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Trump will probably listen a little better.

If you look at a guy like Petreaus, you can see why he (Princeton PhD) would get along w/ a guy like Obama while someone like Mad Dog Mattis (USMC) would not.

The issue with Presidents is that all they have to do is to clear their throat and everyone in DC gets the message.

Take the IRS — there’s no smoking guy out there but he probably said that he didn’t like all these right wing groups and that was all it took. Lois Lerner was a political beast. She got the message and behaved accordingly.

Same thing is going to happen w/ HRC and the DOJ. Maybe, maybe, the FBI will force their hand but not bloody likely.

A President promotes the Generals who reflect his world view of things.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Yes, I’m getting a suspicion that Trump will make a huge number of new appointments based on competence instead of political correctness, political subservience, or social engineering.

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There is something else even more fundamental and shocking — we have almost no veterans in the White House and we have the most ambitious General officer corps ever.

The lack of veterans means we don’t have anyone who has ever been a soldier. Anyone who understands the fragility of unit esprit de corps or morale.

The President, who must approve every promotion for a man with a star, has filled the top echelons with men who will follow orders, his orders. It is like grammar school “social promotion.”

Only the Marines are exempt, apparently.

If you have two stars (Division commander) and want a third or a fourth, you will not pick a fight with the administration.

You would think that the nonsense of putting women in command of infantry platoons would have some General on the verge of retirement calling bullshit on him.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Nearly all of that situation is from decisions made in DC by people elected by US voters. That is, we do have a democracy, and we get the government we vote for and, thus, deserve.

We are having a shockingly surprisingly difficult time finding leaders who can understand how it is, tell us it how it is, and lead us to do the usually fairly obvious right things instead of the essentially brain-dead, wacko political correctness, false goals, silly worries, general incompetence, shooting ourselves in the gut, etc.

What are the fundamentals here? Politics driven by money from people trying to make money in ways good for them but harmful for the nation? A news industry that does a poor job keeping people informed and, instead, tries to get ad revenue from getting readers from absurd content to get attention? A news industry for some reason locked into leftist positions, no matter how brain-dead? Readers who don’t scream bloody murder at the fact that the situation in this thread today has not been among the most important headlines, with followup stories with lots of details, numerical data, graphs, etc., for decades?

Likely there will always be nonsense floating around. Part of our job, then, is to detect, filter out, maybe rebut the nonsense. We have swallowed an ocean of sewage nonsense since just after Gulf War I. We did so well in Gulf War I, at least for the military part, likely in part because of the nonsense we swallowed that got us into Viet Nam.

Some of the nonsense:

CO2 from human sources is causing dangerous climate change. Nonsense. Why? CO2 even from all sources, humans, volcanoes, rotting vegetation, etc. is not causing significant climate change. How do we know? Just take a simple look at the readily available data and observe, there is no fit, that is, temperature variations do not correspond to CO2 concentration variations. E.g., for the temperature and CO2 variations going back nearly 1 million years from the ice cores from the Vostok station in Antarctica, just read the graph, just the graph that Al Gore displayed in his movie: The CO2 concentrations went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. So, clearly the rise in CO2 concentrations did not cause the rise in temperature 800 years earlier. For more, and more recently, look at the temperature changes of the past 2000 years and see that there is nothing in CO2 changes that explains the several significant periods of temperature change. Net, yes, the climate changes, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that CO2 has been the cause. This is all just simple and obvious at, say, the fourth grade, but there are a lot of people, e.g., the NYT, all convinced about the dangers of CO2 from human activities and, in response, have been throwing money at various green projects and trying to cut back on uses of fossil fuels. Dangerous.

For another, the crash of 2008 has been nearly as serious as the one of 1929. Since 2008, we have been smarter about fiscal and monetary stimulus, but by now we have been in The Great Recession from the crash of 2008 for 8 years, that is, already 2/3rds as long as in The Great Depression. So, the crash of 2008 was serious. But we know how we created the crash of 2008, and various people saw it coming. Still, we did nothing about it until there was an actual crash. Totally foolish.

For another, somehow W just got an idea that we should dump Saddam and install a secular, constitutional, parliamentary democracy in Iraq. He believed that “The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of governing themselves.”. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and, thus, put about 6 million Iraqi soldiers on the streets with the stockpiles of guns, bombs, etc. in their hands. Many thousands of thugs, criminals, gangs, ambitious politicians, ambitious clerics, international opportunists saw the fertile ground for chaos and charged in — W and team didn’t see this. We blew lots of precious US blood and treasure, and situation is still much worse than before W went in.

We elected Obama, twice. We knew who and what he was. And the news industry is still negligent in reporting what Obama has done and is doing to harm the US.

Although the news industry has not emphasized and reported clear numerical data, it appears that Obama is importing tens of thousands of people from Syria. Clearly there stand to be ISIS soldiers among those people. So, Obama is importing ISIS soldiers — radical Islamic terrorists — into the US. We shouldn’t do that.

In Trump’s recent speech on US foreign policy, there is:

If President Obama’s goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.

But the US voted for Obama, twice. A huge fraction of the news industry supported him.

We’ve done this to ourselves. We are extracting miserable defeat from the jaws of magnificent victory — we shouldn’t do that. We are in line to pay a very big price.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/5103-2/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com