On politics and terrorism and our thin blue line

Oh what a week it has been.

Donald Trump and Ben Carson are now neck and neck at the head of the Republican primary pack. And CNN has reevaluated its criteria which may allow Carly Fiorina to join the crowded debate stage on September 16.

That three political outsiders have risen so strongly in the polls gives proof of the peoples’ disgust with establishment Washington. Carefully calibrated positions, politically correct formulations, and raw hypocrisy have left the voters deeply disgusted. So candidates who speak obvious truths (among Mr. Trump’s wild exaggerations) without submitting to the verbal constraints demanded by the liberal elite are eagerly embraced.

For instance, there is a political cartoon currently making the rounds on social media illustrating this point. It depicts a puzzled  President Obama on a “Wheel of Fortune” set asking the host, “Gee Pat – I don’t have a clue… workplace violence?  Armed insurgency? Can I buy a vowel?” The game board displays “_SLAM_C  TERROR_SM,” and the caption reads “And it’s even his favorite vowel.”

Why does this strike home? Because everyone knows that the horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State and Boko Haram are rooted in their Islamic beliefs, twisted as they may be. We know it. President Obama knows it. But he will not bring himself to say the words. That is deeply distressing to the populace who desire a clear identification of our adversary and what motivates them. Somehow, we hope, Trump and Carson and Fiorina will not be afraid to name the enemy.

Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton private email server story will just not go away. Seven thousand more of her emails released by the State Department contained significant redactions. Redactions (black outs) of text indicate that the text is sensitive. Arguments are swirling whether she committed a crime by not using a federal email account. Yes. No. Perhaps. Or, possibly, only technically a crime.

Here are a few questions for you. Why did her email server share an IP address and SSL certificate with the Clinton Foundation’s email server? Was her server STIGed to federal security standards? Why did Mrs. Clinton wipe her server and submit the emails to the State Department as a pile of printed documents? Why are we not privy to the email metadata? (For those confused by the forgoing, ask your son-in-law in IT or any high schooler to research it for you).

There is one thing for certain. Wall Street banks, dogged by populists such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would not get away with providing printed copies of email to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC would assert that the missing metadata was material, and that printed emails were subject to undetectable alteration. The regulatory response would be swift,  harsh, and the fines quite steep.

In other topics, there has been a deeply disturbing trend playing out. Consider this:

Charles Gliniewicz

Darren Goforth

Henry Nelson

Steven Vincent

Carl Howell

Sean Bolton

Scott Lunger

Sonny Kim

These are all police officers who have been killed by gunfire in the past few months. One in particular, Goforth, killed in cold blood, ambushed. Officers dead. Families bereft. Kids fatherless. It is hard to appreciate the depth of the loss.

But not less, the loss to their communities. These officers were sworn to serve and protect. In their absence, their communities are less safe. It is difficult to understand the mindset of activists and protesters who carry signs proclaiming “Police are the Enemy.”

What a twisted worldview.

Yes, there are some bad cops. There are bad teachers and doctors and baseball players too. But we don’t paint them all with the same brush. Unfortunately, the debate in this country as of late has done just that.

The vast majority of police officers are honest and fair. Their job is incredibly difficult. They never know, when encountering a subject, whether that is an upstanding citizen such as yourself or a psychopathic criminal. The danger is palpable, their precautions understandable.

Here is a bit of advice. Never argue with a police officer. Comply with his or her directives. If you feel you are being treated unfairly, lodge a complaint later with his superiors or with a judge. So many tragedies, almost all of them, could have been avoided.

In closing, it is now September. The shadows are growing longer, the days shorter. Take a deep breath and enjoy this late bit of summer. Politics and civil strife and global terrorism will wait until tomorrow.   

A cult of life

The “baby boomer” generation, when we were young, read tales of World War II, seeming distant to young minds but actually quite proximate. As close as the dreadful events of September 11, 2001, are to the current crop of kids, who view it as history, something which happened before they were born, or before they remember. So was World War II to us.

We read of grinding land wars in Africa and Europe. Of swirling naval battles and island campaigns in the Pacific. We read of the Holocaust, and the unthinkable cruelty of the Nazis to those viewed as “other.” We read of the fate of Allied prisoners imprisoned by harsh Japanese captors. And how seventy years ago this summer, it was all brought to a just and satisfactory conclusion.

There were many tales of heroism, from the small theater of a Marine falling on a hand grenade to save his buddies to the riveting drama of Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. While militarily insignificant, the raid was the first truly good news of the Pacific campaign, that Japan was vulnerable to attack.

But as the war shuddered to its inevitable conclusion, there were disturbing accounts of desperation, of Japanese volunteers who willingly gave up their lives. Waves of kamikaze pilots, nearly 4,000 in number, attacked Allied ships with what amounted to human-guided, flying bombs. Kamikaze, “divine wind,” was a deeply foreign concept to young Western minds.

Perhaps from our foundation as a free country based on individual liberty, and certainly shaped by religion, we believed in the sanctity of human life. We admired heroism, but cheered the hero who survived as much as one who lost his life in an heroic act. The Marine falling on a grenade was deeply respected, but we did not expect thousands to do so. We would rather they would fight, win the battle, prosecute the war, and come home to take jobs and father children and mow the lawn and go to church on Sunday. We did not expect, nor would we admire, mass suicide.

If we had a cult, it was a cult of life. Death would come in God’s time, not ours.

But here we are, seventy years later, after the Japanese kamikaze waves proved ineffective, with a new cult of death.

We are now in a struggle with Islamic extremists, who twist their religion to justify their war on the West and Western values. Al-Qaeda, ISIS (or ISIL ), and Boko Haram are all examples of this theologically twisted philosophy. They share several fundamental features:

• A blind intolerance for other beliefs. Convert or die.
• Patriarchal and cruel. Women have no rights, gays are put to death.
• Regular use of suicide attackers. Your reward is in paradise, not on Earth.
• Unbelievable brutality. Kidnapping, torture, beheading, immolation, the more gruesome the better.
• Worldwide domination as a goal. International operations are underway, with recent attacks in France, Canada, Belgium, Australia, and the United States, among others.

What could be more antithetical to Western beliefs and culture?

And yet, and yet… we dither in the goal of containing a nuclear Iran. We stand by as the ISIL-declared Caliphate grows in Africa. We continue to avert our eyes… the Fort Hood terrorist attack is officially termed “workplace violence,” its victims denied crucial medical benefits. We refuse to openly recognize the Islamic roots of the enemy. A fringe, twisted, extremist Islamic belief system, but one with millions of supporters.

One only hopes that the next president, whoever he or she is, will recognize the existential nature of this struggle. That if we truly believe in the equality of women, gay rights, and the freedom of expression and religion, there is no accommodation that can be made, no moral equivalence that can be argued. It is time that we clearly state what we stand for: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is foundational. It is who we are.

Let’s only hope that January, 2017, is not too late.