"Every country that enjoys democratic governance today owes its birth of freedom to our Founding Fathers and the continued existence of their democracy to the US military."

In the New York Post, Mark Thiessen writes,

...The US-powered victory over Nazi tyranny in World War II and our triumph over Soviet tyranny in the Cold War defeated the hateful ideologies of fascism and communism and unleashed a global wave of freedom.

...Americans liberated a continent, rebuilt much of it from the rubble of war with the Marshall Plan, and then stood watch on freedom’s frontier and prevented a Soviet tank invasion across the Fulda Gap. And today, the only thing that stops North Korea from invading South Korea or China from invading Taiwan is American military might.

So, let’s be clear: Every country that enjoys democratic governance today owes its birth of freedom to our Founding Fathers and the continued existence of their democracy to the US military.

Today, for all its flaws, America remains the freest, most innovative, most prosperous country in the history of the world. We invented the lightbulb and the iPhone. We put a man on the moon and a rover on Mars. We are a nation of unparalleled military power and unlimited opportunity. There’s a reason we have a crisis on our southern border; millions want to come here so that they can share in the abundance of American prosperity.

Read more here.

America

hat tip Oregon Muse

Contrasting Americas

In Donald Trump's America, working families get tax relief, millions of new jobs created, wages go up, small businesses thrive, the American dream achievable, change that makes America great again. This ad is going to run in all the swing states. Notice what happens right at the end.


h/t Ann Althouse

Historical nonsense

Andrew Klavan writes in PJ Media,

#AmericaWasNeverGreat has been the secret sub-text of much of the leftist message since at least the sixties. It may have reached the high watermark of its legitimacy with Barack Obama's threat to "fundamentally transform" the nation that had given him everything in return for precious little. But it might also gain a few extra months of credence by playing off the blustering nationalist sloganeering of a (let's face it) lowlife like Donald Trump.

The problem is, whether you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight, blessed to be born here or willing to break every law and dare any danger to get here from somewhere else, #AmericaWasNeverGreat is simply historical nonsense.

...Even those Americans whining about how oppressed they are here are only free to talk such trash because of the system our founders created. Without that system, they would actually be oppressed instead of being able to say so.

What the left and other enemies of freedom have done is to convince people to judge us by our failings and our flaws, mostly our woeful participation in the universal sin of racism. This is a strategy (sometimes flattered by association with once-philosophical "critical theory") put into place by those who wish to sell the slavery of socialism, but who can't do it on that failed system's merits. The idea is: you don't have to pimp socialist slavery, you merely criticize everything else and people will follow the siren song of Soviet-loving jackasses like Bernie Sanders — and Barack Obama, who says he shares Sanders's socialist goals.

America was a great nation. It is a great nation. With God's help — and at this point, nothing less will do — it will be greater still.

Read more here.

Co-opt him!

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media about conservative angst over OP front-runner Donald Trump,

The solution to conservative angst over Trump is simple: stop criticizing him, co-opt him.

If you want Donald Trump to be your friend, if you want him to be as conservative as Ronald Reagan, love The Donald to death. He will be your friend for life. And he will do what you wish, mostly. Praise every conservative statement out of his mouth and ignore the rest. It will probably change anyway.

And speaking of the fine art of ignoring, this leads me to something that Will, Charles Krauthammer and other of our best political minds seem to ignore themselves. Trump has kicked ideology to the curb for good reason.

Whether Trump realizes it or not, and I think he does, the situation in the USA has outgrown the finer points of political theory -- left, right and center or anywhere in between. It's far graver than that.

Barack Obama has murdered America's magnificent sense of optimism -- the very thing that made this country unique, that propelled this country, and therefore much of the world, forward in a generally positive way through Republican and Democratic administrations.

Now it's the reverse. America, the global leader, is a despondent, pessimistic country, leaving a void to be filled by the worst imaginable actors like ISIS. Donald Trump wants to make her great again. Bravo for him. That is something we should all be applauding this Christmas. In fact, it is the most important thing of all.

So if Donald does get the nomination, that's what I'll be focusing on. Indeed, I'll be focusing on that too if it goes to someone else. First, we need our country back. We can worry about the ideological implications later.

Read more here.

What's there to love?

Since the big focus this weekend seems to be on Rudy Guiliani's comments questioning Obama's love for America, Kevin Williamson suggests:

Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America? For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons.

...When as a candidate he was in trouble because of his association with the racist lunacy of the Reverend Wright, he responded by giving the American public at large a lecture on racism and its culpability therein, while his minions began proclaiming that the only reason to oppose this politician with the racist associates was — presto-change-o! — racism. But if you believe that the system is basically rotten, that the society that produced that system is basically rotten, that the game is rigged, that your opponents are all phonies and hypocrites, then what’s a little intellectual dishonesty in the service of the common good?

There is very little that a man with Barack Obama’s views and proclivities should love about the country, beyond the fact that its people are so vulnerable to insipid sentimentality that they twice elected him president.

Read more here.

Decline?

Cal Thomas writes:

British diplomat John Glubb wrote a book called “The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival.” Glubb noted that the average age of empires since the time of ancient Assyria (859-612 B.C.) is 250 years. Only the Mameluke Empire in Egypt and the Levant (1250-1517) made it as far as 267 years. America is 238 years old and is exhibiting signs of decline.

A Pew Research Center study confirms one trend that has been obvious over several years. The “typical” American family is no longer typical. Just 46 percent of American children now live in homes with their married, heterosexual parents. Five percent have no parents at home. They most likely are living with grandparents, says the study.

These startling figures about the decline of the American family contrast with the year 1960, when 73 percent of American children lived in traditional families.

Go here to read what Thomas thinks are the contributors to these changes.

Thanks to Kris Cook

Turkey and Qatar prop up Hamas terrorists

Evelyn Gordon points out that

it’s no exaggeration to say that without the support Hamas receives from Turkey and Qatar, it could never have built the war machine that enabled it to start this summer’s war, and thus the death and destruction the world is now decrying in Gaza would never have happened.

Since both America and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, one might expect this flagrant support for Hamas to prompt sanctions on Qatar and Turkey as state sponsors of terrorism. But Qatar is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and richest country, as well as home to the main U.S. air force base in the Middle East, while Turkey is a NATO member and major emerging economy. So in fact, far from sanctioning Qatar and Turkey, both America and Europe consider them key partners. In short, it’s simply easier for the West to condemn Israel’s response to Hamas attacks and pressure it to accede to Hamas demands than it would be to condemn and penalize Turkish and Qatari support for Hamas.

Read more here.

What would Rand Paul do to signal seriousness to those who threaten us?

Angelo Codevilla notices that Rand Paul does not appear to have given much thought to some issues of American foreign policy:

In short: today, any number of people in the Muslim world are “messing with us,” while the Chinese and Russian governments are setting about doing so even more seriously. They feel safe in doing so. For a generation, the U.S. government has been interfering in other peoples’ business while neglecting our own—making commitments without consideration of what it would take actually to keep them. It has spoken loudly while whittling down America’s stick. We have earned disrespect. Today, nobody takes America seriously. Would-be President Paul has made clear that his America would speak much more softly. Good. But he seems to have given little thought about what kind of stick the U.S. government needs to secure America’s peace as well as about what strokes may be needed to restore respect.

Today, China is building a military reasonably designed to control the western Pacific Rim from land bases. How would President Paul counter that? China has warned that any serious attempt to safeguard the independence of the islands off its coast might lead to the nuclear destruction of American cities. Would President Paul defend America against Chinese missiles, or Russian ones? As Muslim potentates from Palestine to Pakistan consider whether to (send or allow, it matters not) any of their zealots to kill more Americans, what reason would President Paul give them to hold them back? If and when terrorists from country X strike America, what if anything would he do to those in power there? In the meanwhile, what would he do to signal seriousness? Would he continue to subsidize the Palestinian Authority’s nursery of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism?

Paul‘s pronouncements on foreign policy, promising as they do retrenchment from foolish commitments, are faithful to the physician’s maxim: “First, do no harm.” But foreign affairs, as well as medicine, require more than refraining from harm. We may hope that Dr. Paul will study foreign affairs with the same seriousness with which he mastered medical school, and with equally competent professors.

Read more here.
Thanks to Maggie's Farm for linking to the Codevilla article.

Hitting the wall, but rising again

Sarah Hoyt believes America will hit the wall, but that the people will rise again.

The Soviets, weirdly, were an empire, with occupation of other lands and feeding of products (and riches) to the mother land. A predatory empire at that, since they never gave anything comparable to what they took. Instead, they protected the colonies from the imaginary “imperialism” of the US. (Which is why they accused us of it, and that piece of propaganda is still around. They needed that boogey man.)

You know, the same “imperialism” that made our client states filthy rich and quite able to call us names.

But we don’t occupy/claim territory, and no matter what the no blood for oil idiots had to say, we’ve never seized the natural riches of other lands.

I won’t deny we’ve caught the Marxist virus. We let it infect our schools, our universities, our journalists, and our so called “elites.”

Since 1776, when has there been a time that our liberty was completely assured and we knew we’d not have to fight for it?

Read more here.

Duck!

Peggy Noonan writes that

We are suffering in great part from the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations, many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the building of a house, or the starting of a business. You can only employ so many before the new insurance rules kick in so don't employ too many, don't take a chance! Which means: Don't grow. It takes the utmost commitment to start a school or improve an existing one because you'll come up against the unions, which own the politicians.

Participate to the maximum!

Let's start off the day with a discussion between Ted Nugent and Hillary Clinton Roseanne Barr.

What happened?

Thanks to Jason Worley.