What Ron Paul should have said is that Mitt Romney never meant to reveal his indifference to the suffering of other people.  I am sure this is true, and if we look closer at his language, we can see exactly what he meant to say.  "Concern" is an ambiguous, if not a dodgy word.  Its primary meaning meaning  is something like "be related to to, involved in."  As in "this book concerns the Franco-Prussian War."  A derived meaning is to care about.  All Romney meant to say was that in thinking about economic policies, he was not primarily addressing himself to welfare dependents who were taken care of by the government but to working class and middle class people who were slipping between the cracks, that is, to the class of people who have been badly hurt by the Bush and Obama administrations and their policies.

The fact that a scoundrel like Newt Gingrich could make hay out of this in the press tells us more, perhaps, than we need to know, both about Gingrich himself and about the literacy of the press.  It also tells us something about Romney who, even in defense of his career and his ego, could not come up with a coherent explanation of his harmless gaffe.

It is nothing of the kind. Obama’s DSG replicates all of the flawed strategic assumptions of the Bush era. Reading a short statement at a press briefing at the Pentagon to unveil the DSG, President Obama spoke of “enduring national interests” in maintaining the unparalleled U.S. military superiority, “ready for the full range of contingencies and threats” amidst “a complex and growing array of security challenges across the globe.”

Obama made no attempt to outline the basis for his claim that the security threats to America are growing, or to provide his own definition of “enduring national interest.” The terms “full-range,” “contingencies,” “threats,” or “security challenges,” are not value-neutral. Obama used them within a paradigm which treats the entire world as a legitimate sphere of interest of the United States. The consequence is that there will be new wars, as unrelated to the realist understanding of this country’s national interest as have been those in the Balkans under Clinton or in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush.

Far from heralding “the massive $450 billion in defense budget cuts over the next 10 years” the President stated that “global responsibilities demand leadership, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.” This means that the rate of growth will slow down somewhat—and 45 billion a year is a drop in the $16 trillion ocean of debt—but there will be no “cuts.” Obama further stated that our defense spending “continues to be larger than roughly the next ten countries combined.” It is less than the rest of the world combined—the preferred neocon level of spending—but it is still much more than America needs, or can afford to spend.

The DSG claims that in the decades ahead it will be the task of the United States to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world.” “Even when U.S. forces are committed to a large-scale operation in one region,” it declares, “they will be capable of denying the objectives of - or imposing unacceptable costs on - an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.” This means that the totality of what the DSG treats as American commitments and interests around the world will continue to exceed the ability of the United States to defend them.

A strategically innovative president would accept the limits of American power and seek to establish a rational correlation between its ends and means. He would turn America into a “normal” power pursuing limited political, economic, and military objectives in a world populated by other powers doing the same. But Obama and his team remain wholly unwilling to do any such thing (not to mention his likely Republican opponents). His view of America’s role in the world still produces strategic blueprints for new self-justifying interventions around the world—interventions which are not merely unnecessary but detrimental to U.S. interests. “Making the world safe for democracy” has morphed since 1917 into many strange pursuits: making Libya, Syria, and Bosnia safe for the Islamic radicals; making Kosovo safe for the KLA. Under Obama the bipartisan continuity of methods and objectives has remained intact. The continuity of imperial assumptions and practices remains unbroken.

The DSG is a flawed document. The key issue of ends and means of American military power is still unexplored, and will remain so regardless of what happens next November.

A day earlier Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said American troops in the Persian Gulf region do not require any build-up for a possible military conflict with Iran. “We are not making any special steps at this point in order to deal with the situation,” he said. “Why? Because, frankly, we are fully prepared to deal with that situation now,” Panetta explained.

In the meantime the European Union is on track to agree to an oil embargo against Iran at the EU foreign ministers’ meeting next week.

The latest rhetorical escalation follows President Obama’s decision on December 31 to apply sanctions against any institution dealing with Iran’s central bank, effectively making it impossible for most countries to buy Iranian crude oil.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao criticized the U.S. position in comments published on January 19, and on the same day foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said that “sanctions and military threats will not help solve the problem but only aggravate the situation.”

On Wednesday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the military option mooted by U.S. would ignite a disastrous, widespread Middle East war. “Unilateral sanctions against Iran has nothing in common with the desire to keep the nuclear weapons nonproliferation regime unshaken,” Lavrov said.

Unsurprisingly, the neoconservative advocates of a preventive war against Iran are delighted. They see Tehran’s threat to block the Strait of Hormuz as a “golden opportunity” to force the issue by military means:

A military plan would have to include the elimination of the offending Iranian ships or submarines laying mines, and the destruction of missiles that might menace shipping. Most of Iran's navy would find itself gracing the bottom of the sea as a result. Meanwhile, major U.S. Marine amphibious landings on Iran's coast and Army airborne drops deep inside the sparsely populated Hormozgan region would have to create a physical cordon and an occupied buffer zone between Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. It would be a very long time before the West gave this territory back to Iran.

Furthermore, the argument goes, by seizing Hormozgan, the West would have a forward base within Iran from which to conduct attacks on known nuclear sites: “Strike aircraft (and, more worrisome to Iran's regime, Special Forces troops) would be just 60 to 90 minutes away from Iranian nuclear sites. Iran's threat to block the Strait of Hormuz has given the West new options.”

The issue that remains moot is not whether Iran is developing a nuclear weapon—let us assume that this is a documented fact, though it is not—but whether an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a threat to the United States. What are the motives of the Iranian decisionmakers? To threaten Europe, thus necessitating an American antimissile shield along Russia’s western borders in Central Europe? To threaten the United States even, regardless of a guaranteed hundred-fold retaliation to any attack? Or to protect Iran from what her leaders perceive to be a threatening environment?

Iran has one neighbor to the west and another to the northeast who were both invaded by the United States over the past 11 years. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq would have been invaded had they actually possessed weapons of mass destruction. Iran’s eastern neighbor is Pakistan, an unstable and unpredictable nuclear power. In the wider neighborhood there are two other key players with an atomic arsenal, India and Israel, with Turkey not far behind. Under the circumstances, having an independent nuclear deterrent is a perfectly rational option for the government in Tehran to pursue—any Iranian government, Islamist or secular, monarchist or republican, pro- or anti-Western. That option is based on the realities of the security equation and not on the millenarian zeal of Shi’ite fanaticism or on genocidal Jewhatred, as the proponents of war would have us believe. Even if Iran were to garner an arsenal of a dozen devices, which would take a decade at least, the overall strategic balance would remain fundamentally unaltered. Indeed, the political climate in the region may actually improve: Iran would feel safe from an American attack and therefore at least potentially less likely to indulge in destabilizing proxy interventions in the region, notably in Lebanon.

Israel may have reason to feel threatened by Iran’s long-term plans, but it is up to Israel to consider her options and to act accordingly. She may well decide on a robust response, like her bombing of the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq in 1981, with all the attendant risks and uncertainties. She should not expect the United States to do the job on her behalf, however.

The Saudis would also feel uncomfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran across the Gulf, and that would be a good thing. The more the royal kleptocrats in Riyadh focus on potential threats in the neighborhood, the less likely they are to escalate their global proliferation of Islamic extremism, which they have lavishly financed for decades. In any event, as the example of North Korea shows, the possession of the bomb by a single actor does not necessarily lead to a sudden nuclear rush in the region.

The second objection is technical. Regardless of its formal or substantial justification, can a U.S. war against Iran be kept limited and winnable? The initial intent may be to execute bombing raids against a dozen or perhaps two-dozen specific targets, but would that merely set Iran’s efforts back by two or three years? And what if Iran retaliates by detonating dirty bombs in downtown Tel Aviv and midtown Manhattan? What if the Iranians treat a U.S. attack not as a limited action that, in the War Party’s calculus, would produce a limited response, but as an existential struggle comparable to Khomeini’s all-out reply to Saddam’s attack 30 years ago?

If the Iranians respond forcefully, the advocates of limited air strikes against nuclear installations are certain to demand troops on the ground, regardless of risks and consequences, because our “credibility” would be at stake. In reality, America’s credibility would be terminally undermined by the resulting Iranian quagmire. An all-out “Operation Iranian Freedom” is not a rational option, because even with our unsurpassed military capabilities, the United States would not be able to mount a full-fledged invasion.

The third predictable consequence of a U.S. attack on Iran would be a global economic meltdown of unprecedented severity and magnitude. Not only would Iran’s output of some four million barrels per day be halted, but the maritime traffic through the Straits of Hormuz would come to a standstill for months on end—regardless of outcome. The resulting global energy crisis would make the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War pale in comparison, pushing a barrel to $300 within weeks and making the economic and financial crises of the past three years in Europe and the United States seem like the good old days.

Last but not least, we’d witness internal consolidation of the Iranian regime, a calcified theocracy devoid of ideas and solutions as it faces economic stagnation and political tensions. Domestic squabbles and the infighting of recent months would be forgotten, and any sign of opposition to the regime would be equated with treason. There would be no Iranian Spring for decades to come. On the other hand, without the unifying effect of an external threat the mullahs’ regime may yet prove more vulnerable to implosion than we would otherwise suspect.

Instead of considering a military action against Iran with no clear exit strategy at a prohibitive cost to our core interests, Washington would be well advised to prepare a strategy for dealing with Iran—even as a putative nuclear power. Deterring and containing Iran would be easier than deterring and containing the Soviets 50 years ago. The country’s regime, admittedly unpleasant, is neither suicidal nor tainted by the blood of untold millions, as the two communist nuclear powers had been.

Real concerns about Iran’s nuclear program exist; they are also present in Moscow and Beijing. It is still possible and politically profitable for Washington to pursue bilateral diplomacy based on an offer of U.S. security guarantees to Iran in return for a rigorous supervision regime and a formal pledge that Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons. A reasonable agreement would also allow Iran to enrich uranium to the extent needed for power generation and accept Iran’s right to the enrichment technology, so long as she agrees to subject her entire nuclear program to international oversight.

By pursuing sanctions similar in intent and likely consequences to FDR’s sanctions against Japan in 1941, the Obama administration may produce similar outcomes. That would be a disaster for all concerned.

So Rick Perry colorfully characterized the private equity firm Bain Capital, once run by Mitt Romney.

How did Bain prosper? Says Perry:

"These companies ... come in and loot the people's jobs, loot their pensions (and) loot their ability to take care of their families."

Behind this depiction is a 28-minute documentary, King of Bain, being aired in South Carolina by a super political action committee that supports Newt Gingrich and is financed by Vegas-Macau casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

The truth, however, turns out to be less colorful, as The Washington Post has awarded the documentary four Pinocchios for "manipulative interviews" and a "highly misleading portrayal of Romney's years at Bain Capital."

Seems that two of the companies Bain allegedly looted were not acquired until after Mitt left the firm, and the closure of a third plant in Gaffney, S.C., was no communal disaster.

No one in Gaffney, writes The New York Times, seems to recall the company, and the local paper did not even report its demise.

King of Bain is a hit piece, a malicious libel full of so many errors and lies that even Newt said it must be corrected or pulled down.

Yet if Romney is nominated, we will see this avenue of attack pursued by the Democrats. For populist assaults on capitalists and capitalism, dating back to William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech to the 1896 Democratic National Convention, have a long and venerable history.

Moreover, the hysteria of Beltway Republicans and their Chamber of Commerce allies over the Newt-Perry attacks on Mitt "the predator" and Mitt "the vulture capitalist" testifies to the power of the narrative and Republicans' fear of it. And they would do well to be fearful.

To many Americans, the period from the Civil War to World War I, when U.S. production grew from half of what Britain produced to twice what Britain produced, was a legendary era of growth and prosperity.

To others, however, this was the Gilded Age of Jim Fisk and James Gould, of robber barons and the Pullman strike, of the Haymarket Massacre and the Homestead strike at Carnegie Steel, where armed Pinkertons came up the river in barges to break the strike, only to be shot, disarmed and beaten by strikers and their families.

In 1904, Ida Tarbell wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company, painting oil magnate John D. Rockefeller as a capitalist without conscience, a "money-mad ... hypocrite." "Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises."

In 1906, Upton Sinclair penned The Jungle, a novel depicting the horrors of the stockyards and meat-packing plants of Chicago.

Teddy Roosevelt said of these reformers, "The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."

Yet T.R. himself took up the role of trustbuster. When J.P. Morgan wrote to him to protest Justice Department moves against one of his trusts—"Just send your man to my man and we can fix it up"—T.R.'s man at Justice retorted, "We don't want to fix it up; we want to stop it."

Teddy Roosevelt savaged the "malefactors of great wealth," and his cousin Franklin would echo him on taking office, denouncing "the money changers ... in the temple of our civilization."

They hate me, exulted FDR, "and I welcome their hatred!" He went on to crush and almost wipe out the Republican Party in 1936.

At the end of the Reagan era, which the left had decried, Barbarians at the Gate was published, portraying the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as a manifestation of colossal greed.

Michael Lewis—author of Liar's Poker, about the fall of Salomon Brothers, and The Big Short—has built a successful career describing the amorality at the apex of corporate America.

Today, President Barack Obama, with his Osawatomie, Kan., attack on "breathtaking greed," channeling T.R., seeks to insert himself in that populist tradition.

Undeniably, Americans cherish their economic freedom and respect the men who helped make America great, inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and industrialists such as Henry Ford.

But they do not revere the men who make millions and billions at the big casinos of capitalism. They do not admire a George Soros for winning his billion-dollar bet shorting the British pound.

They believe that a man's professional, as well as private, life should be guided by a conscience. And because they recoil from the teachings of Karl Marx does not mean they embrace the values of Ayn Rand.

Let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, economic Darwinism, is neither conservatism nor Americanism.

Should Mitt Romney be nominated, he will need to make a national address defending his career at Bain Capital with the same conviction and passion with which he defended his faith in the campaign of 2008.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

I have proof. That's to say, Gingrich keeps opening his mouth. Aargghhhh. The stuff that spills out!

The terrible, horrible, no good, please-go-away race for the Republican presidential nomination has the potential to deliver President Obama the kind of ringing affirmation that seemed impossible not many months ago. That was before the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives began shrieking his dislike and contempt for, well, the candidate likeliest to deny him, Newt Gingrich. Can you imagine it for a second?—the right to make over America in his personal and intellectual image.

No one treats Newton Leroy Gingrich like that and gets away with it. No one. If Republican voters are duped somehow into misappraising his genius and they spurn his suit, Gingrich appears to have decided, perhaps after consultation with heaven, that he'll show 'em. He'll pull down the temple, Samson-like. (Newton Gingrich fancies comparison to the strong and the brave.) Beneath the Republican ruins, we'll lie and sigh while the proud van of the Obama campaign sweeps past to victory.

Gingrich as a vice presidential nominee? Why not? Who can fairly be judged at this point to have done more than Newton Gingrich to undermine the Obama resistance movement?

In a New Hampshire debate, the former speaker of the House instructs his main presidential rival, Mitt Romney, to drop the "pious baloney." Nice, high-toned language, don't you agree? Very presidential. But we have to move on quickly, to ingest the news that Newton Leroy Gingrich, with the aid of a gambling baron from Nevada, will be distributing far and wide a 28-minute documentary purporting to expose the seamy side of Mitt Romney—his heartlessness, as head of an investment firm, in trying to restore the fortunes of failed or failing companies. Romney says his stewardship created a net 100,000 jobs, notwithstanding that other jobs were eliminated in the process.

As it happens, the Romney record at Bain Capital (the firm he left in 1999) is a favorite Democratic theme. The day before the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic National Committee released a web video making essentially the same charges as Gingrich. The Democrats—with little to tout in the way of economy-reviving policies—have long promised to throw Bain's "job destruction" record in the face of a GOP ticket headed by Romney. Why wait? the ex-speaker seems to reason. Let's do it now, since nothing else seems to be helping the Gingrich campaign.

The Bain story is complex as all get-out, even for the Wall Street Journal's attempt this week, in a news story, to simplify the matter. This is all the more reason to handle the story gingerly. Ah, but "gingerly" isn't the Gingrich style. Nothing else will do for Gingrich but that Bain Capital's attempts to turn around hard-up companies represent greed and contempt for all but the wealthy. Exactly—as Romney points out—"the type of criticism we've come to expect from President Obama and his left-wing allies at Moveon.org."

Even without Newton Leroy, the GOP presidential quest, with its mostly B-list roster of candidates, would have been less than inspirational. With him, the contest turns potentially fratricidal, just when the party should be starting to consider the healing of wounds, the unification of message, the overdue observance of Ronald Reagan's once-famous 11th Commandment—to speak no ill of a fellow Republican.

Obama-Gingrich—the sound of such a political union has a rich ring, in spite of what one knows already about Barack Obama; namely, he understands the futility of joining forces with a fellow know-it-all. Newton Leroy Gingrich is anything but the easiest man in America to live with—as two ex-wives might some day be induced to explain.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Chronicles

Look for a full obituary and reflections on his life in future issues of Chronicles, as well as several of his yet-to-be published pieces.

Cordray's nomination had been blocked by a Senate filibuster. There was no way he was going to win approval in 2012.

Enraged Republicans denounced the appointment as an affront and a usurpation of power, for the Senate had not formally gone into recess.

The White House airily dismissed the Republican rage, saying no Senate business is being conducted during the Christmas-New Year break, and to argue that the Senate is still in session is a sham.

Obama seemed to delight in his Trumanesque contempt:

"I will not sit by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people they were elected to serve. ... Not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans."

Cordray's appointment will be contested in the courts. Yet it will likely stand, though it's in-your-face aspect added appreciably to the bad blood bubbling in this city.

The Obamaites seem not to care.

Indeed, from year-end reports out of Hawaii, this is the new Obama strategy. He has given up on working with Congress and intends to run a year-long campaign modeled on Harry Truman's 1948 demagogic assault on the "no-good, do-nothing 80th Congress"—the one that passed Taft-Hartley and enacted the Marshall Plan.

Details of the Obama strategy were spoon-fed to the Post and New York Times. The Times lead: "President Obama is heading into his re-election campaign with plans to step up his offensive against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of Republican hostility to his agenda."

The Post lead: "President Obama has a New Year's resolution that will shape his re-election strategy at the dawn of 2012: Keep beating up on an unpopular Congress."

Once he gets a year's extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut, said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest, that is the last "must-do" item, "the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C."

But if the president is about to barnstorm the nation savaging Congress for a full year, where does that leave the country?

If Obama will be proposing nothing to deal with the fiscal crisis—trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see—how does America avert the future that Italy faces? Italy's debt is 120 percent of gross domestic product; ours, at 100 percent of GDP, is not all that far behind.

The U.S. fiscal crisis can be simply summarized. Since 2009, the federal government has been spending 24 to 25 percent of gross domestic product, while tax collections have fallen to 15 percent. When his first four years end, Obama will have grown the debt by $6 trillion.

And if he is giving up on any solution in 2012, believing he can win re-election by vilifying the GOP as toadies to America's top 1 percent, who are icily indifferent to the middle class, what hope is there for any political cooperation, should Obama win?

As of today, Obama is running even with Mitt Romney. He has lost much of the enthusiasm of the young and the minorities that he had in 2008. College-educated whites who had hopes for him seem disillusioned.

Assuredly, he may still win. But should Obama win, how, after a campaign like the one he intends to conduct, does he unite the country?

How does he work with a Republican Party that will likely still hold the House and will have made gains in the Senate, after he has spent a year castigating that party?

And what happen to the nation if we have five more years of political gridlock?

If the president failed to broker a budget compromise with the GOP in 2011 and has given up on 2012, how does he work with a Republican House in 2013? How does he, in a second term, resolve this budget crisis when his bottom-line demand for higher taxes is poison to a party he has just trashed for 15 months as a tool of Wall Street?

Resolving our fiscal crisis seems today beyond the capacity of the U.S. government, as currently constituted. We appear to be in a crisis of the regime rooted in an irreconcilable ideological conflict between two parties of relatively equal strength.

Republicans who refused to raise taxes in 2011 are not going to agree to raise them in 2013 in response to a request from an Obama who defeated them by portraying them as the party of the 1 percent in 2012.

If Obama is re-elected, the crisis endures.

It will then be resolved when the world realizes that the U.S. deficit and debt are beyond the capacity of this U.S. government to bring under control.

At that point, the ratings agencies and world markets will begin to treat the U.S. debt the way they treat the debts of Italy and Spain.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

At least the DPRK doesn't trumpet its status as the least-best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago, came a mile-marker in America's steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic with Obama's assertion that he has the right as president to secretly order the assassination, without trial, of a U.S. citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his 2009 betrayal of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

After months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It's snuggled into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates—don't glide too easily past that word—that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes U.S. citizens within the borders of the United States.

All onslaughts on potential sedition like to cast as wide a net as possible, so the detention act authorizes use of military force against anyone who "substantially supports" al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces." Of course, "associated forces" can mean anything. The bill's language mentions, "associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces." That's language that can be bent, at will, by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it's not fanciful to expect the thump of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of evil and darkness. Since 1878, here in the U.S., the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome people to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan's time, in the 1980s, Lt. Col. Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the former lecturer on the U.S. Constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There's been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have raised a stink. The New York Times denounced it editorially as "a complete political cave-in." Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn't codify "indefinite detention." But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes "detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities."

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Contrary to widespread belief, liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional rights. That's more the province of libertarians and other wackos actually prepared to draw lines in the sand for matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the U.S. government, another extremely sinister development.

The U.S. military has been outsourcing war at a staggering rate. Even as the U.S. military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights—a U.S. non-profit organization—is currently representing Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. They seek to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. In the words of Laura Raymond of the CCR, "By the military's own internal investigations, private military contractors from the U.S.-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases—Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3—aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes."

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the U.S. government's interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports, "They are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed 'battlefield preemption' and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any 'battlefield.'"

You've guessed it. As with "associated forces", an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a "battlefield." So unless the CCRs suit prevails, and a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel stands, private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a "battlefield."

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military delegates these powers to private military contractors. A company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any U.S. citizen here within the borders of the USA, "who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces," torture them to death and then claim "battlefield preemption."

Don't laugh.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop's fable of "The Dog in the Manger."

The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.

The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even enjoy.

What brings the fable to mind is this year's crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.

The problem with these folks is not simply that they detest Christmas and what it represents, but that they must do their best, or worst, to ensure Christians do not enjoy the season and holy day they love.

As a Washington Times editorial relates, the number of anti-Christian bigots is growing, and their malevolence is out of the closet:

"In Leesburg, Va., a Santa-suit-clad skeleton was nailed to a cross. ... In Santa Monica, atheists were granted 18 of 21 plots in a public park allotted for holiday displays and ... erected signs mocking religion. In the Wisconsin statehouse, a sign informs visitors, 'Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.' A video that has gone viral on YouTube shows denizens of Occupy D.C. spewing gratuitous hatred of a couple who dared to appropriate a small patch of McPherson Square to set up a living Nativity scene."

People who indulge in such conduct invariably claim to be champions of the First Amendment, exercising their right of free speech to maintain a separation of church and state.

They are partly right. The First Amendment does protect what they are doing. But what they are doing is engaging in hate speech and anti-Christian bigotry. For what is the purpose of what they are about, if not to wound, offend, insult and mock fellow Americans celebrating the happiest day of their calendar year?

Consider what this day means to a believing Christian.

It is a time and a day set aside to celebrate the nativity, the birth of Christ, whom Christians believe to be the Son of God and their Savior who gave his life on the cross to redeem mankind and open the gates of heaven.

Even if a man disbelieves this, why would he interfere with or deny his fellow countrymen, three in four of whom still profess to be Christians, their right to celebrate in public this joyous occasion?

This mockery and hatred of Christmas testifies not only to the character of those who engage in it, it says something as well about who is winning the culture war for the soul of America.

Not long ago, the Supreme Court (1892) and three U.S. presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter—all declared America to be a "Christian nation."

They did not mean that any particular denomination had been declared America's national religion—indeed, that was ruled out in the Constitution—but that we were predominantly a Christian people.

And so we were born.

Around 1790, America was 99 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic, with a few thousands Jews. The Irish immigration from 1845 to 1850 brought hundreds of thousands more Catholics to America. The Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 brought millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans, mostly Catholic and Jews. As late as 1990, 85 percent of all Americans described themselves as Christians.

And here one must pose a question.

How did America's Christians allow themselves to be dispossessed of a country their fathers had built for them?

How did America come to be a nation where not only have all Christian prayers, pageants, holidays and holy days been purged from all government schools and public institutions, but secularism has taken over those schools, while Christians are mocked at Christmas in ways that would be declared hate crimes were it done to other religious faiths or ethnic minorities?

Was it a manifestation of tolerance and maturity, or pusillanimity, that Christians allowed themselves to be robbed of their inheritance to a point where Barack Obama could assert without contradiction that we Americans "do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation"?

What are these Christmas-bashers, though still a nominal minority, saying to Christians with their mockery and ridicule of the celebration of the birth of Christ?

"This isn't your country anymore. It is our country now."

The question for Christians is a simple one: Do they have what it takes to take America back?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

An explosion ripped through a Catholic church during Christmas Mass near Nigeria’s capital Abuja on Sunday morning, killing at least 25 people. A radical Muslim group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility for the attack and another bombing in the city of Jos, as explosions also struck the nation’s predominantly Muslim northeast. The Christmas Day attacks show the growing national ambition of Boko Haram, was responsible for some 500 murders this year alone. The assaults come a year after a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded.

Egypt’s dwindling Copts have seen their position deteriorate over the past year from precarious to perilous. Already facing discrimination and harassment from Mubarak’s secular regime, they now see that things could get a lot worse under the Islamists who are poised to take power. Their annus horribilis started on New Year’s Day 2011, when a powerful car bomb targeted a Coptic church in Alexandria, killing 25 parishioners and wounding nearly 100 just as they were finishing midnight Mass. The next turning point was the Maspero massacre on October 9, when 27 unarmed Christian protesters were killed and hundreds more injured, not by some shadowy Islamic extremists but by the military.  An official commission—established by the Army—has unsurprisingly absolved the Army of all responsibility for the killings.

The country’s eventual transition to what passes for democracy in the Muslim world is going to make matters far worse for the Copts, who are fearful the army and courts will no longer be able to shield them from ever-greater discrimination and harassment. The writing is on the wall. The Freedom and Justice Party, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the second round of the three-stage parliamentary elections last Wednesday and Thursday, taking 38 of the 59 seats contested; an even more radical group, the Salafist Nour Party, won 13 seats. The adherents of political Islam, in other words, have captured 86 percent of all seats contested. Their spiritual leader is Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who in a recent video reminded the faithful that Christians are kuffar, or infidels. After quoting Quran 5:17 (“Infidels are those who declare God is Jesus, son of Mary”) he went on to declare that any association between a human and God (shirk) is the greatest sin: “Whoever thinks Christ is God, or the Son of God, not symbolically—for we are all sons of God—but attributively, has rejected the faith which God requires for salvation.”

The Sheikh’s position is eminently mainstream in the Muslim world, which may explain the fact that he is still hailed in the West as a moderate. Three years ago, in a U.S. News article titled “Finding the Voices of Moderate Islam,” Lawrence Wright described him as “a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam”: “He is the kind of cleric the West longs for, because of his assurances that there is no conflict with democratic rule and no need for theocracy.” His assurances, indeed… On this form watch out for the Coptic Exodus of 2012, on par with that of the Christians in Iraq since the “liberation” of 2003.

Iraq's dwindling Christian population marked Christmas on Sunday with religious leaders calling for peace, days after attacks across Baghdad killed dozens. A week after US forces completed their withdrawal from the country, a senior bishop noted that little was being done to prevent a continuing Christian exodus from Iraq. As worshippers gathered for Sunday morning Christmas services, their churches were guarded by armored security vehicles, heavily-armed soldiers and policemen patrolling the surrounding streets and guarding rooftops. “Our faithful are like everyone in Iraq—they have fear,” Chaldean Bishop Shlemon Warduni told AFP. “They feel there is no peace, no security, so they go where they can live in peace. We don't agree, we don't want them (to go), but they say, 'If we don't go, can you ensure my life, can you ensure my job, can you ensure the future?' … The government cannot ensure their lives, how can we ensure their lives?”

The Christian community in Iraq was some two million strong before the US-led invasion of 2003. Up to four-fifths are estimated to have left the country in recent years following a series of attacks by Muslim extremists. On October 31, 2010, an Al-Qaeda assault on a Baghdad church left 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security force members dead. “We have concerns about the US withdrawal, despite the security forces saying it will be safe,” says Louis Sako, Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk. “There has been a failure to ensure the safety of Christians—the security forces are not sufficiently prepared to ensure the protection of Christians. Even though we have repeatedly asked to raise the level of security, the results are not encouraging.” According to Sako, 57 churches and houses of worship in Iraq have been attacked since the invasion, with more than 900 Christians killed and more than 6 000 wounded.

Syria has the largest Christian community in the region, some 2.5 million strong. Most of them are supporting President Bashar Al Assad amidst ongoing protests in the country. A Syrian Christian explained that they prefer “a brutal dictator who guarantees the rights of religious minorities to the uncertain future that Assad’s departure might bring.” It is not to be doubted that if the Obama Administration is successful in its stated objective of bringing Assad down, the Christians in Syria will follow their Iraqi brethren into exile.

Two thousand miles further east, Asia Bibi, a mother of five children, is one of a dozen Christians in the province of Punjab currently awaiting appeal or execution under Pakistan’s scandalous blasphemy laws. On Christmas Day, after a year in jail, she will not be able to say prayers or to see her children and husband. She is being held in isolation, has not been allowed to bathe for over two months, and cannot stand unsupported. It is worthy of note that Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated last January and Federal Minorities Minister Shahbaz_Bhatti was killed in March for defending Asia Bibi and criticizing Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

Pakistan has a constitution that guarantees religious freedom, but murders, discrimination, and violent harassment of its small Christian minority are persistent. Any dispute with a Muslim—most commonly over land—can become a religious confrontation. Christians are routinely accused of “blasphemy against Islam,” an offense that carries the death penalty. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidence—one man’s word against another, and since it is invariably a Muslim’s word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained. The ease with which blasphemy charges can be made to stick has led to a spate of malicious complaints motivated by personal enmity and greed, especially for the Christians’ land. On many occasions Christians charged with blasphemy have been murdered before their cases reached the courts.

The scene is the same in Alexandria, Aceh, Istanbul, Prishtina, Karachi, Nazareth... Heavily armed police guard churches as hostile crowds look on. Wherever Muslim numbers dominate, Christians have reason to fear for their safety.  The majority know Sheikh Ali Goma is right. The refusal of the People of the Book to acknowledge him, Muhammad, as the messenger of God doomed them to unbelief and eternal suffering after death (Kuran 5:72-73). Christians are mortal sinners and their condemnation is irrevocable: “God will forbid him the garden and the fire will be his abode… They blaspheme who say: Allah is one of three in a trinity; for there is no god except One Allah. Christ the son of Mary was no more than an apostle; many were the apostles that passed away before him.” (5:75)

As he progressed from a moral teacher to the secular ruler of Medina and master of people’s destinies, Muhammad made the final break with the Jews and Christians, who are fiercely denounced. The Muslims must be merciless to the unbelievers but kind to each other. (48:29) “Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them.” (5:55) The punishment for resistance is execution or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides. (5:33) Muhammad was no longer trying to convert; Allah is a repetitive polemicist rejoicing in infidel suffering.

Thirteen centuries of Islam have effectively eliminated Christianity from the land of its birth. The terminal decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of the region their percentages have been reduced to single digits. Whether they disappear will partly depend on Western leaders belatedly expressing their outrage at Christian persecution. According to David Parsons, media director for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, there is clear historic precedent for such outside intervention in the Arab/Muslim world to protect Christian communities:

As Ottoman rule over the Middle East began to wane, the Great Powers moved into the region, each concluding deals with the Sultanate in Istanbul to provide protection to various imperiled Christian denominations. British envoys arrived to safeguard Protestant interests, France the Lebanese Christians, Russia the Orthodox folds. The Vatican also stepped in to aid certain sects… These Western interlocutors all brought with them schools, hospitals and other modern institutions, thus vastly improving the education, health and job opportunities of the local Christians. With this benevolent influx also came advances for all peoples of the region. Some locals are sure to object to any renewed Western intervention on behalf of Middle East Christians as a form of neo-colonialism. But no one has territorial designs here anymore.

It is just a matter of plain human decency, Parsons concludes: “No coddling of Islamist regimes! Sanctions if necessary! Someone has to do something to help stop the endless bleeding of Eastern Christianity.”

It is a near-certainty, however, that that “someone” will not be the U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama.

If the Jewish or Muslim population of America or Western Europe were to start declining at the rate at which Christian communities are disappearing in the Middle East, there would be an outcry from their coreligionists all over the world. There would be government-funded programs to establish the causes and provide remedies. The endangered minority would be awarded instant victim status and would be celebrated as such by the media and the academy. By contrast, when the President of the United States visited Jerusalem in October 1994, he was steps away from the most sacred Christian shrines but did not visit any of them. He did not meet a single representative of the Christian community, which remained invisible to him. A decade later, as busloads of American evangelicals stare at the Western Wall dreaming of a rebuilt temple that will provide an eschatological shortcut through history, the remnant of that community is on the verge of extinction—unseen and unlamented.

The one crucial difference between the Gospels and the Kuran is God’s love and His desire to redeem sinners by way of sacrifice. Without sacrifice there is no forgiveness, no atonement and no reconciliation that gives meaning to life and creation. Without it there is no salvation, which is why no true Muslim can ever be saved.