Good Tuesday Morning Americans!

1. Question – What does forcing a state to bankrupt itself by giving away “free” services to people who are in the country illegally have to do with the Fourteenth Amendment?

2. Thought – In 1994 California passed a ballot initiative. Proposition 187, which would of denied “free” (that is, taxpayer-funded) social services to illegal aliens. Californians, under the delusion that they had the right to govern themselves, defied fashionable opinion – liberal and “conservative” alike – in passing the initiative. But they found out who really governed them when the federal courts prevented the implementation of 187, in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment. What does forcing a state to bankrupt itself by giving away “free” services to people who are in the country illegally have to do with the Fourteenth Amendment? Who knows. But this is why many people opposed it in the first place: Language in the amendment that meant something specific and finite when taken in its proper context became a  recipe for federal domination of the states when torn from that context. (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Rh.D.)

Good Wednesday Morning!

1. Question – Under which President did the role of the American soldier change from a homeland defender to a nomadic peacekeeper?

2. Thought – The area in which Bill Clinton largely received a free pass, even from those who claimed to be his opponents, was foreign policy. Yet Clinton was at his most misleading and did by far his greatest damage in the foreign arena. Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Buzz Patterson wrote in his book Reckless Disregard that Clinton carried out “CNN Diplomacy – foreign policy driven by television news coverage and political polling.” Commander-in-chief Clinton dispatched the military overseas an amazing forty-four times during his eight years. The American military had been deployed outside our borders only eight times in the previous forty-five years. “The [role of the ] American soldier,” Patterson wrote, “changed from homeland defender to nomadic peacekeeper.”

When Clinton took office, the American military was already in Somalia on a humanitarian mission to help feed the starving. President George H.W. Bush intended U.S. forces to deliver humanitarian supplies and then withdraw, but Clinton broadened that mission to include nation-building and the pursuit of warlords. Major General Thomas Montgomery, the commander of U.S. forces in Somalia, faced with the new nature of his mission, had requested additional tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and gunships, but was denied by Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin.

A month later, on October 3, 1993, the president sent fourteen helicopters carrying Rangers and the elite Delta Force to seize members of the Somali National Alliance at the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu. The operation was a disaster. American airmen and soldiers were trapped in a firefight for thirteen hours. For the rescue, the U.S. military therefore had to borrow four Pakistani tanks and twenty-four Malaysian armored personnel carriers. In all, eighteen Americans died; eighty were wounded. (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D.)

“I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people.” (C.S. Lewis)

Good Monday Morning Historians!

1. Question – Do you see the parallels of war in the Mid-East that we experienced in Vietnam? Better question, ‘Are we learning anything?’

2. Thought – President Kennedy’s advisers were split as to what kind of changes they thought needed to be made in South Vietnam first. One group, whom historian Patrick Lloyd Hatcher has called the “Whigs,” emphasized the importance of encouraging popular government in countries like South Vietnam. “Tories,” on the other hand, emphasized the importance of economic progress, and “were prepared to tolerate authoritarian regimes so long as they were effective.” McDougal describes how this divide among Kennedy’s advisers applied to Vietnam: