at the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that had hung there for two centuries and more. “The United States doesn’t send its pilots to taunt other nations by trailing our coat along their borders. They do their proficiency flying entirely within our borders. At all other times, they’re under orders. Specific orders.”

    “A wise policy, Mr. President,” Lichnowsky allowed. He smiled nastily. “It averts the possibility of angering a stronger, more resolute power and triggering a reprisal.”

    Sumner stared at the Russian. His face lost its inscrutability as it lit with delight. He gestured to Lichnowsky to rise. The Russian ambassador did so and stood uncertainly in the middle of the Oval Office.

    “Diplomacy,” Sumner said, “has always struck me as akin to fencing.” He reached for the foil that hung below the portrait and dismounted it from its hangers. “Do you fence, Ambassador?”

    Lichnowsky’s smile darkened. “I do not, though I am familiar with the sport.”

    Sumner flexed the foil, testing its springiness, and struck a garde position. “A great deal of what a fencer must master is feints and misdirection.” He slowly moved the foil through the standard octave. “How to persuade the opponent to look elsewhere, really.” He returned to garde, moved quickly to a mid-line attack stance, and advanced toward Lichnowsky with a series of showy cuts. The Russian, seeing that the foil’s tip was unblunted, raised his hands defensively. His expression morphed toward alarm.

    “The United States has seldom played the diplomacy game as well as your nation, Ambassador.” Sumner had brought the tip of his foil within inches of the knot in Lichnowsky’s tie. He forced the Russian steadily back, oscillating the tip of the foil delicately back and forth. “We have this problem, you see. We’re habitually honest with others, even when those others have displayed no penchant for honesty themselves.” He backed Lichnowsky into the wall and laid the tip of his foil against the Russian’s chest with the greatest of delicacy. “But in the usual case, once we discover that we’ve been lied to, we cease to talk. I dare say you’d rather we kept talking, wouldn’t you, Ambassador? Considering the alternatives, that is?”

    “Yes, of course,” Lichnowsky quavered.

    Sumner smiled. “I was sure you would. So please, convey my compliments to President Ragozin and tell him I expect to see him here, in this office, no more than seven days from today.” He looked away briefly in mock surprise, as if he’d suddenly remembered something of modest importance. “Oh, and please tell him that until I have the pleasure of hosting him here, the strategic forces of the United States of America will be at DEFCON Two. Would you give him those messages for me, please?”

    “Of course, Mr. President.” Sweat from Lichnowsky’s brow dripped into his eyes. He blinked frantically. “Will that be all?”

    Sumner stepped back and raised his sword in parting salute.

    “For the present, my friend. Have a safe trip home.”

* * *

    Nikolai Stepanovich Ragozin, President of Russia, had clawed his way bloodily to the top of his government over the bodies of more adversaries than anyone could remember. He had openly proclaimed a Russian Empire Reborn, a realm to humble even what the Tsars had ruled. No one expected him to react well to Sumner’s “invitation,” nor did he. He didn’t acknowledge Sumner’s summons in any way. Fearing the possible consequences, Ambassador Lichnowsky refrained from contact with the White House.

    When seven days had elapsed, a squadron of B-52s lifted off from Edwards Air Force Base. They rendezvoused with F-15E escorts from Elmendorf over the North Pacific, flew to just outside the Russian defensive perimeter around Kamchatka Peninsula, and launched sixteen cruise missiles. Those missiles were state of the art: smarter and stealthier than any of their predecessor generations. They flew barely above sea level, completely undetected, to within a mile of Klyuchi Air Base before initiating their terminal pop-up maneuver.

    Sixteen warheads detonated at points evenly spaced along Klyuchi’s military-grade runways. The quarter ton of Octol each contained dug a broad, wide crater in the concrete, throwing chips and dust for two hundred feet in all directions. When the air had cleared, the bodies of the unfortunate collected, and the debris swept away, it became clear that the runways had been reduced to uselessness. Given the difficulties involved in getting heavy equipment and supplies to Kamchatka overland, it would be many months before another plane took off from or landed at that field.

* * *

    “Mr. President.”

    Sumner pressed the TALK key on his intercom pad. “Yes, Sally?”

    “President Ragozin of Russia is on line one. He’s very agitated and has demanded to speak with you at once.”

    Sumner nodded. “I see. Sally, I’m about to ask you to do something difficult.”

    “Anything, Mr. President.”

    “Make that two things.” Sumner grinned in anticipation. “First, I’d like you to call me Steve. I like to be on a first-name basis with the people around me. It might help to keep me from getting a swelled head. Besides, I call you by your first name, don’t I?”

    “Mr. President, that’s...going to be difficult.”

    “Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. But perhaps this next part will be a little easier.” Sumner took a deep breath. “Please tell President Ragozin that I’m unwilling to speak with him other than face to face here in my office. Then hang up without waiting for a reply.”

    “Mr. Pres...Steve? Are you sure about that?”

    “Perfectly, dear.”

    “As you wish, Mr....Steve.”

    Sumner sat back and chuckled to himself.

* * *

    It took the best efforts of the best men on the Presidential Detail to keep the four huge thugs accompanying the Russian president from forcing their way into the Oval Office. Nevertheless, they succeeded, albeit with much clamor and many concussive thuds of burly Russian bodies upon the anteroom carpet. When the action was over, Nikolai Stepanovich Ragozin, who had inspired mortal terror in his enemies for thirty years, stood alone before a semicircle of edgy Secret Servicemen, all of whose guns were pointed directly at his head. His retinue was uniformly down for the count.

    Senior Agent Ryan McFarlane, commander of the Detail, scanned his men, holstered his weapon and stepped forward to address the Russian. “Mr. President, the invitation was for you alone.”

    Ragozin gaped. His mouth moved, but no sound issued forth.

    The door to the Oval Office opened and Sumner stepped forth. His gaze landed immediately on Ragozin, and his face lit with pleasure.

    “Niki! At last!” He extended a hand toward the Russian, who clasped it dumbly. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve looked forward to this moment. Come,” he said, ushering Ragozin inside, “let me fix you a drink. Vodka, I assume?”

* * *

    “A long time since someone’s pointed a gun at you, eh, Niki?” Sumner set the vodka over ice before the Russian president with a flourish and seated himself on the facing sofa. “Exhilarating, eh what?”

    “My men—” Ragozin faltered.

    “They’re alive,” Sumner interjected. “Which is more than I can say for Colonel Tadeusz Warshovski and Major Franklin Oporto. Who gave the order, Niki? Was it one of your half-bright lieutenants, or did it come directly from you?”

    Ragozin merely stared at him.

    “Cat got your tongue, Niki?”

    Sumner’s repeated use of the demeaning diminutive stirred something in the Russian. He straightened and firmed visibly.

    “You killed one of my best pilots,” Ragozin growled. “You threatened my ambassador with a sword. You summoned me to this room as if I were a peasant to kneel before you.” He rose and glowered down at Sumner. “Your missiles killed twenty-three Russian workers and did billions of rubles of damage to a Russian military base. And now you hold me here like a hostage to your whims!”

    “You must understand something, Niki.” Sumner knocked back his Scotch in a single draught and set down his glass. “Ah! That hit the spot. You see, I’m not Walter Coleman. I’m not Andrew Purcell. I’m not any of their predecessors, either. In fact, I plan to make Reagan look like a pansy, at least when it comes to dealing with morons like you.” He rose from his seat and stared the Russian in the eyes. “Sit down.”

    “How dare you—”

    “I said sit down.” Sumner took two steps forward, placed a hand on the incredulous Russian’s chest, and shoved. Ragozin fell backward heavily onto the sofa, eyes wide in astonished outrage.

    “You’ll get it before you leave here, I promise you,” Sumner’s eyes had gone hard. “You’re not my equal. You’re not my partner in negotiations over matters of mutual interest. You’re a bully who seeks to prop up his regime with the riches of others. Your country is little better than a Third World satrapy. And I am not going to follow in my predecessor’s footsteps in trying to placate you. Tell me, Niki, how well do you know the history of the Soviet Union?”

    “I am...familiar with it,” Ragozin murmured.

    “Then perhaps you already know the story I’m about to tell you,” Sumner said. He resumed his seat. “It comes from the Seventies, when things were breaking loose in the Middle East and your fatherland was approaching a transition of its own.

    “It seems that, back then, Islamic terrorists preferred to ransom infidel captives rather than kill them. They took quite a number of such captives, and for a while they received a great deal of money for them. One group that had made a pile kidnapping and ransoming Westerners decided to try the game on a Soviet agent. But the KGB didn’t respond the way their Western victims’ governments had. Instead it performed a counter-kidnapping of one of the group’s members, and returned him to his confreres in pieces, in a plastic bag. There was a note on the bag, in Russian and Arabic. It said, ‘This is the way we play.’ The kidnapped Soviet agent was back with his comrades within twenty-four hours, alive and whole. No Soviet agent was molested ever again.

    “I was told that story by a marvelous campaign advisor, a young woman who knew far more about power politics than I, and probably still does. She was trying to make a point to me about my personal safety, but it was clear that there was more than one lesson to be drawn from the tale.

    “We learned from your predecessors, Niki. Unpleasant lessons, but ones we needed to absorb if we were to deal successfully with you and others like you. Some of my predecessors failed to internalize those lessons. We needed to drive them so deeply into our institutional psyche that we would act on them without hesitation, as I did the day before yesterday.

    “You and yours respect only power, Niki. Don’t bother to deny it; it’s plain from your history. You react to concessions and accommodation by pressing for more. When my nation has treated yours like honorable bargaining partners, we’ve always come away regretting it. You’ve shown no regard for the truth. You’ve taken advantage of every little chink in every deal, every word that could be interpreted to your advantage. The spirit of an agreement has never meant anything to you, only the most you could possibly squeeze out of it. You’ve cheated outright when you thought you could get away with it, and much of the time you were right.

    “I can’t bring my airmen back to life, but I can prevent a recurrence. I can teach you the lesson the KGB taught those Muslim kidnappers. Your provocations toward the United States are going to end here and now. Any further ones will be repaid tenfold, upon Russian soil, Russian assets, and the Russian people, just like the one that brought you here.

    “The forces of the United States have been at DEFCON 2 for nine consecutive days, Niki. That’s a wearying posture to hold, but I know the quality of those forces, and they’ve met my nation's needs superbly. I could give a single order and those forces would reduce Russia’s strategic force to radioactive ash, make Russia the globally irrelevant Third World country it deserves to be—and believe me, I’d very much like to give that order. So don’t test me again.

    “But I called you here for more than one reason, Niki. One was to demonstrate to you just how feeble your pretensions to empire really are. Another was to put you on notice that to the United States, you are no longer the potentate of a ‘great power’ whose whims and rages must be included in our decision making, but an enemy to be closely watched until the day your people tire of you and depose you in favor of some new tyrant. But the third reason is the most important one. We’re going to sign an agreement together.”

    “What sort of agreement?” Ragozin murmured.

    “A treaty,” Sumner said. He went to his desk and picked up a pair of stapled pages. “A treaty that makes Russia a co-guarantor of the political independence of all the nations of Eastern Europe.” He handed the papers to the Russian.

    Ragozin’s gaze fell on the pages. He read the first few lines of the top sheet, then looked away. “Why should I sign such a thing?”

    Sumner shrugged. “For one thing, you’d get to leave here when and as you choose, and with your little retinue intact. For another, I hear your people really like bread. And I’m told that they make most of it with flour milled from American wheat. You wouldn’t want them to lose access to that wheat, would you? Besides,” he said through a grin, “I have lots of cruise missiles.”

* * *

    “Did you mean it?” Adrienne Sumner said.

    “Every word. Though I must admit, the Scotch helped.” Sumner forked up the last of his broccoli in cheese sauce and savored it. “What on Earth was Bush the Elder ranting about? Broccoli is one of the few vegetables with real flavor.”

    His wife chuckled. “Stop trying to change the subject, Mr. President.”

    Sumner groaned. “Not you too, Brutus.”

    “Bruta.” Adrienne rose and started to gather up the dishes. A Navy steward appeared out of nowhere, swooped down on her, relieved her of the dishes, and vanished to whence he had come. She chuckled again and reseated herself.

    “It’s going to take me a while to get used to that.”

    “What, ten days hasn’t been enough?” Sumner grinned. “Seriously, though, we won’t be here for long, and we don’t get to keep the stewards.”

    “I know. But Steve...” Adrienne’s expression was troubled. “Didn’t you think you might be taking a big chance?”

    He started to reply, checked himself. There was a long moment of silence.

    “I suppose I tried not to think about the downside,” he said at last. “But the previous three administrations did a lot of damage to America’s international stature, and I knew that had to be set right. Ragozin made a perfect demonstrator. He’s a bully through and through. Handing him his head was the best imaginable way to tell the world that we’re not taking any more crap—from anybody.”

    He stood and surveyed the little room in which they took their meals. Like most of the rooms in the White House, it was smaller than a room of the same function in a private home. Yet it was both beautiful and calming, appointed tastefully yet without opulence, a perfect place to dine and to begin the process of decompression from a president’s working day.

    They all had the same resources with which to face down thugs like Ragozin. Why didn’t they use them?

    “This is a tough job, sweetie. But refusing to use all my tools and weapons would only make it tougher. Ragozin thought I’d be another Coleman, or maybe another Purcell. A cream puff he could chew up and spit out at his pleasure. I had to prove him wrong, so completely that he’d never even fantasize about crossing me again.” He cringed briefly. “We simply can’t afford for the wolves of the world to look at us and think ‘lunch.’ So I risked a global war...but had it come to that, my finger was already on the button. Ragozin was my prisoner, for as long as I cared to keep him that way.”

    He thrust his hands into his pockets and gazed somberly at his wife.

    “Besides, didn’t we have an agreement of our own? That if I was to take this job, I’d never back down, never compromise on what I believe is right? Don’t you believe that was on my mind at the time, along with all the other stuff?”

    Adrienne Sumner rose from the table, went to her husband, and folded his hands in hers.

    “I do, but...”

    “I know, sweetie. I was a little scared, myself. But a promise is a promise.” He smiled down at her. “I know it’s early, but would you like to make love?”

    She nodded.

==<O>==