Friends, Yours Truly is known for my FEARLESSNESS!!!!!!! I charge in where others fear to tread. Possibly this reputation is recognized only by me, but that doesn't make it any less accurate. Possibly other things make it less accurate, like my reputation for cowardice. Now we're getting bogged down in facts, though, so let's power through to the main point: Dr. Waddy is back on the air this week, and he's up to his usual tricks!
On today's Newsmakers show, Brian and I discuss the state of the midterms, which is disspiriting, from a Republican perspective, but perhaps not unrecoverable. We also cover the evolution of the Russia-Ukraine war and what it might portend for the future of warfare. We naturally consider what a Democratic victory in Congress and the next presidential election would look like, at least as regards the infrastructure that DJT is building on the White House grounds and elsewhere. We also ponder the race for Attorney General in New York State, the fabulosity of the Right Thinkers group in Olean that I have long been a part of, the cancellation of the livestreaming of the execution of the Fort Hood shooter, the challenge posed by the Houthis on the Arabian Peninsula, and where responsibility lies for inflation.
An impressively broad and comprehensive discussion, you say? I say: you're right!
Dr. Waddy: Just for fun: is not "vive le Empereur !" the battle cry of those depicted in the illustration?
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Re your latest Newsmaker broadcast: One thing is for sure in the upcoming NY state elections : there will be dang few State Corrections Officers , Police and crime victims who know the score voting for our incumbent criminal apologists Governor Hochul and Attorney General James.They have both demonstrated their resolve to give all benefit of any doubt to violent thugs and against law enforcement and the law abiding.
ReplyDeleteI worked in NY state prisons for 20 years, closely with the Officers. Even then you and the Officers knew that any time you took action against a convicted criminal for often threatening misbehavior you were bound to have to answer "harassment" charges encouraged by civilian state officials in comfortable offices and free of the stressful consequences of their dominant virtue signaling concerns for inmate well being . How can that be possible, you may ask? When you face from the very top down often college corrupted far leftists who bear you open contempt and who could take your job, ruin your consequent job prospects and even threaten your freedom, if you can vote against them, you'll welcome the chance. And you would welcome the support of the voting public in this!You know where you stand with these irresponsible dreamers because you experience every day the vicious insolence of criminals predictably emboldened by the support they know full well they get from people in power who believe punishment is itself a crime.
The sobering experience which informs my opinion on this is very common among law enforcement personnel who have direct contact with criminals. Our wonderful State Senator Borrello, who preceded you on the broadcast , knowledgeably noted that our NY State Attorney General devotes more effort to prosecuting law enforcement personnel than she does in advancing the rights of the law abiding.
For those from out of NY State who may read this: yes, we of common sense here are way out numbered by the far left voters who now rule the lala land amoeba on the Hudson. But take care! What is happening to us can happen to you. The formerly loyal Dem party has surrendered to the "Democratic"Socialists of America. If you vote for a Dem at any level you vote for the DSA. And take it to the bank: DSA are Marxists who see criminals as a "revolutionary class" to aid them in taking over the US. That is why they openly advocate abolishing the police and prisons.
Dr. Waddy : During WWII gas was rationed severely and you could not buy a new car. Access to many foodstuffs was limited.
ReplyDeleteInflation, no doubt much exacerbated by higher gas prices , is an unavoidable consequence of war with a country which has much control over the flow of oil to an oil dependent world. That country, Iran, has now called on its ally in fanatic antipathy, the Houthi's of Yemen, to aid them by threatening the Bab Al Mandeb outlet from the Red Sea , which is oil rich Saudi Arabia's other major oil export site. And the Houthi's ,at Iran's behest , have murderously bombed Saudia Arabia"s busiest airport. All this is of course to make Middle East countries who endorse the US determination to end Iran's savagely motivated hopes for nuclear weapons with which to chastize all infidels, to rethink their positions. Iran knows the US has an assertive and vocal anti American war effort movement and wishes to encourage them to "feel wanted".
Consequently the war with Iran has taken on dimensions we might not have at first envisaged. First Bull Run and Shiloh had a similar chastening effect on the US public but the US persisted through even worse challenges and the Union was saved. Within days of declaring war on Japan we were declared upon by Germany. In fighting the Japanese, especially at Okinawa , we faced theretofore unimagined depths of depravity on the part of the desperate Japanese. In all these instances our country stayed the course and endured relative domestic hardships until a successful end was accomplished. We must resolve to do the same in this present war. For the immediate present that necessitates defeating an America hating DSA, which would be pleased to bring about another Vietnam style shame on our country, by turning out on Election Day.
RAY TO JACK
ReplyDeleteDuring your 20 years in the NY state prisons system, did you ever come to any conclusions, or semi-conclusions, as to why the civilian state officials believed "punishment is a crime" and that sort of pro-criminal mentality. What are your thoughts on this?
Jack, I believe you're right about those brave cavalrymen!
ReplyDeleteIt is depressing how little inclination the public now has to rally around a wartime president, no matter how despicable the enemy happens to be. You'd think selling aggression against an Islamist, terrorist-supporting autocracy would be fairly simple. You'd think its penchant for holding the entire world hostage, economically, would seal the deal. Nope! Orange Man Bad trumps, as it were, all other considerations. No wonder our presidents hesitate to go to war, and expect little of the American people in terms of sacrifice when we do. The character (and staying power) shown by the public in the course of our last few major conflicts has been seriously wanting. Maybe the Gulf War was an exception, but that's ancient history now.
RAY TO DR. WADDY
DeleteClearly my opinion, but I would say the last time Americans were supportive about anything to do with war, was 1941-1945, and after that it was all downhill.
Dr. Waddy: I should add: our NY state "Attorney General"sat visibly smirking merely feet away from DJT in the courtroom in which her hatred for him was being disingenuously prosecuted. What chance for justice then does anyone have from her ;eg.men accused of sexual assault or working men and women in law enforcement who have the temerity to challenge the criminals she exalts?
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: During the Gulf War, traitors set up loud speakers outside the White House and succeeded in impairing President Bush's sleep. True, though, their cynical ingratitude did not prevail. President Bush and Generals Powell and Schwartzkopf handled the war , as far as it went, brilliantly . Too, this was the first chance America had to affirmatively express sincere regret over the vicious castigation often faced by Vietnam vets upon their return . The eager spitters knew better than to do that anathema to the Desert Storm returnees and have been justly intimidated ever since in that regard. That of course has not stayed the relentless "American" far left from undermining American war policy itself , as they do now. Their support for the N. Vietnamese Marxist savages cast a pall over our military for over a decade and their present cadre, including even senescent survivors of Vietnam era sedition , reinvigorated by the rise of the America hating DSA, would delight in reprising it.
ReplyDeleteRay: Many of these officials were products of post 1965 college and "university" educations and were corrupted by the reflexive social, legal, political and philosophical iconoclasm spawned by the American academy since then. Its now in its third generation and to so many it is an inherent, unthought of replacement for common sense .
ReplyDeleteThe psychologist Karl Menninger wrote The Crime of Punishment , the title of which summarizes its theme. I met several persons both in our main Corrections office in our state capitol and in the mostly left wing library profession with which we prison librarians cooperated who demonstrated agreement with the views expressed in that book. Completely either ignored or disdained by them was the three volume work The Criminal Personality by Louis Yochelson and its one volume precis Inside the Criminal MInd by Yochelson and Stanton Samenow. The latter book provided me a working model of criminal thinking which I found very useful in my job. It described most criminals as very self centered , possessed of very high regard for themselves (not the "low self esteem" so lamented by leftists), well aware of the evil they do , nonetheless determined to "do their thing" and justly dealt with only by holding them to complete personal responsibility. Occasionally I expressed my agreement with Samenow and Yochelson to civilian colleagues and was usually met with patronizing scorn (not so by Corrections Officers, who of course know criminals as only those close to them 24/7 can know them).
I encountered civilian administrators in NY's Corrections dep't who described themselves as kneejerk liberals and who considered criminals to be victims and the law abiding to be their victimizers by ostensibly showing no sympathy for the "root causes" which supposedly force criminals into crime. This view course ignores the fact that so many of the true victims of crime are as unfortunate as so many criminals routinely claim to be.
It only takes a few closed minded administrators at the top to force an entire organization to comply with their counterintuitive view that criminal justice must have as its imperative " the rights of criminals" and to regard the gross injustice this often causes the law abiding as an ancillary phenomenon of secondary importance. Its obvious that N.Y. Governors Cuomo and Hochul and our present State AG James have insisted on the primacy of this view in NY state law enforcement. That it runs contrary to the everyday , on the scene experiences of law enforcement and crime victims is of no moment to these imperious executives.
Oh criminals do revere the law, ehh, when it works for them; they disdain it when it holds them to account for their freely chosen actions. The intellectual and professional acculturation displayed by many who administer criminal justice and related fields (like librarianship) , especially in far left dominated places like the 'left coast" and the eastern "megalopolis ", rationalizes sympathy for this view and cynical and expeditious law breakers gratefully thrive on it.
RAY TO JACK
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to explain this to me, or that is to say, the origins of this type of non-thinking. Basically, a society where the cops are the perps, and the perps are the victims.
Ray": Its disgusting and doubly so when we know that these totalitarians would very quickly establish a police state if they could.Of course they would be a much different kind of police. Oh and all those empty prisons we have in NY.?They'd fill them up real fast with "counter revolutionaries".
ReplyDeleteRAY TO JACK
DeleteYou got it! People like us would become political prisoners, and the criminals left in the prisons would be in charge of us.
Dr. Waddy: A conservative columnist whose name escapes me once remarked: "Unless we are veterans of foreign wars, or their families,what do we in the US know of war"? How could anyone without the searing actual experience of it make a balanced judgement as to the justice or necessity of war? Still, we are a democracy, where public support for continued prosecution of a war is vital.
ReplyDeleteWell, in 1940, the US had seen and heard film and radio accounts of the war in Europe but the Draft Act passed by one vote in (I believe) the House. We had had the unprecedented and counterintuitive dispatch of a massive US force to fight in Europe in 1918 and thought it would never again be necessary. Pearl Harbor did get US hackles raised and public support for the war never wavered after that as far as I know but 400,000 American combat deaths no doubt helped to steel American resolve. Too, America itself was never directly assaulted. So some balance did obtain in the general public's ability to judge war from experience but it understandably could not compare to that of those who suffered war's cataclysmic physical presence.
The Korean War probably came as a most unwelcome shock only 5 years after WWII and its necessity was controversial , though loyally expressed so.
Then in came the boomers, with their experience of relative peace, prosperity and security; even the brief nuclear attack drills we had in school seemed thus to be based in unlikely possibilities. As so many of the boomers flocked to colleges , quite unlike previous generations, they were greeted by faculty Marxists and America haters who had lain low since the Depression but who now saw in my mostly incalculably fortunate generation a fecund naivete which they hastened to manipulate. They convinced too many of us that our parents' America was a terribly flawed , even essentially oppressive country and that we had been lied to in our school civics classes. The boomer college crowd may not have even been the majority of the generation produced by a young America which had annealed itself in the Depression and WWII but in such an enormous generation it was a very culturally significant faction. And its dissembling influence on American culture, politics, legality and economy was profound. It was manifested most immediately in the still shocking intensity of the opposition to the war in Vietnam, especially among those of draft age. Their resistance to the draft would have made them pariahs in WWII. They conveniently embraced the excuse that the conflict with communism, then focused on S.E. Asia, where the intensely important Straits of Malacca were credibly threatened, was not worth the price of their inconvenience , their subjection to military discipline and the possible end of the bright personal futures prosperity promised them.
Their shameful subjugation by grimly expeditious "American" Marxists, extended for a limited interval even into vicious castigation of our defense forces, continues into its third generation today in the US. It fuels the"American " far left's firm devotion to the discreditation of any effort, be it military , economic or diplomatic, to advance America's interests and its domestic unity. That that American strength saved the world from the harrowing technologically advanced threat of the great totalitarian movements of the 20 the century is to these dreamy radicals dismissable and even regrettable because it unjustly delayed the "inevitable" marxist subjection of humanity to utopian perfection.
The recent rise of openly demonstrated Jew hatred on campus in the US gives telling evidence of continued anarchic Marxist influence among our cynically indoctrinated younger populations and a senescent rump of the boomers persists in its vicious disdain for America. They say we invited Sept. 11 and we even now suffer among us viable political candidates who say we deserved it.
Dr, Wady: In saying anarchic Marxism above I mean only that chaos Marxists advance so that they can pick up the pieces. If they take over there will be GOVERNMENT with a vengeance, as the world knows from experience and as today's atavistic and unapologetic neo Marxists would have us forget or counterintuitively deny.
ReplyDeleteRay, I would say things aren't quite that bleak, but the American people are fickle AT BEST when it comes to supporting our wartime presidents and our troops on the battlefield. You'd think an enemy like the Viet Cong or the mullahs wouldn't be that hard to rally around, but never underestimate the guile of the Left!!!
ReplyDeleteEek! So you say I'm destined for "the big house"??? And lefty ideologues and hardened criminals will lord it over me there? Now, that doesn't sound like a cheerful vision of the future AT ALL... Can't I just vote for AOC and redeem myself? I say again: EEK!!!
Support for the war effort in 1941-45 was indeed strong, but I would say that was largely a factor of the unanimity in the media about its nobility. Conservatives can generally be depended on to rally around the flag, but in this case liberals could too, because they saw fascism (rightly) as their ideological foe. Ergo, there was essentially no space left for those who opposed the war, and these contrarians were not treated well, to say the least. Perhaps the initial reaction to WWI was similar, but it's interesting how public perceptions of that war turned sour almost immediately after it was over. I wonder why? Probably because leftists saw an angle they could exploit in anti-war sentimentality.
Dr. Waddy: Some other consequences may too have had a negative effect after WWI: the catastrophic Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19 was thought to have been brought back by Doughboys returning from a foreign land. American casualties were a shock, as we had not experienced such high counts since the Civil War. The Peace Treaty process might have seemed to Americans to be yet another of the endless European succession of treaties and wars and treaties etc. Too , President Wilson brought from the Versailles treaty conference a "League of Nations" proposal which bade fair to entangle us in future typical European conflict. And the "Great War " had shown how terrible that could now be. The astounding success of the Uboats was not fully appreciated and so we still thought we could repair to the protection of two immense oceans. The prosperity of the '20s shielded us from the renewed war possibilities maybe incomprehensibly emerging in Europe and supported a belief that WWI had truly been "the war to end all wars" and that war was henceforward unthinkable.
ReplyDelete