P&D and The Week That Was

 

 Truth is the Sublime Convergence of History and Reality

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De Omnibus Dubitandum, (Everything is to be questioned!)

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This Link will take you to My Commentaries. 

 

By Rich Kozlovich

 

 

There are approximately 2.2 million federal civilian employees.  The average cost of a federal employee, including salary and benefits, is around $143,643.  How much money is that in salaries and benefits every year? $316,014,600,000.    

 

Recently it was reported Trump said 1 million federal workers ‘could be fired.’  That's a minimum savings of $172, 371,600,000.  That doesn't count all the other expenses involving employees, such as buildings and the cost of maintaining them.  That's a lot of money, but when you compare saving a hundred and seventy five billion and more dollars to the nation's debt of almost 37 trillion dollars, that's chump change.  But if that's the pattern that plays out in everything they do, then we're talking real money.   I'm convinced by the end of Trump's first year in office, his DOGE team and the generals he's appointed to be heads of these government bureaucracies, are capable of eliminating a trillion dollars in spending. 

I've told this story before, but I think it's  worth repeating.  Some years ago my friend Jay Lehr, who attended Princeton and met Einstein, said when Einstein first came to Princeton he gave seven lectures.  He said the first few were so packed you couldn't beg, steal, borrow, or buy a seat.  By the end of the series there were a lot of empty seats.  I was surprised and I asked him why.  He said Einstein was lecturing some of the smartest people in the world, and they didn't have a clue what he was talking about.  You can only image how that effected their egos.  They didn't dare suggest Einstein didn't know what he was talking about since he was considered the most brilliant man alive.  

Well, I will be the first to acknowledge I'm far more clueless about physics than those sitting in that lecture hall.  But by just watching from the back row there's one thing I've gleaned.  Much about physics is based on a lot of "maybes".  Maybes that can't be proven via the scientific method of observation, experimentation, and analysis.   They can observe, and they can analyze, but how do they experiment?  Take black holes for example, how do you experiment with a black hole?  Now, all of a sudden everything they "knew" about black hole astronomy might be wrong.  As I see it, it's all guess work, and they don't have a clue either, yet they're absolutely positive ..... again.  

Truth be told I find it all interesting and fascinating, and I always have, but in the final analysis, I really don't care.  I consider this to be academic welfare, like so much of what academia does, much of which should not be funded by the government since there's not one iota of practical value in so much of what they do.  If that makes me a neanderthal, I can live with it. 

Fani Willis, of Georgia prosecutor who played the bully role in her attempt to "get Trump" is now crying that Jim Jordan is bullying her.  Imagine that, and doing so in violation of his oath of office.  What? Investigating a known corrupt prosecutor is a violation of his oath?  Really? Why?  Because it's black history month, and he should be celebrating that instead of "bullying" her!  It seems her deck of race cards has no limit.  

The FBI is heading into a maelstrom from which many will not return.  If this true, and I'm betting it is, the "new" FBI has launched an investigation into James Comey, and it's being reported the FBI is destroying evidence including the files on the JFK assassination.

This is the crack national law enforcement agency that raided the home of a mom of four children,  who protested at a school board meeting resulting in an invasion of her home by a FBI SWAT team, knocking down her door, bursting into the house with guns and handcuffing her while she was homeschooling her children.  

The FBI is broken, and it's not just a matter of bad leadership; it's the system itself.  And guess what?  A lot of these miscreants are worried they're going to be thrown in jail, and they have good reason to be worried.  Remember.... no one is above the law.  Their only recourse?  Destroy the evidence! 

I really like being right, and this is one time I wished I wasn't.  The covid shots were not vaccines, not only did they not prevent infections, they weren't designed to do so, and that was right from the mouth of Deborah Birx, who designed their vaccination policy.  A person who needs to be charged with crimes against humanity, or at the very least depraved indifference, right along with Fauci.  Only Fauci has been given a pardon, Brix hasn't.  Fauci isn't immune to  non-federal criminal charges, or civil actions against him. 

 ;

We're seeing a lot of kickback from Democrats over DOGE and all they're exposing, and there's a reason why.   Here's one example,  Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Backed Legislation That Funneled Millions to His Wife’s Nonprofit.  They're in on the take, and feeding at the government's trough is addictive.  And ya just gotta love pencil neck Schiff.  He knows there are millions of Americans who are downright ashamed of Trump.   And he's right, they're called nitwits, halfwits, dipsticks, and misfits, all of which are Democrats and RINO's.   And we should care why?

Think about this.  Someone recently pointed out: "There are 18 intelligence agencies, and somehow they had no idea that Hamas was going to attack Israel or that Syria was going to collapse. What were they doing? I would say that is a lot of duplicative waste."  Well, it appears we now know a lot about what some of them were doing.  Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fires 100 perverts spewing out their drooling on government computers and time. 

And this is at the nation's most top secret agency, the NSA, involving the CIA and others.  The questions that now need answering is how did this happen, who in leadership knew about this, when did they know it and is it likely to happen again? Since all these people are being fired, I think I can say, not in the near future, and now, not in the military.  

As for how this happened, and it happened like a things from the left, "a slow march through the institutions", as this article There’s a Trans Cult Inside the NSA, by Christopher F. Rufo explains:

An insider tells the story of the intel agency’s ideological capture..........But according to our whistleblower, these sex chats were just the tip of the iceberg. This longtime NSA insider tells me that the ideological capture of the NSA began a decade ago. Trans activists have entrenched themselves in positions of power, pressured employees to undergo reeducation trainings, and compromised national security in the name of ideology........

It's clear this is deeply entrenched, and it's also clear that many of those who will be thrown out of these top secret agencies may well decide to commit treason in order to get back at those who fire them.  It truly is an "iceberg" problem.

Trump has made it clear any state that doesn't end transgenderism in sports will have their funds cut off, and Maine has made it clear, they don't' care.  They're even going to punish a   GOP Congressman for opposing transgenderism, and they've even attacked a female state Senator for challenging Maine's actions claiming she's done "irreparably breaking the public trust."  The left's capability to use more words in more twisted ways is mind boggling.

As a side bar...did you get a look at their governor?   How does someone that dumb, that strange, and that ugly get elected? There's just gotta be something in the water in Maine. 

 

Another favorite of mine is that great intellectual and moral giant,Michael Moore, with his latest rant filled with logical fallacies claiming one of these deported illegal migrant children might have cured cancer, or stopped an asteroid from hitting the planet.  But then again, maybe they wouldn't.   But if he can show us which ones would be able to do that, we'll keep them.  

In the meanwhile they're criminals because they're here illegally, eating up American's tax money, overwhelming our public services, committing a lot of crimes, forming criminal organizations, and even creating groups to overthrow the United States, much of which Joe Biden can take "credit".  Other than Michael Moore and his ilk, all suffering from mental delusions, the rest of this call this blame, not credit. 

Finally, I was a surprised that all of a sudden DOGE, and the President, want Fort Knox audited.  I thought... really... what's that all about?   There were two show audits in 1953 and 1974, but there's never been a real audit of the gold supply...ever.  And there's some kickback over this, why?  

What really triggered this?  I'm guessing of course, but I'm kinda getting the feeling something unexpected has turned up in one of the DOGE investigations, and I think there's something going on in the background they're not divulging, and it shook them.  But, we'll see.   

This week I've posted eight commentaries of my own, and twenty one by others.  I hope you find them worthy of your time.

Best wishes, 

Rich 

My Commentaries

1. Media Collapse is Inevitable, and it's a Good Morning in America! Part VII, Fake News
2. Media Collapse is Inevitable, and it's a Good Morning in America! Part VI
3. Media Collapse is Inevitable, and it's a Good Morning in America! Part V
4. We Do Need to Return to the Past
5. Are We Entering a Golden Age?
6. Judicial Boundaries Need to be Imposed
7. It's Time For a Constitutional Confrontation With the Federal Judiciary
8. Often Wrong, Never in Doubt

Commentaries

1. Extra! Extra! Changes Coming to The Washington Post Opinion Page By Leesa K. Donner
2. DOGE Is Very Popular With Americans, New Poll Finds By Leesa K. Donner
3. Wishful Thinking: Leftists Say Trump ‘Coup’ Has Failed By Tim Donner
4. Mine, Baby, Mine – Right Here in the USA!  By Paul Driessen
5. AI: How to Teach Critical Thinking By John Droz, Jr.
6. The President, the Special Counsel and his Lawyers By Daniel Greenfield
7. Searching for Condemnations in the Muslim World  By Daniel Greenfield
8. Is There a Constitutional Right to Castrate Children?  By Daniel Greenfield
9. Washington DC: The March of Folly By Robin Itzler
10. Black History Month: 2020 BLM George Floyd riots By Robin Itzler
11. Birthright citizenship and Democrat hypocrisy By Robin Itzler
12. Maybe We Need a Government Shutdown By Robin Itzler
13. HHS Job Cuts: Pork or Purge? By John Klar
14. The Case Against Socialism, Part IV By Dan Mitchell
15. What Country Has the Best System of Health Care? By Dan Mitchell
16. The Process Of Rescinding The Endangerment Finding Has Begun By Francis Menton
17. Amicus Brief Filed In Glen Oaks Village Owners v. City Of New York By Francis Menton
18. Karma for Comey: Is the FBI Investigating Its Former Director? By Graham J. Noble
19. Operation Whirlwind Targets Democrats’ Incendiary Rhetoric By Graham J. Noble
20. The Wall Street Journal Completes Its ‘Woke’ Transition By Joe Schaeffer
21. Ethel Rosenberg and the Model UN By Michael D. Shaw

Permanent Links

1. 45 Communist Goals to Destroy America as Listed in the 1963 Congressional Record
2. My Seven Rules of Geopolitics
3. The John Boyd Legion of Honor

 No matter what anyone says, you can’t marginalize the truth!  You can suppress it, you can ignore it, you can avoid it, you can attempt to undermine it, you can attempt to subvert it, you can attempt to organize against it, you can even laugh at it, but if we have the courage and the fortitude to stand and confront the lies, irrespective of the personal costs, the truth will stand the test of time, because truth and time are on the same side.

Constant as the North Star

How the Kennedy Family Caused Today’s Immigration Crisis

And brought Obama's father to America.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

When LBJ signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act into law, JFK had been dead for two years, but it, more than the Cuban missile crisis or the race to the moon, was his real legacy which still impacts us today when there are no more Americans on the moon or nukes in Cuba.

At the signing, LBJ paid tribute to “the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy”. Little did the 36th president know that the 44th president, born to a radical Kenyan student, was already growing up in this country due to JFK’s personal intervention during his 1960 presidential campaign.

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Johnson argued. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives… Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration.” Only the last was true.

It affected not only millions, but tens of millions, and it reshaped our lives and our country.

At the signing ceremony, LBJ was flanked by the newly minted Senator Ted Kennedy and a grinning RFK to cement the bill which ended national quotas for immigrants as the Kennedy legacy. The bill would be described as Senator Ted Kennedy’s “first legislative victory” which “helped change the face of the country” and “fashioned the modern day immigration system.”

“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs,” Senator Ted Kennedy had promised in the Senate. All of these promises proved to be false.

The 1965 bill was a sequel to a battle that Rep. John F. Kennedy had narrowly lost to Senator Richard Nixon over the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. President Truman had vetoed the 1952 bill because it imposed national restrictions on immigration, favoring Western European immigrants and drastically limiting immigration from the rest of the world.

Kennedy had upheld Truman’s veto in the House but Nixon cast a tie-breaking vote and the 1952 bill became law.

While Nixon won the battle, Kennedy won the war. In 1958, Kennedy published “A Nation of Immigrants” which argued that restricting immigration by national origin “violated the spirit expressed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’”.He was preparing to relaunch it in 1963 for his big immigration push before his assassination.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, the Kennedy team focused its outreach on immigrant groups restricted by the bill. The 1952 bill, also known as the McCarran–Walter Act had been partly the work of Senator Pat McCarran: a powerful Senate Democrat who had wanted to keep out Poles, Ukranians and other Eastern Europeans, Jews, Greeks and everyone he did not like.

The Kennedy campaign turned to Eastern Europeans, who were prominent in Illinois, and Chinese-Americans, prominent in California, as part of its strategy to win the White House. And the strategy paid off with a narrow victory in Illinois that clinched the presidency. (Nixon narrowly won his native California, but by a far smaller margin than Eisenhower’s triumphant romp.)

That made the 1960 election into the first true multicultural presidential campaign that changed the face of American politics. And by 1968, Nixon would be cutting his own “black power” ads.

One of the more significant moments in the 1960 campaign took place at the Hyannis Inn Motel, just down the road from what is now the JFK Museum, when Kennedy met with a number of Ukrainian and Eastern European Democratic Party activists organized by Michigan Gov. Gerhard “Soapy” Williams, who headed the Democratic National Committee’s ‘Nationalities’ division to organize the support of different national groups (the term commonly used then to refer to immigrants from outside Western Europe) to rally support for the Democrats.

(As President Kennedy’s Secretary for African Affairs, ‘Soapy’ would play a key role in pulling away U.S. support from Rhodesia and South Africa while championing “Africa for Africans”.)

At the Hyannis Inn, Kennedy promised an end to national quotas and, almost as importantly, for “due process, right of appeal, and statutes of limitation” to “be extended to noncitizens” which would eventually turn immigration into the endless process of litigation that it now is.

Senator Ted Kennedy would describe immigration as a “very central part of President Kennedy’s administration.” “President Kennedy elected in 1960, one of the first pieces he introduced in the Congress of the United States was reform of our immigration laws. I remember being on the Judiciary Committee after being elected in 1962, and my brother Bob coming up and testifying for the Immigration Reform Program,” he later recalled.

Once in the White House, President John F. Kennedy could not immediately deliver on these promises, it would fall to LBJ’s dealmaking savvy and brute force politicking to do what the former pretty boy senator couldn’t and actually open up the immigration system to the world.

But what JFK could do was play on national opposition to Communism to open up the doors to refugees, which he did, ushering in the 1962 Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, initially meant to provide refuge to Cubans and Eastern Europeans fleeing Communism to come here, but which would become a key element in a virtually endless system of asylum migration.

Much as he had with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, LBJ would once again do what JFK could not, by signing on to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1968. This treaty is what forces us to process an asylum request by any migrant who walks up to the Mexican border. LBJ had promised the Senate that it would “not impinge adversely upon established practices under existing laws in the United States” and that “State laws are not superseded by the Convention or Protocol.” Those claims would also prove untrue.

States and cities have been swamped by masses of migrants crossing the border by making asylum claims and they are barred by the federal government from keeping them out.

A decade later, Senator Ted Kennedy would be hard at work codifying the UN treaty into immigration law with what would eventually become the Refugee Act of 1980. What had started out as an anti-Communist measure instead became a means of admitting Communists, Marxists, Islamists and an endless flood of migrants who could be persuaded to support them.

Refugee admissions led directly to the current border crisis, but there was another shadow immigration policy that may have been equally devastating, if not more so, which was also initially justified as a means of fighting Communism, but became a means of importing it.

The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, for all that it was denounced as racist and exclusionary, had actually increased immigration from Asia and had begun putting into place the student visa system that political elites wanted which would dramatically transform America.

While JFK had signed the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act into law to increase the number of foreign students in 1961, Barack Obama Sr and Shyamala Gopalan, the mother of Kamala Harris, had both moved to America in 1959: using the student visas that the McCarran–Walter Act had brought into being to subsidize American universities with a flood of foreign students.

When Donald J. Harris, Kamala’s father, arrived in 1963, it was likely as part of the growing number of foreign students benefiting from the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act.

But when Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood leader and godfather of Islamic terrorism, fled Egypt to study in Colorado in 1949, and came away loathing everything about America and calling for war against it, he was able to do it because of the lobbying by the Institute of International Education (IIE) headed by key university and foreign policy leaders which used their elite access to vastly increase the number of foreign students coming to America.

The IIE’s promotion of foreign students led not only to visits by Qutb and Obama Sr, but by a generation of radical Marxists and Islamists who soon set up operations in this country.

The only way to understand what happened to America beginning on September 11 is to study the wave of Third World radicals who came to study at American universities and stayed, or, like Barack Obama Sr and Donald J Harris left their children behind here, or, like Qutb, learned enough to figure out how to best wage war against the United States of America.

To understand why we have pro-Hamas riots in the streets of New York City, part of the answer begins with the arrival of Archibald Wickeramaraja Singham, a Sri Lankan Marxist to study in America. He became a powerful academic and his Maoist son, Neville Roy Singham, made a fortune, moved to Shanghai and directs anti-war groups from China. His story is far from unique.

Edward Said, the academic godfather of terrorism, was sent to study at an elite boarding-school in Massachusetts before moving through Princeton and Harvard. While the IIE and the open door to foreign students was supposed to ‘Americanize’ Third World elites, those elites actually ended up radicalizing and even ‘Islamizing’ America. They have already produced one two-term president and one vice-president who could end up becoming a president in her own right.

The IIE was primarily concerned with subsidizing Ivy League universities. And the foreign students they tended to attract were radical members of the elites in their own countries.

The Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act was also known as the Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961 after Senator J. William Fulbright. Fulbright had pulled off nearly as great a coup under Truman with an act amending a bill dealing with surplus property left in Europe that allowed the State Department to use the sale of “surplus war properties” to fund foreign students to come to America also partly subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

Senator Fulbright was to foreign students what Senator Ted Kennedy was to immigration. And the IIE took the lead in making sure that colleges took full advantage of the Fulbright system.

JFK championed the Fulbright scholarships and the foreign students changing America.

“Do you know that we brought more foreign students to the United States ten years ago than we do today?” Senator John K. Kennedy had complained on the campaign trail at NYU in 1960.

Foreign students had been excluded from immigration quotas, but many did become immigrants, joining universities and firms as a new kind of intellectual cheap labor force. These men and women, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats, and academics, became the backbone of the Third World Marxist and Muslim Brotherhood presence that transformed America.

The elites who had been restrictionist eugenicists at the turn of the century were now eager to open up to the world. The Cold War as it played out in world capitals was less a matter of nuclear buildup and defense drills (which the elites dismissed as nonsense) but of a global influence operation playing out across cultural, political and academic battlefields.,

That led to everything from the CIA backing the colorful spatters of Jackson Pollock to “It’s a Wonderful Life” director Frank Capra being dispatched to India to report on Communist infiltration into Bollywood. Bringing foreign students to America was described as the ultimate influence operation. Moscow had the paltry Patrice Lumumba University while America had Harvard, Yale and Columbia, but the trouble with using the Ivy League to fight Communism was that universities were already leftist and the new students and future faculty even more so.

America’s elites did not change the world, instead the world changed them.

JFK may have been one of the best examples. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy held a press conference together with Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya. The topic was Mboya’s efforts to bring members of his tribe to study in America. Hoping to appeal to black voters by embracing African nationalism, JFK tried to use his brother’s foundation to foot the bill.

Additional funding was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.

A furious bidding war soon broke out between Nixon, inside the administration, and Kennedy over the opportunity to win over black voters by funding the airlift of Kenyan students. It was an image battle that JFK easily won with his press conference together with Mboya.

JFK’s political genius rebranded immigration, often viewed as a means of Communist infiltration, into the ultimate anti-Communist measure, turning a political weakness into a strength, and accusing the Republican administration, as it had once accused the Truman administration, of losing the world in the struggle against Communism. America could only defeat Communism, he argued, by being open to the world, taking in immigrants and students, forming the Peace Corps to go out to the world, and, as he had in Europe as a student, to learn about the world.

But what JFK really believed was that through exposure to the world, America would change, as he had been changed by his time in the United Kingdom and traveling across Europe. It was a message highly appealing to the elites who believed America was inferior to the world. Bringing Kenyan students to America was not so much about changing them, but about changing us.

JFK hoped to unify a new rising liberal coalition, fusing elites, urban and suburban Catholics and Jews, bringing in new voting blocks of black and Asian voters, and reinventing the Democratic Party and America for a new generation. He found inspiration in younger African leaders like Mboya more than anything that was happening in America and viewed them as the future.

One particular Kenyan student from Mboya’s circle would indeed become America’s future.

Mboya’s African American Students Foundation (AASF) would bring hundreds of students from Kenya to America. Among the Kenyan students receiving AASF grants was Barack Obama Sr.

“The Kennedys decided, we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go out to Africa. And we’re going to start bringing young Africans over to this country and bring them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is. And this young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country,” Barack Obama Jr. said in his speech at Selma. Like many of Obama’s stories, it wasn’t really true, but there was some truth to it.

Barack Obama Sr. had not qualified for the original Kennedy airlift, but as a personal friend of Mboya and a fellow member of his Luo tribe, the AASF paid his expenses in Hawaii anyway.

The Kennedy administration had pitched its immigration reform plans as a way of overcoming American tribalism, but instead opened the door to the tribalism of the Third World.

“Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers,” LBJ had declared at the signing of the 1965 immigration bill that ended the quotas and opened up immigration to the world.

America since has become more of a nation of strangers than ever, at odds with one another, angry, conspiratorial, resentful and lacking a common language of values or interests.

And there is little that is beautiful about the broken America that they have built.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

The Patterns of Life Repeat Over and Over Again. Why is That So Hard to Get?

The time has come, the Walrus said, To talk of many things:Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, Of cabbages and kings, And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings.

By Rich Kozlovich

I'm getting a lot hits on my old commentaries and links, here's one of them.  On May 17, 2015 Anna Malpas published this piece, Russia probes space failures after rocket falls to Earth saying: 

Russia on Sunday began investigating the loss of a commercial satellite and a separate glitch on the International Space Station, sparking fears over the industry's safety.  A commission to investigate the accident with the Proton-M rocket carrying a Mexican telecommunications satellite met Sunday morning, the TASS state news agency reported, citing a space industry source…….But experts say years of underfunding mean there is a shortage in new generation specialists to replace those recruited in the Soviet era.  "The best of the best do not go to work in the rocket and space sector. There is nothing to attract highly qualified specialists: the pay is low and it's not very prestigious to work there," 

I think that's telling in dealing with all the clabber over this Russo/Ukrainian War, and all things left.  Nothing is ever their fault, and everything is a lie.  As AT&T used to say:  "The System is the Solution", but in the case of the Russians, the system is the problem.   It’s the same old story with the Russians, whether they’re Soviets or not. 

Khrushchev claimed – falsely I might add –they could produce rockets like sausages to scare the U.S.  He was lying, and he knew he was lying, and the CIA went along with that lie.  The Russian hierarchy is now and has always been full of blowhards, and the west is now and has always been, full of invertebrate appeasers and collaborators like Kennedy, and traitors like FDR. 

Putin, with all his international shenanigans, coupled with Obama’s and Biden's responses, have been part and parcel of that same clabber, going back to the FDR and Truman era where they allowed Stalin to rape and murder throughout Germany, creating the Iron Curtain and the Cold War.  

Neither of which would have happened if the Allied powers had allowed Patton to take Berlin, and more.  It's clear Germany and Japan were the immediate enemies that needed defeated, but over the long haul, FDR was an even greater enemy to America.

Russia suffers from the same economic incompetence that collapsed the Soviet Union - they're broke! Their military is full of alcoholics, the general population decreases every year, and in the general population alcoholism is rampant, AIDS is a serious problem, along with drug resistant tuberculosis.   The Navy is full of rust buckets and I have trouble believing their air force is much better overall.   

Then I keep reading articles by those who  insist the west bail out one crap hole country after another for fear Putin, or even worse, China will do it instead.  Who cares, they'll be investing in nations with a history of unending failure because their foundational social paradigms are designed for control by powerful corrupt elitists.  An absolute design for failure.

Them giving money to loser crap hole nations just drives them closer over the cliff to bankruptcy.  That would be a positive thing for western capitalism, and humanity. That way they could all collapse together, and be a great big happy socialist family.  Broke, clueless, and most importantly, harmless. 

Here's another quote by Khrushchev, only this one wasn't a lie:  

"Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up & find that you already have communism. We won’t ever have to fight you; we’ll weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands."

And now it's happening, and how and why did he know that was going to happen?  Because just as he factually knew he was lying about everything else, he also knew starting in 1920 all the institutions of America including academia, the unions, public education leaders, commerce, entertainment, the news organizations, and the federal government were filled with communists, socialists, Soviet spies, and far left traitorous fellow travelers going back to FDR administration, which was considered the most infiltrated government in world history.

Nixon and Kennedy: The myths and reality

By Patrick J. Buchanan  

Editors Note:  For some reason I'm finding many of the articles I've linked over the last ten years are being hit, even going back to 2008 a year after I first started this blog.  I have no idea why, but they're good pieces. This one is from World Net Daily in 2013, and while initially I just linked it, I really think that piece needs to be promoted far and wide.  So, if Pat, who I've met, or World Net Daily object, I will break this down into a link once again. Meanwhile, here's  the full text.  

Also, all said here about Kennedy is right on, Kennedy was not who the media made him out to be, when in fact they knew the Kennedys to be a disgrace and covered it up.   In fact, this piece isn't long enough to cover how bad he was.  However, Buchannan was in the Nixon administration and make no mistake, considering the long term consequences of Nixon's foreign policies with China and environmental law here in America, Nixon may ultimately have been far worse.  Nixon was a globalist, and let's face it,  Richard Nixon Was Not A Great President. Accept it!  RK

Had there been no Dallas, there would been no Camelot.

There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame.

Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America's popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth.

But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off.

The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster than any. Ronald Reagan has replaced him as No. 1, and JFK is a fading fourth.

Kennedy is increasingly perceived today as he was 50 years ago, before word came that shots had been fired in Dallas.

That he was popular, inspirational, charismatic, no one denied. But no one would then have called him great or near great. His report card had too many C's, F's and Incompletes.

His great legislative victory had been the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. His tax-cut bill was buried on the Hill.

His triumph had been forcing a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. But we would learn this was done by a secret deal for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and a secret pledge not to invade Cuba.

And after the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy pushed the CIA to eliminate Castro, eliciting a warning from Fidel that two could play this game. Lyndon Johnson said that under the Kennedys, the CIA had been running "a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

What caused Nikita Khrushchev to think he could get away with putting rockets in Cuba? His perception that JFK was a weak president.

Kennedy had denied air cover for the Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the worst debacle of the Cold War. He was then berated and humiliated by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961.

In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sat paralyzed.

In September, Khrushchev smashed the three-year-old nuclear test-ban moratorium with a series of explosions featuring, at Novaya Zemlya, a 57-megaton "Tsar Bomba," the largest man-made blast ever.

"Less profile, more courage," the placards read.

In Southeast Asia, JFK had Averell Harriman negotiate a treaty for neutralizing Laos, resulting in Hanoi's virtual annexation of the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam.

Where Eisenhower had 600 advisers in Vietnam, JFK increased it to 16,000 and gave his blessing to a generals' coup in which our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated.

Then and there, Vietnam became America's war.

Kennedy had made a famous phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King during the 1960 campaign when her husband had been arrested. Yet, he kept his administration away from the March on Washington and directed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King to learn of his associations with Communists.

Since his death, Kennedy's reputation has been ravaged by revelations of assignations and mistresses from Marilyn Monroe to Mafia molls to White House interns from Miss Porter's School.

All of this was covered up by his courtier journalists who would collaborate in perpetuating the Kennedy myth and collude in destroying their great hate object, Richard Nixon.

Yet, contrast what Nixon did with what JFK failed to do.

Where Kennedy managed to get Gov. George Wallace to admit two black students to the University of Alabama, Nixon desegregated 70 percent of all Southern public schools.

Where the JFK-LBJ administration spent eight years putting 535,000 U.S. troops into a war they could neither end nor win, Nixon withdrew all U.S. troops in four years, brought home the POWs and left every provincial capital in South Vietnamese hands.

Where Kennedy had the Peace Corps, Nixon ended the draft, gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, created an Environmental Protection Agency and a Cancer Institute and an Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

Where Kennedy gave speeches about detente, Nixon negotiated the greatest arms treaties since the Washington Naval Agreement – SALT I and the ABM treaty – ended decades of hostility between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China, rescued Israel in the Yom Kippur War and pulled Egypt out of the Soviet bloc into the U.S. camp.

Creating a new majority that would dominate presidential politics until 1992, Nixon was rewarded with a 49-state landslide in 1972.

Whereupon a press elite that had maintained a conspiracy of silence on Kennedy's misconduct seized on Nixon's failure to deal decisively with misconduct in his campaign to bring him down in the first successful coup d'etat in U.S. political history.

The mythologizing of JFK and demonization of Nixon tell us less about respective accomplishments than the moral character of an establishment, which, though it had lost America by '72, still controlled the culture, media, bureaucracy and Congress.

And as they brought down Nixon with Watergate, they would seek to bring down Reagan with Iran-Contra. But that coup failed.

 

This Week in History: How JFK Surrendered to a Snickering Khrushchev and Castro

Humberto Fontova Oct 28, 2023 @ Townhall.com

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal President Kennedy cut with Khrushchev regarding the missiles in Cuba. 

'Aaw come on, Humberto!' Some amigos retort. 'Gen. LeMay was a serious war-monger and NUTCASE!—the model for Gen. Ripper in Dr Strangelove!  Are you saying we shoulda started a worldwide nuclear war with tens of millions incinerated to liberate a two-bit Caribbean island of barely 7 million people?! Get a grip, DUDE! Geeez!' 

Nothing of the sort. In fact, the choice at the time was never between nuclear war and surrendering Cuba along with U.S. national security. This was amply recognized by some of LeMay’s fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, by a diverse array of Republican Party leaders of the time, and even by a few cold-warrior Democrats—though you’d never guess it from the 60 year Democrat-Media-Hollywood juggernaut of pro-Kennedy propaganda.

Let’s do this. Let’s bypass LeMay, and look at what many of his “less Gen. Ripper-like” colleagues and contemporaries were saying at the time about Kennedy’s “resolution” to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Joint Chiefs of Staff Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor (a Kennedy favorite) represented opposite poles of the military establishment of the time. Well: 

"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of Kennedy’s deal.

"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.

Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, represented different poles of the Republican Party. Yet both agreed: 

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” wrote Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviet squatters rights in our backyard." 

"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Defense establishment stalwart Gen. Alexander Haig, who served as Asst. National Security Advisor to Kissinger during Nixon’s term and as Sec. of Defense under Reagan. 

"The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: 

"This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."

But not for the Soviets. 

"We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba." 

In fact, according to Khrushchev’s own son Sergei, his father prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!?” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?” 

“Apparently.” 

“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack…..But that is insane!..Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier. 

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat during the Cuban missile crisis. Apparently, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach. 

In his diaries, Khrushchev snickers further: "It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 8,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable." So much for the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers.

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy. 

What the situation called for was some mature and low-key “Brinksmanship,” of the type President Eisenhower used to end the Korean War and keep us out of any more during his terms. And (as President in 1962) his top understudy (former Vice President Nixon) would have been just the man to employ it against Khrushchev.

Of course, had Nixon been president since 1960, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962—in fact, there’d been no Castro regime since April of 1961.) 

In any case, the genuine threat in Oct. 1962 came — not from Moscow — but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear-armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.” 

"Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said," snickered Fidel Castro as late as 1968. "Perhaps one day they'll be made public."

"We can't say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us." That's Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.

Castro's regime was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Here’s the exact wording from Khrushchev when gleefully agreeing to Kennedy’s terms:

“You (JFK) in your turn gave (to Khrushchev) the assurances that the so-called “quarantine” would be promptly removed and that no invasion of Cuba would be made, not only by the U.S. but by other countries of the Western hemisphere either.”

Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.

JFK's Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country!

It's a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for over half a century the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still had Castro, "defying ten U.S. Presidents!"

Nothing of the sort. Instead he’d been protected by them.

 

The Bay of Pigs Part II—the Battle’s Over but the Heroism Continues

Humberto Fontova  Apr 22, 2023 @ Townhall.com

Outnumbered over 10 to one by Soviet-led forces and betrayed by their sponsor, these mostly civilian volunteers fought till the last bullet. In three days of relentless close-quarter fighting they made monkeys of the Soviet commanders at the scene and their Cuban lackeys and cannon-fodder, inflicting losses of 20 to one. 

Castro and Che were jittery there for awhile, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the two Soviet satraps assumed they faced at least 20,000 invading "mercenaries," as they called them. 

Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered laughably. But to hear Castro's echo chamber (the Beltway media and leftist academics), Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!

(We recently discussed the battle in greater detail here.)

In fact, if JFK wanted some genuine Profiles in Courage he might have looked at the men he betrayed on that heroic beachhead. Some of the most jaw-dropping heroics, however, came after the shooting ended, after they’d spent their last bullets and knew no more were coming from their ally, the most powerful nation on earth, the same one that enforced a "no-fly zone" half a country wide on another continent (Iraq) with half the U.S Air Force for a decade—but refused to provide one three miles across, 90 miles away, for half a day with two planes.

At any rate, the battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. During almost two years in Castro’s dungeons, the freedom-fighters lived under a daily death sentence. 

Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” or go on camera denouncing the U.S.  Given these freedom-fighters' betrayal, you might think Fidel and Che Guevara had a cakewalk here.

Hah! None of these men signed the document, or uttered a peep against their “ally.” The freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. “We will die with dignity!” snapped their commander Erneido Oliva (a black Cuban, by the way, Ms. Maxine “VIVA FIDEL!”  Waters” and Jesse, “VIVA FIDEL!” Jackson) at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite, such an attitude not only enrages but also baffles.

Think about it, amigos: even after that betrayal these men (and boys, some as young as 16-17) refused to utter any anti-American slogan for Castro and Che Guevara’s cameras and propaganda mill. The very slogans that half-wit, grandstanding “woke” celebrities and politicians parrot daily for free publicity, these betrayed men refused to utter even while thinking it might save their lives!

The Castroites also staged a classic Soviet-style show-trial attempting to showcase (for all the world to see) the Bay of Pigs prisoners admitting they were “mercenaries in the pay of the Yankee Imperialists.” And initially they thought they’d get the propaganda bonanza they so desperately desired.  

For this big production the prisoners were thoroughly interrogated beforehand (the KGB had been coaching Castro’s secret police for almost two years by then) to see who’d crack, who’d play along. Only these would get in front of the cameras.

Tomas Cruz, Felipe Rivero and a few other Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters gave every impression of having broken down. They whimpered to their Castroite “interrogators” that they’d be willing to go on camera and denounce the U.S. 

“AHA!”  Fidel and Che snickered while rubbing their hands. “Now we got ‘em!” (Rivero and Cruz were also snickering.)

So the day came. The Stalinist stage was set at Havana’s Sports Arena and the communist cameras rolled. Castro and Che Guevara’s lackey vice President Carlos R. Rodriguez were the opening act. He put the microphone to Felipe Rivero.

"Nobody paid us to do a damn thing!" Rivero blurted…..Whoops! The Castroites’ mouths dropped. They gaped nervously. They looked around. A rumble went through the crowd. 

"We came here to fight communism!" Rivero continued. "Men from every class and race in Cuba volunteered to come here and FIGHT you!"

“Holy s**t! What now?!” the Castroites were frantic! The cameras were rolling but started shifting around nervously. Rodriguez’s lips trembled. He wiped his forehead. He stretched his collar. Some heads would (literally!) roll when the Maximum Leader saw this! The cameras didn’t know where to focus.

"And another thing!" Felipe shouted. "We outfought you!” The Castroites were frantic now, they looked from one to another aghast and cleared their throats. They looked like Democrats during the Ollie North hearings. 

Rodriguez finally caught his breath and with a trembling voice started with the usual commie mumbo-jumbo about "the masses" and "the people…bah…blah…”

"Ok, fine!” Rivero rolled his eyes and waved his hand. "You say you have the people with you? Then hold an election! That’ll really tell us, won’t it!"

Complete pandemonium, amigos. Even the diehard commies in the crowd couldn’t restrain themselves. Che Guevara himself had to snicker. A rumble of laughter, a rustle of claps and hoots erupted from all corners. All this was on Cuban national TV, remember. 

And Cuba – that impoverished and squalid little Third World country Castro’s echo chamber (the mainstream media) always tells us about – besides having net immigration from Europe shortly before the glorious liberation, also had more TVs per capita than Canada or Germany. 

The very island almost shook with a collective roar.

Finally the Maximum Leader himself (Fidel Castro) pranced on the stage. Only he could straighten things out. He had it all figured out. He had an ace up his sleeve. So he approached the black parachutist prisoner Tomas Cruz. "We opened the beaches for you blacks," he sneered. (In 1958 Cuba had a private whites-only country club with a private beach.) "So what on earth are you doing with these Yankee mercenaries?"

Tell it to Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter, Fidel. Tell it to Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson – they’ll swallow your BS and ask for seconds. But Cruz didn’t flinch. He looked Castro straight in the eye. "I didn’t come here to swim," he glowered. "I came here to fight communism. I came here with my brothers of every race to free my homeland from communism.”

Well, amigos, the Castroites decided to hold these "trials" behind closed doors and with the cameras off after that.

A guilt-stricken JFK finally ransomed the Brigade back from Castro's dungeon. The negotiations took almost two years while the men suffered the mental and physical tortures that always accompany Communist incarceration. One source claims that Castro had agreed to terms seven months earlier. But the Kennedy brothers (both President and Attorney General) feared the Bay of Pigs issue in the news for the November '62 congressional races. They feared the issue of how those men came to be prisoners in the first place might skew the races Republican. So the prisoners were conveniently released Christmas Eve of '62. A few died in prison during those intervening seven months. 

Outrageously, thanks to yet another Democrat administration, Castro might have gotten the last laugh with Rivero. In 1967 Felipe Rivero found himself in a U.S. federal prison. His crime? Organizing attacks from the U.S. trying to overthrow Castro! 

You read that right. The same man accused and jailed by Castro for being a U.S. mercenary and lackey, of being bribed by the U.S. to overthrow communism in Cuba was later jailed by the U.S. for trying to overthrow Communism in Cuba!  LBJ had to honor that Kennedy-Khrushchev Missile Crisis swindle to safeguard Castro, you see.

"We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev about the Missile Crisis in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba." 

The Brigadistas' ordeal was mostly over by late 1962. But when it came to JFK's lies I'll yield to Bachman Turner Overdrive: "You ain't seen nothing yet! B--ba-ba-ba-BY you just AIN'T seen nothing yet!" 

"I promise to deliver this Brigade banner to you in a free Havana!" That was JFK addressing the recently-ransomed Brigade and their families in Miami's Orange Bowl, Dec. 29, 1962. I guess those people hadn't been subject to enough lies, to enough betrayal. They hadn't suffered enough. And the mothers, widows' children—they hadn't been through enough either. In Camelot's eyes, they deserved more shameless lies. 

Kennedy’s secret deal with Khrushchev to safeguard Castro was made barely a month before JFK made his liberation promises in the Orange Bowl. Yet he addressed those men, their families and compatriots with a straight face. 

Small wonder that these Brigadistas, their families, and most of their compatriots always refused to file meekly into the liberal plantation, like obedient little "hispanics," or “latinos,” or ‘Latinxs” with a nice pat on the head by the condescendingly smirking doyens of the Democrat-Media complex. 

The Bay of Pigs 62th Anniversary — What Really Happened

Humberto Fontova  |  Apr 15, 2023 

 

 

“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety (italics mine,” wrote Beltway media stalwart and former Democrat White House official Lawrence Hass two years ago in The Hill. 

“1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs…It was an unmitigated disaster…Kennedy had learned the hard way not to blindly trust the advice of his decorated military and intelligence chiefs.”

Unsurprisingly, rather than go through the trouble of concocting their own propaganda, communist Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored media simply transcribed the U.S. beltway media….Think I exaggerate?

“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president (John F. Kennedy, JFK) launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety,” headlined Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda organ Prensa Latina, April, 12, 2021.) 

“1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs… Lawrence J. Hass, a U.S. expert on international relations, acknowledged on Monday that Washington's invasion of Cuba in Bay of Pigs was 'an ill-conceived military venture and an unmitigated disaster.”

Between snickers 62 years earlier, Che Guevara explained the fascinating process seen so starkly above: “Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 1959.

In fact, in complete refutation of the Media-Democrat-Castroite spin, the lack of naivety started with invasion’s very begetter and main booster: Vice President Richard Nixon. 

Here was the man who bucked the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment to see through and call out Alger Hiss. Nixon was also among the first U.S. officials to buck the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment by calling out and urging the overthrow of the closet Stalinist and Soviet asset Fidel Castro—and at the very moment Castro was being lionized by the U.S. media, State Dept., and even many in the CIA.

In fact, the military venture was expertly-planned and was anything but naive. The astonishing blunders and naivety were entirely Camelot’s. 

After it dropped in their lap with Nixon’s electoral defeat, the New Frontiersmen insisted on sticking their manicured fingers and fumbling with almost everything planned on the orders of the Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord. 

“Help the Cubans to the utmost,” Eisenhower stressed to his successor while handing over the reins. “We cannot let Castro's government go on.”

For starters, the original invasion plan by the CIA and its military partners (all WWII and Korea vets) picked the Cuban town of Trinidad as the landing site. This coastal town 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and the military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment and offered good off-loading facilities. 

Also, the nearby Escambray Mountains crawled with anti-communist guerrillas, who were giving the Castroites fits. These would join the invading force that also carried arms for them. Just as importantly, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the freedom-fighter’s small air force. 

Alas, landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed "too noisy" by the guilt-stricken New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding the U.S. role (this massive secret!) Any hint of such a role might discomfit the Latin American "street," you see. The New Frontiersmen suffered a guilty conscience about such "Yankee bullying." 

And, mercy me, what would the U.N. say? The Best and the Brightest suffered a veritable fit of the vapors just thinking about it. So back to the drawing board for the planners. 

They returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success – given total air superiority, given the complete obliteration of Castro’s air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it’s stressed here by me. Don’t let Camelot’s Press Agency (the Beltway media and academia) feed you any malarkey about this all-important factor, please, amigos. 

Idiotically (and tragically) 80 percent of the pre-invasion sorties by the freedom-fighter planes from Nicaragua -- the essential component of the plan to knock out Castro's air force on the ground as originally devised under the Eisenhower administration -- was canceled at the last moment by JFK on the advice of his Best and Brightest. The U.S. hand after the first air strike (that “HUGE SECRET!”) was showing, you see. 

So the flustered and guilt-stricken Knights of Camelot, while frantically fanning their blushing faces, nixed the next airstrikes literally in their tracks. Some of the freedom-fighter planes were already taxiing down the crude runways.    

'WHAT?! Are they NUTS?!” bellowed Brigade Air Force chief Reid Doster when he learned that Kennedy had canceled most of the vital airstrikes to destroy Castro’s small air force before the invasion. “There goes the whole f***ing war!" 

The canceled airstrikes made the Brigade's lumbering B-26s easy prey for Castro's jets and fast Sea-Furies -- and the troops, ships and supplies below them were even easier prey. It was a turkey shoot for the Castroites. 

But the unequal battle raged furiously on the tiny beachhead. “Where are the planes?” kept crackling over U.S. Navy radios two days later. “Where is our ammo? Send planes or we can’t last!” Brigade Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very U.S. fleet that escorted his men to the beachhead. Crazed by hunger and thirst, his men had been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. By then many suspected they’d been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot. 

That’s when Castro’s Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the freedom-fighters over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one said later. “Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson in his book, the Bay of Pigs. By that time the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. But these men (representing every race and social class in Cuba) were in no mood to emulate Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon–the burning duty to free their nation. 

The term "liberation" was no abstraction to these men. No navel gazing about the merits of "regime change" for them. Sullen or hostile foreigners in sandals, beards, kiffeyehs, and strange robes wouldn’t be the ones meeting them. They’d be bashing open prison doors and bulldozing down barbed wire, all right – but their own fathers, uncles, cousins and even sisters, aunts, daughters would be the ones staggering out to suffocate them with teary hugs and sobs. 

One of 19 Cubans was a political prisoner that horrible year. Firing squads were murdering hundreds every week. Dozens of American citizens languished in Cuba’s prison cells too. 

"If things get rough," the heartsick CIA man Grayston Lynch radioed back, "we can come in and evacuate you." 

"We will NOT be evacuated!" San Roman roared back to his friend Lynch. "We came here to fight! We don't want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want planes! This ends here!”

It seemed like Camelot’s criminal idiocy had finally relented when Pres. Kennedy allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex, which was just offshore of the beachhead.  One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro tanks and infantry making for the freedom-fighters.  The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "Aha!" he thought. "Now we’ll turn this thing around!" The pilot began his dive.

"Permission to engage denied," came the command.

"This is CRAZY!" he bellowed back. "Those guys are getting the hell shot out of them down there! I can see it!" Turned out, JFK had allowed them to fly and look—but not to shoot!

Some of these battle-hardened Navy pilots (well before U.S. military personnel were required to be “woke”) admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck and broke down completely.

"I wanted to resign from the Navy," said Capt. Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the fleet off the beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.

A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have pushed those Essex pilots over the edge.

The freedom-fighters’ spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro's jets and Sea Furies were roaming overhead at will and tens of thousands of his Soviet-led and armed troops and armor were closing in. The Castro planes now concentrated on strafing the helpless, ammo-less freedom-fighters. 

"Can't continue,” Lynch's radio crackled - it was San Roman again. "Have nothing left to fight with ...out of ammo...Russian tanks in view....destroying my equipment.” 

"Tears flooded my eyes," wrote Grayston Lynch. "For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country." 

When the smoke cleared and their ammo had been expended to the very last bullet, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 of them -- without air support (from the U.S. Carriers just offshore) and without a single supporting shot by naval artillery (from U.S. cruisers and destroyers poised just offshore) -- had squared off against 21,000 Soviet-led Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted over 3,000 casualties on their Soviet-armed and led enemies. This feat of arms still amazes professional military men. 

“They fought magnificently and were not defeated,” stressed Marine Col. Jack Hawkins a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who helped train them. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and support promised by their sponsor, the Government of the United States.” 

 

Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1960s

March 21, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Back in 2010, I shared a comparison of Obama and JFK on tax policy. For an update, here’s a comparison of Biden’s class-warfare agenda with JFK’s supply-side agenda.

I’m sharing this video for two reasons.

The first reason is that it shows that some Democrats in the past were very sensible about tax policy.

The second reason is that it gives me a good excuse to discuss what we can learn from tax policy in the 1960s, thus adding to our collection.

• Tax Lessons from the 1920s
• Tax Lessons from the 1930s
• Tax Lessons from the 1950s
• Tax Lessons from the 1980s

I’ll start with the caveat that tax policy does not necessarily overlap with 10-year periods. But we can learn by examining significant tax policy changes that occurred (or, in the case of the 1950s, did not occur) during various eras.

For the 1960s, the key change was the Revenue Act of 1964, generally known as the Kennedy tax cuts (proposed by President Kennedy in 1963 and then adopted in 1964 after his assassination).

Here’s what Kennedy proposed, as explained by the JFK library.

Declaring that the absence of recession is not tantamount to economic growth, the president proposed in 1963 to cut income taxes from a range of 20-91% to 14-65% He also proposed a cut in the corporate tax rate from 52% to 47%. …arguing that “a rising tide lifts all boats” and that strong economic growth would not continue without lower taxes.

And here’s what was enacted, as summarized by Wikipedia.

The act cut federal income taxes by approximately twenty percent across the board, and the top federal income tax rate fell from 91 percent to 70 percent. The act also reduced the corporate tax from 52 percent to 48 percent and created a minimum standard deduction.

The good news is that the Kennedy tax cuts were the right kind of tax cuts. Marginal tax rates were reduced on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

The bad news is that the top tax rate was still confiscatory, though 70 percent obviously was not as bad as 91 percent. And a 48 percent corporate rate was not much of an improvement compared to 52 percent.

That being said, moving in the right direction produced good outcomes.

People often talk about the booming economy in the 1960s. And there is some evidence to support that view since inflation-adjusted economic output grew rapidly as the tax cuts were implemented – by 6.5 percent in 1965 and 6.5 percent in 1966.

But I’m cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions from short-run data, especially since we know many other policies also have an impact on economic performance.

So let’s focus instead on some tax-related variables. Here’s a chart that I shared back in 2015, showing that upper-income taxpayers paid more when tax rates were reduced (the same thing happened in the 1980s).

That chart was taken from a report I wrote way back in 1996.

And here’s another chart from the same publication. This one shows that lower tax rates were associated with rising revenues. Especially as the changes were being implemented.

By the way, this does not mean that the tax cut was self-financing.

The core lesson of the Laffer Curve is not that tax cuts “pay for themselves.” That only happens in rare circumstances.

Instead, the lesson is that lower tax rates encourage more productive behavior, which means more taxable income. It then becomes an empirical question of how much of the revenue lost from lower rates is offset by the revenue gained from more taxable income.

And, in the 1960s, we know there was a big Laffer Curve response from upper-income taxpayers. Why? Because they have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of this income.

Which brings us to the final lesson, which is that class-warfare tax policy was a bad idea in the 1960s and it is still a very bad idea today.