Reagan’s Rules for Military Action pt.5

It should be pointed out here that in spite of all the criticism from all sides of President George W. Bush, in fact he followed Reagan’s Rules in dealing with both Afghanistan and Iraq. He made the Reagan Rule 1 case that each instance involved the vital “national interest” of the United States. He followed the Reagan Rule 2 and went all-in to win — while it was Obama who eventually got Osama it was the infrastructure set up by Bush that made it possible, and Bush himself was responsible for getting Saddam literally out of his hiding hole.

As recommended by Reagan Rule 3 Bush went out and sold the Congress and the majority of the American people on the need to go into both Afghanistan and Iraq, specifically getting congressional authorization. And after repeatedly working through the UN to get Saddam Hussein to open up and come clean — and failing repeatedly — it’s very safe to say Bush and company saw the invasion of Iraq as Reagan Rule 4’s “last resort.” 

America is now in a very difficult spot — precisely because in the Obama era it has abandoned Reagan’s mantra of Peace through Strength.

What we now have — what liberalism in foreign policy always produces from Vietnam to Syria — is War through Weakness.

The so-called “re-set” of American relations with Russia proclaimed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has resulted in Vladimir Putin having nothing but disdain for the American president and his country. Whether the issue is the return of Edward Snowden or blocking action on Syria in the United Nations Security Council, bluntly speaking Putin has given a scornful diplomatic obscene gesture to Obama and Clinton and now John Kerry’s foreign policy.

Going to Congress is the exactly right thing to do. It is no small thing. It is the Constitutional thing to do. Ted Cruz sending out a tweet that showed the British Parliament in full session discussing Syria while the floor of the U.S. Senate was empty was exactly right. Cruz, Rand Paul, and others are to be applauded — and yes so too the President.

But unfortunately doing the right thing so late — and worse complicating the issue immeasurably by blurting out off-prompter talk of a “red line” and giving the impression of great urgency—then befuddling the whole issue by holding off until the scheduled return of Congress on September 9 is precisely the wrong image to be sending abroad. 

If Syria is as urgent an issue as Secretary of State Kerry insisted it is, the President should have forthwith stepped in front of the cameras and stated that he was using his authority as provided by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which reads in part that the president “may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses.”

One of Reagan’s heroes was his old friend Harry Truman, whom the young actor and then-Democrat had supported for re-election to the White House in 1948. It was Truman who recalled Congress in a special session not over an issue of war or peace but for a political confrontation with Republicans over his 1948 election agenda. If Truman can do it to make a mere point in a political campaign, Obama should certainly be doing it in a situation which is infinitely of more moment — an actual question of war or peace.

This is a turning point in modern American history.

It is as much about Iran as it is Syria. It is about the American role in the world. It is about the Constitution of the United States. It is about understanding that peace comes through strength and war comes from the perception of weakness.

Ronald Reagan’s success as president came about not in spite of his failure in Beirut but because he learned from that mistake. He made a point of rebuilding the American military that had been so terribly weakened by his predecessor — but he also learned the hard way that real military strength is not simply about “sending in the Marines.” Real military strength comes rather from first, having the military strength — and then knowing when not to send in the Marines — or for that matter cruise missiles either.

Reagan understood the importance of the Constitution. He well understood his authority as commander-in-chief to protect the vital national security interests of the country. Failing to get those 800 American medical students out of Grenada peacefully, Reagan knew what he had the authority to do. Getting the urgent plea from governments in America’s back yard to stop a Communist revolution bristling with arms, ammunition as well as Cubans, Russians and all manner of Soviet allies dedicating themselves to Communizing said American back yard — Reagan knew he had the constitutional authority to go into Grenada.

He never hesitated. Saying simply: “Do it.”

But after Beirut, Reagan made sure he was not turning the United States into some globe-straddling empire. He concentrated on defeating the premiere American enemy of the day — the “Evil Empire” that was the Communist Soviet Union. His philosophy, as he said at the time, was clear: “We win, they lose.”

What we have today is a president who has, in the style of liberalism everywhere, induced the weakness that invites war. All of five years of repeatedly sending a message of weakness by bowing to this or that foreign potentate, trying to make friends with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood while happily sending video greetings to the Imams of Iran and more has now resulted in chemical weapons being loosed upon the people of Syria. Not to be forgotten either is the fact that, as Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has sharply reminded:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/inhofe-US-obama-troops/2013/08/30/id/523224#ixzz2dlgShrwk

Even Gen. [Martin] Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) said we are putting our military on a path where the ‘force is so degraded and so unready’ that it would be ‘immoral to use the force…’

In short?

The Obama foreign policy has served up a mess. A lethal mess.

How to get out of this mess? Where to begin this discussion in the Congress on September 9?

Recalling Reagan’s Rules for Military Action would be a good place to start the debate.

Al-Qaeda Is Back!

Killing Bin Laden was never enough.

  

AUGUST 1, 2013 12:00 AM NRO

By  Clifford D. May

By all accounts, the attack was planned with care and executed with precision. At two notorious Iraqi prisons, Abu Ghraib and Taji, al-Qaeda combatants last week used mortars, small arms, suicide bombers, and assault forces to free 400 prisoners, including several who had been on death row. AQ spokesmen hailed those released as “mujahedeen,” holy warriors, who will rejoin the jihad on battlefields throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Soon after, we were seeing headlines such as this: “Al Qaeda Is Back.” 

Where had al-Qaeda gone? Dig deep in the memory hole — all the way to last summer. At the prestigious Aspen Security Forum, Peter Bergen, CNN’s national-security analyst and a director at the New America Foundation, gave a talk titled, “Time to Declare Victory: Al Qaeda Is Defeated.”  

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lynch III (retired), a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, was writing and speaking widely on the same theme. And President Obama’s reelection campaign was making similar claims, e.g. “The tide of war is receding,” “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Mitt Romney hardly attempted to rebut the thesis.

I don’t like to say “I told you so” — oh, who am I kidding? Of course I do. But in this instance there is more than ample justification. Scholars at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in particular Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, have argued consistently and forcefully, based on solid evidence, that the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, followed by the elimination of other al-Qaeda leaders, did not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean the demise of al-Qaeda.

Instead, it led AQ to adapt, evolve, and morph. It is essential to study these changes and probe their strategic significance — an assignment unlikely to be seriously undertaken by those convinced al-Qaeda swims with the fishes.

On July 18, Joscelyn testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, attempting to make clear to members of Congress that AQ has become “a global international terrorist network . . . that, despite setbacks, contests for territory abroad and still poses a threat to U.S. interests both overseas and at home.”

The nodes of AQ’s network are affiliates that pledge bayat, unswerving allegiance, to “core AQ” while retaining substantial operational autonomy. That makes them harder for intelligence operatives to monitor, penetrate, weaken, or eliminate. Nine years ago, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer wrote a book called Al-Qaeda’s Armies predicting that such AQ affiliates would increasingly constitute the organization’s “outer perimeter and the pools from which new terrorists can be drawn. Indeed, al-Qaeda affiliates, in the Arab world and beyond, represent the next generation of the global terrorist threat.”

Since the waving of the “mission accomplished” banner last summer, AQ affiliates have killed an American ambassador in Libya, and hoisted their flag above the U.S. embassy in Cairo. They have taken the lead in the rebellion against the Assad dynasty in Syria. They have fought an American-backed government in Yemen, and they conquered much of Mali before French troops drove them back into the desert. They continue to slaughter Christians in Nigeria — more than a thousand last year. They have regenerated in Iraq since the departure of American troops, killing 700 people in July alone. They remain undefeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, poised for the opportunity further American troop withdrawals will present. Last week, they attacked Turkish diplomats in Somalia. On Monday, AQ’s close ally, the Taliban, attacked a jail in northwest Pakistan, freeing as many as 200 prisoners.

Joscelyn and Roggio have been making another argument that has challenged the conventional wisdom: They maintain that al-Qaeda has long had a working relationship with Iran’s rulers. Two years ago the U.S. government formally confirmed that hypothesis, yet now as then many Iran experts deny the links, arguing that there is no way that Sunni AQ and Shia Iran could collaborate.

What those experts fail to grasp is that Iran’s rulers and al-Qaeda’s commanders, despite very real theological disagreements and differing strategic interests — indeed, they are literally at each other’s throats in Syria — are united in their commitment to what they see as the moral imperative of Islamic supremacy and domination. Their shared goal is a global revolution leading to the defeat or submission, or both, of those they regard not just as inferior, but also as “enemies of God.” America and Israel top both their lists.

This worldview is very difficult for Westerners to take seriously. Surely, there must be a less medieval explanation — perhaps grievances that can be addressed or fears that can be assuaged. But this conflict is deeper and more complex. Until that is understood, the U.S. and its allies cannot possibly devise a coherent strategic response — which is why 34 years after Iran’s revolution and twelve years after 9/11, we still don’t have one. That is another point that Joscelyn and Roggio have long been making, and which too many in the government and the foreign policy community have been either unable or unwilling to grasp. 

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

Needed: A Tragic Hero

JULY 30, 2013 4:00 AM

In good times, the larger-than-life figure is an affront; in crisis, he is necessary.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tragic heroes — from Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone to the Western films’ Shane and Woodrow Call — can be defined in a variety of ways. But the common archetype is a larger-than-life figure. He is endowed with extraordinary gifts and sometimes even more monumental flaws. Fate decrees that even his departure or self-destruction will be memorable.

Sometimes the tragic hero suffers from hubris, like know-it-all Oedipus. The goddess Nemesis waits until just the proper moment to tap his arrogance, blind him to the reality around him, and thereby lead him to his own destruction.

But note: What separates the tragic hero from the arrogant fool who suffers the same fate is the sheer magnitude of his gifts, and thus the depth of the abyss into which he falls, and the spirit with which he accepts larger cosmic forces at work.

At other times, the tragic hero is simultaneously irreplaceable and unfit for the changing world about him. That paradox is a common theme of classic Westerns like High Noon, Lonesome Dove, The Magnificent Seven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ride the High Country, The Searchers, and Shane. Tragic heroes are throwbacks to a prior, perhaps pre-civilized age (hence the Old West is our version of the pre-Athenian city-state, so fertile for the mythological nature of Greek tragedy).

They hold a Manichean notion of good and evil, and in unapologetic fashion. There is little nuance in General Grant’s “lick ’em tomorrow” or “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” (Imagine if President Obama said that about his health-care plan’s employer mandate!)

Tragic heroes possess the requisite primeval physical and mental assets to welcome the challenge at hand, and they exude a certain sort of self-destructiveness — or is it self-sacrifice? — that puts the welfare of the people they’re protecting above their own. In Ride the High Country, an aging Steve Judd, with all his talk about “sand,” doesn’t much care whether he lives, but he very much cares that the job is finished.

When there are ruthless outlaws, gangs of thieves, unapologetic gunslingers, renegades, or lawless cattle barons who are not likely to fall in line with the law of the so-called civilized world, then the weird Tom Doniphons step forth from the twilight to deal with the Liberty Valances.

They are out of place as saviors. Yet these defiant ones apparently gain a sense of Schadenfreude at the fact that their benefactors, the civilized Ransom Stoddards, in extremis need the very skills that they profess should be superfluous.

We are a society of lawyers, not cowboys — 99 percent of the time. But it is that 1 percent that can become fatal to a sophisticated society without the cowboys prepared to step out of the shadows. Do we need now and then the half-civilized — a slapping Patton; an Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, who is a temper tantrum away from who knows what?; a Sherman raging about making plantationist Georgia “howl”? If so, tough luck — there are few of these dinosaurs around. The France of May 1940 needed the old cry of the Verdun of 1916 — “Ils ne passeront pas” — but then, Verdun had ensured that there would be no more “Ils ne passeront pas,” and not a Clemenceau (“The Tiger”) to be found.

From Sophocles to John Ford, we are reminded that tragic heroes accept — or is it that they enjoy? — the idea that their own triumph will eliminate the evil of their era and thus the very reasons for them to exist as uncouth warriors against that evil.

Breaker Morant agrees that a middle-aged superb horseman and unapologetic warrior is not exactly what the politically minded British Empire of the early 20th century needs any more — most of the time. Tragic heroes welcome the idea that action is necessary to deal with violence, while conceding that it becomes anachronistic and antithetical to the pretensions of the new society they help to save.

Note that tragic heroes are not anti-heroes, who, of course, share this acceptance that they no longer fit and who would rather die than change. Still, Shane is not the Wild Bunch, who rob banks and kill the innocent in their crossfire. The thieves in Heat have a certain nobility and code of conduct, but ultimately they are cold-blooded killers. Creepy Tony Montana in Scarface has some chivalry in his code, and is unapologetic about being the thug he is — but his talents are solely destructive, and as a psychopath he pollutes all in his sphere.

But the tragic hero?

He somehow marries his rugged savagery with civilization, if only for a moment. True, like Sam Peckinpah’s anti-hero Pike Bishop, he can be a noble sort of relic who fights the uniformity and monotony of the modern world, and would not just rather die than change but welcomes death (“Why not?”) given what the world has become (“I wouldn't have it any other way”).

Indeed, the genius of Peckinpah was that he ended the Wild Bunch in a redemptive moment. His anti-heroes almost became tragic heroes, by whose violent sacrificial deaths the federales were decimated and the revolutionaries, now helped by the reborn Deke Thornton, have a fighting chance.

Perhaps the most moving tragic hero in recent cinema was Denzel Washington’s brilliant portrayal of the bodyguard Creasy in Man on Fire. He alone possessed the skills to save his ward, Pita, but thereby, Shane-like, he acknowledged that his mission would nullify his own brief return to civilization, for which he was utterly unsuited.

Remember the lines of Christopher Walken, speaking of Creasy’s revenge: “A man can be an artist . . . in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” The tragic hero carries around his own world and its codes wherever he goes. It is irrelevant that Creasy is in Mexico or that Shane ends up in Wyoming; their skills trump landscape and culture and make even the most bizarre new landscape bend to their protocol — sort of like Horace’s wandering man who is integer vitae scelerisque purus, and who is oblivious to his always-changing surroundings.

The greatest generals are tragic heroes. Take again George S. Patton — the man who was needed to instill a 19th-century martial audacity in an untrained army of conscripts reliant on superior logistics and material supply. Yet Patton was singularly inept in adjusting to the necessary politics of an allied effort, and indeed to the cultural parameters of modernism itself — thus his crackpot talk of reincarnation and manly essence.

In contrast, Omar Bradley, reminiscent of the Civil War general Henry Halleck, best typified the sort of sober and judicious bureaucratic figure necessary for a new American military with global responsibilities — but his battlefield aptitude and leadership were mediocre in comparison with Patton’s. Patton may not have consciously sought to destroy his own career, but he almost welcomed the fact that his flamboyance, foul speech, and dash would do just that as the price of convincing the Third Army that they were not just people mechanically obeying orders, but fighters who could go toe to toe with the dreaded Waffen SS.

We wanted the brilliant, unapologetic, and uncouth Curtis LeMay, cigar and all, to come to the fore in the Pacific theater, when the billion-dollar B-29 program was in shambles and a horrendous invasion of Japan loomed on the horizon. But 20 years later, in Vietnam, he was considered not just eccentric but culpable for urging that we really had to napalm the cities of North Vietnam as we had firebombed those of Japan to win the war. Please go away, Mr. LeMay.

When Ethan Edwards walks out the door at the end of The Searchers, we assume not just that there is nothing left for him to do, but that he wants nothing more to do with us. “Live nobly or nobly die,” sighs doomed Ajax, suggesting that most of us live ignobly and so live on.

Can we have tragically heroic leaders? Lincoln excelled as a tragic hero — to the point of his strange premonitions about his early and violent death. He grasped that the Unionist cause, and with it eventual abolition, could be advanced only by a man of the border — in his case a native Kentuckian and a transplanted son of Illinois, who would confuse Southerners, given his affinities with the South, while remaining a pragmatic Midwestern man of the people and yet almost satisfying the New England abolitionists.

Yet he put his majestic prose to the cause of militarily ruining the Confederacy. Without his soaring rhetoric, there would not have been much transcendence to mask the horrors of Little Round Top or the decimation of Grant’s forces at Cold Harbor. It was to be the wage of the great emancipator and peacemaker to preside over the near-destruction of the American people. “Now he belongs to the ages,” Stanton sighs as Lincoln expires, perhaps with the implication that he might not have, had he lived through the mess still looming on the horizon.

Churchill was a tragic hero. I would guess that, without him, there was a 40/60 chance that Britain would have settled for a negotiated peace with Hitler after June 1940. All his supposed flaws — unrepentant imperialist, monarchist, aristocrat, colonialist — were part of the larger menu of polymath, veteran, stylist, orator, and political genius, with an iron will that towered over the wills of his contemporaries.

In Churchill’s case, the public did not even wait until the end of World War II to depose him. After all, the man who rallied the nearly defeated with “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” was soon, when danger passed, perceived as opposed to the socialization of a new modernist United Kingdom.

We cannot live in a world of tragic heroes, at least too many of them. The Achaeans could handle only one Achilles, but hundreds of Menelauses and Agamemnons. Churchill sucked the oxygen out of every room he entered. Even Lincoln’s friends were bewildered by him. It was easy to mock Patton’s vanity and childishness, impossible not to acknowledge his superior genius.

Yet in those rare times of existential crisis, civil or global, the tragic hero is our only salvation. Take away Shane, and the sodbusters are through; without Yul Brynner the Mexican villagers of The Magnificent Seven remain Caldera’s sheep to be sheared.

Could there be a tragic hero in the 21st century? Might a candidate reform the tax code, balance the budget, recalibrate entitlements, return the U.S. to a meritocratic and self-reliant society, and understand that he had to be hated for doing what might save us? “I shall end agricultural subsidies entirely and cut Food Stamps back to 2009 levels,” a heroic president might thunder as he welcomes a single term as the price for that defiance.

In theory, this tragic hero would require the oratorical gifts of Reagan, the wit and verve of JFK, the political savvy of Clinton, the steadiness of Truman, the decency of the George Bushes — and something far more. There would have to be some acceptance that our president was different from the rest of us, that he did not welcome, but expected nonetheless, disdain from us, the fickle turba.

A tragic president would not be ruined during his presidency, but only after it and by transcending it. He would not cash in like the Clintons but would walk away from it like Truman.

Petulance is not part of the tragic hero: He ignores both insults and praise, and expects to be hated more than loved, as Aristotle so brilliantly describes the megalopsuchos, the magnanimous soul, of the Nicomachean Ethics.

In these times we need a president who will accept, even welcome a single term, who expects to be broke after he leaves office, to be offered $5,000 a lecture at most, who embarrasses us by our own ingratitude.

Again, are there tragic heroes on the horizon?

Few, I fear. Mitch Daniels has the standoffishness, and a sense that what has to be done would be near politically intolerable for the most of the public. But does he have the spirit, over familial objections, to turn the buckboard around back to Hadleyville before High Noon?

Chris Christie is the antithesis of the current metrosexual president, as unconcerned with his appearance as Obama is prissy and compulsive in his manners and grooming. But while Christie’s bluster shows signs of tragic unconcern, is it matched by a spiritual unconcern for what the presidency might do to him if he were to try to save the country?

Perhaps things must become even worse to cause a tragic hero to emerge — for someone to speak the truth, offend the majority, and, when the successful effort is over, to lose.

At the end of The Magnificent Seven, Chris sighs of both his victory and the near-destruction entailed in achieving it, “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.

Rolling Stone’s Portrait of an Affable Psychopath

Posted By Neo Neocon On July 21, 2013 @ 12:15 am at PJMedia

Much of the brouhaha about Rolling Stone’s piece on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has centered on the rockstar-style photo of the bomber on the cover.

But that’s not the only thing wrong with the article. Take the text ^[1], which is an earnest attempt to answer the question: How could a good boy like Dzhokhar go so bad? What secret sorrow, what family troubles or school troubles or other troubles led a young man universally described as unusually charming, magnetic, easygoing, laid-back, cool, and happy-go-lucky to become an Islamic terrorist murderer?

The article fails abysmally to answer the question, although along the way it offers quite a bit of background information about the boy and then the young man it refers to as Jahar, as most of his friends did. But perhaps the author is asking the wrong question. Maybe there’s not that much to explain or understand, if one considers the possibility that the charismatic Dzohkhar may in fact be a psychopath.

How could that be? Despite a common popular misconception that psychopaths are a gloomy sort, not the type of people you’d take to if you were to meet them, that doesn’t really describe the majority of them. The classic text on the subject, The Mask of Sanity ^[2], was written in 1941 by psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley. That’s a long time ago, but the work holds up very well today because although we can describe psychopathy, we have learned very little more about its etiology than was known in Cleckley’s time. Here’s his description of the psychopath’s “mask”:

…[T]he [psychopath's] central personality…[is] covered over by…a perfect mask of genuine sanity, a flawless surface indicative in every respect of robust mental health. .. [T]hose called psychopaths are very sharply characterized by the lack of anxiety (remorse, uneasy anticipation, apprehensive scrupulousness, the sense of being under stress or strain)…

It is my opinion that when the typical psychopath…occasionally commits a major deed of violence, it is usually a casual act done not from tremendous passion or as a result of plans persistently followed with earnest compelling fervor. There is less to indicate excessively violent rage than a relatively weak emotion breaking through even weaker restraints.

Reading Cleckley, and then reading the Rolling Stone piece, one can’t help but be struck by the similarity between his friends’ descriptions of Dzhokhar and Cleckley’s descriptions of psychopaths. Many of Dzhokhar’s friends were deeply puzzled by the cool, chill, laid-back Jahar’s participation in the bombing, and theorized that his more conventionally depressed, angry, and jihadi brother Tamerlan must have “turned” him or controlled or brainwashed him in some way to have accounted for Dzhokhar’s going along with such a violent and cold-blooded act.

Most people would find it hard to believe that Tamerlan, the more ideologically motivated of the pair, could really just say to his brother, “Hey, want to help me bomb people at the marathon?” and that Dzhokhar would say, “Sure, why not?” But if one studies psychopaths, it is much easier to see how that could really be the case. There is no need to postulate some sort of terrible psychological trauma for Dzhokhar, nor any particularly deep influence or mysterious control Tamerlan had over him, if Dzhokhar is a psychopath. It may have just seemed like a good idea to Dzhokhar at the time, and he had no inner core of morality to stop him.

More from Cleckley:

More often than not, the typical psychopath will seem particularly agreeable and make a distinctly positive impression when he is first encountered. Alert and friendly in his attitude, he is easy to talk with and seems to have a good many genuine interests. … More than the average person, he is likely to seem free from social or emotional impediments, from the minor distortions, peculiarities, and awkwardness so common even among the successful.

And from the Rolling Stone article:

…[A]fter several months of interviews with friends, teachers and coaches still reeling from the shock, what emerges is a portrait of a boy who glided through life, showing virtually no signs of anger, let alone radical political ideology or any kind of deeply felt religious beliefs.

We don’t know the cause of psychopathy. But whatever it is, it seems present very early in life and is a defect in the moral and empathic senses. The result can be a killer who is able to hide an utter lack of regard for other human beings behind a facade of facile con artist charm, adept at sensing what other people want to hear and delivering it. When such a person meets up and partners with a needier, angrier, more sincerely doctrinaire, and more conventionally motivated sidekick (such as brother Tamerlan), a sinister synergy is born.

Note also the casual, nose-thumbing malevolence of actions of Dzhokhar’s such as these post-attack ^[3] tweets of his. How could someone be so strangely distant from the dire consequences of his own acts? How to square it with his seeming sweetness and affability? More from Cleckley:

It is not necessary to assume great cruelty or conscious hatred in [the psychopath] commensurate with the degree of suffering he deals out to others. … In [human life] he seems to find nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations, and ennui. …[H]e suggests a man hanging from a ledge who knows if he lets go he will fall…who, furthermore, is not very tired and who knows help will arrive in a few minutes, but who nevertheless, with a charming smile and a wisecrack, releases his hold to light a cigarette, to snatch at a butterfly, or just to thumb his nose at a fellow passing on the street below.

…Having no major goals or incentives, he may be prompted by simple tedium to acts of folly or crime. Such prompting is not opposed by ordinary compunction or concern for consequences.

From Rolling Stone again:

At his arraignment at a federal courthouse in Boston on July 10th, Jahar smiled, yawned, slouched in his chair and generally seemed not to fully grasp the seriousness of the situation, while pleading innocent to all charges. At times he seemed almost to smirk –

There was probably no “almost” about it.

“Listen,” says Payack [the high school wrestling coach], “there are kids we don’t catch who just fall through the cracks, but this guy was seamless, like a billiard ball. No cracks at all….I knew this kid, and he was a good kid,” Payack says, sadly. “And, apparently, he’s also a monster.”

Payack only thinks he knew him, although he can be forgiven for his error. After all, he only knew the mask, as did virtually everyone else Dzhokhar encountered, right up to the moment the bombs went off.

“He was just superchill,” says another friend, Will…

“He was smooth as f—,” says his friend Alyssa, who is a year younger than Jahar…

For all of their city’s collective angst and community processing and resolutions of being “one Cambridge,” the reality is that none of Jahar’s friends had any idea he was unhappy, and they really didn’t know he had any issues in his family other than, perhaps, his parents’ divorce, which was kind of normal.

Maybe they should read The Mask of Sanity. It would teach them a lot more about psychopathy than the Cambridge schools ever did.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-affable-psychopath/

URLs in this post:

[1] Take the text: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717

[2] The Mask of Sanity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Sanity

[3] these post-attack: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boston-marathon-bombing-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-tweets-run-article-1.1322163

A Chicken in Every Lot

By CHRISTOPHER ORLET on 7.19.13 @ 6:07AM at PJMedia

Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg” as a cautionary tale for hipsters.

It is my belief that a great deal of misery can be avoided by reading great literature. I, for one, have never had the slightest impulse to raise chickens, and for that I have Sherwood Anderson to thank. Anderson’s short story “The Egg” should be required reading for all would-be urban chicken ranchers:

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your … brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens, and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God’s mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex.

For a decade or so this complexity has been a popular pastime of urban Do-It-Yourselfers. Not content with a cabbage patch and a few carrots and maybe some marijuana plants in the attic, DIY’ers crave the full agricultural experience. Since raising cattle and hogs on inner city streets is out of the question, poultry must suffice. What could be easier? Build a little coop in the back yard, throw down some corn in the morning and sit back and think about all the money you’re saving, all that sustainable food grown in a humane manner, all while basking in the warm, fuzzy glow of self-sufficiency.

Here’s where I turn into a wet blanket. Turns out that the “pets that make you breakfast” aren’t pets at all. They are livestock, and, as every child who has read Charlotte’s Web knows, one must be willing to butcher one’s livestock. What’s more, it is hard to sex chickens, so when you order a bird online you cannot be guaranteed you are getting a hen and not a rooster. And many cities ban roosters because they are considered too noisy. Turns out with all the pit bulls, jackhammers, weedwackers, leaf blowers, hip hop music, garbage trucks, rush hour traffic, and incessant sirens, your neighbors are most likely to complain about a few cock-a-doodle-dos.

Turns out hens only lay eggs for about two years, but can live as long as a decade. Who knew? I didn’t, until I came across a magazine piece about fair-weather farmers dumping hundreds of yard birds on animal shelters. Nationwide, urban animal shelters are reporting steep rises in their chicken populations. Suddenly the urban farmers, who probably laughed at the high school kids that joined Future Farmers of America, find themselves stuck with dozens of noisy, expensive, dirty, spent hens. A country girl would not see this as a problem. She would see this as a solution to Sunday’s dinner. But urban farmers are notoriously squeamish. While the thought of eating a chicken seems palatable, the thought of killing one’s hen seems like something a Republican would do.

CRITICS BLAME THE locavore movement for the unwanted birds. Locavores respond that Americans — especially conservatives — talk a great game about tradition, small business, small farming, and rugged individualism, but write off those who indulge in traditional practices as suffering from a misplaced rural nostalgia.

Put me down with the locavores. The fact is our small towns and small farms are vanishing. If there is too much rural nostalgia, which I doubt, it certainly hasn’t led to a rush from the cities and suburbs to the countryside. It hasn’t led to the best and brightest of small town America returning home after college to settle. As for buying locally, as a family that buys local produce at a farmer’s market, I can report that the sweet corn we buy from the farmer in nearby East Carondelet tastes like butter, and the small sweet strawberries we buy from the Kruse farm in nearby Columbia taste like real strawberries, and not like the giant, red waxy things produced, frozen, and shipped in from California.

But as Sherwood Anderson would tell you, poultry is another matter. Cities probably meant well when they began allowing city dwellers to raise chickens in their backyards. But gardens are one thing. Livestock is another. Animal husbandry is best left to the professionals.

Al Sharpton, Posh Populist

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE JULY 19, 2013 12:00 AM

Living large among the 1 percenters.

By Jonah Goldberg

If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1 percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.

Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.

Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join.

The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership?

“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.

The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn't have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn't own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. In our overly therapeutic culture, we talk a lot about “enabling” pathologies, self-destructive behavior, etc. Well, Sharpton is a pathology enabled by the very system he loathes.

In a healthy society, Sharpton might be on parole now — not the must-get guest for Meet the Press and Today on issues of racial justice. He was a ringleader in perpetuating the evil Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he and two corrupt lawyers (now disbarred) falsely accused assistant district attorney Steven Pagones and others of gang-raping a 15-year-old girl in a racist attack (Brawley claimed that she’d been smeared with feces and had had racist epithets written on her body). No person of any ideological stripe could doubt it was a fraud — except, that is, for the unrepentant Sharpton, who recently insisted “something happened.”

If he’d been locked up for that, he might not have helped incite the Crown Heights riots in 1991. After a tragic car accident in the New York neighborhood in which a Jewish driver accidentally struck and killed a black child named Gavin Cato, Sharpton stoked anti-Semitic rage. At the funeral for Cato, amid shouts from the crowd of “Heil Hitler!” (one banner read, “Hitler did not do the job”), Sharpton didn’t call for reconciliation; he inveighed against “diamond dealers.” During the riots Jews were beaten in the street, and eventually a Hasidic tourist from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death.

Perhaps if Sharpton had been shunned for his role in that, he might not have encouraged yet more violence in 1995, when he led protests against the eviction of a black-owned record store. Sharpton fueled rage on his radio show and at rallies to the point where one of the protesters ran into a Jewish-owned store whose owner was wrongly blamed for the eviction, shot several people, and then burned the place down, killing seven (mostly Hispanic) occupants. [And his own damned self.]

But he was shunned for none of it. Nor was he shunned for his sometimes cavalier compliance with tax laws or his shabby shakedowns of corporations for donations. In fact, in a culture that increasingly rewards shamelessness, Sharpton got in on the ground floor and has been cashing in on his access ever since. The attorney general himself celebrates his “partnership” with Sharpton.

Sharpton is even hailed as an expert on racial tensions, which in a funny way is true. The establishment he constantly seeks to “speak truth” to has enabled him in every conceivable way. He doesn’t just have access to his suits, he’s been given access to just about everything the 1 percent has to offer, including the very best cigars.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of the The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Syria in a Nutshell

By  Victor Davis Hanson at NRO Sept. 13 2013

We are contemplating going to war in Syria to help the opposition a lot and to hurt Assad some, or to help the opposition some and hurt Assad a lot, or to hurt Assad some and help the opposition some, or to force Assad to stop or to leave, or to stop but stay, or to stop and leave; or to restore the word of the president, or the word of the United States, or the word of the international community by bombing, or by threatening to bomb but not bombing, or by neither threatening to bomb nor bombing; or to warn the Russians to stay out, or to welcome the Russians to come in, or to warn the Russians to stay out and welcome the Russians to come in. Message? We are planning to do all kinds of things by not doing anything.

We had planned a “shot across the bow” against Syria, which was to be “unbelievably small” but could by no stretch of the imagination be a “pinprick” — given that the U.S. military “doesn’t do
pinpricks.” But a pinprick at least hits its target, while a shot across the bow does not. 

Message? The administration apparently wants to talk about taking military action rather than take military action, and so splits the difference and talks about taking a little bit of military action.

First Hillary Clinton set a red line, then Barack Obama set two; but neither really did, because the world already had set red lines. Message? Everyone vies to set red lines; no one competes to enforce them.

The United States does not bomb a sovereign nation that is responsible for a war that kills 99,000 people. The United States instead does intend to bomb a state that has used WMD to kill 1,000. But then again, the United States really did not bomb a state that has killed 1,000 with WMD. The United States would bomb any sovereign nation that has killed 1,000 with WMD, to destroy its WMD, or to warn others not to kill 1,000 with WMD, or to punish it for already killing 1,000 with WMD. Message? If you’re a monster, either kill 99,000 without WMD, or a number smaller than 1,000 with WMD — or maybe 1,000 with WMD after all.

According to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Mr. Assad, before he was to step down and leave, was not long earlier a “reformer” and a “moderate,” at the very time when Mr. Qaddafi in contrast was targeted as someone who needed to be captured or killed. But before we targeted Qaddafi, he had in fact also been proclaimed to be a reformer and a moderate. The message?

Middle Eastern authoritarians should worry when the U.S. labels them reformers and moderates, but relax when we order them to step down and leave.

War with Syria was once imminent, given that time was of the essence, and then was not imminent, given that time was not of the essence. Message? Apparently when we think about bombing, we have to bomb right away before the targets scatter; but when we think about not bombing, then we should not bomb right away because the target always stays put while we think about bombing — or not.

If we are going to bomb Syria, the president does not have to go to Congress. But he also is supposed to go to Congress. But he also can bomb Syria after he goes to Congress if he doesn’t like the way Congress votes. But he can also postpone going to Congress if he is afraid that he won’t like the way Congress votes. Or he can go ahead and not postpone going to Congress, and just bomb Syria because he does not want to go to Congress if he thinks he won’t like the way Congress votes. Message? Going and not going to Congress are essential.

Assad is a monster who kills thousands. Assad is a monster who gasses children and seems also to be the only one protecting Christians, Alawites, and Kurds from non-monsters who do not gas children but do kill minorities. Assad is opposed by monsters who are cannibals and execute prisoners as well as non-monsters who only kill but do not eat Assad’s monsters. Message?

Sometimes monsters are non-monsters, and sometimes non-monsters are monsters.

Obama was elected to end wars, not to start them. So he ended a war in Iraq that in truth had already been ended, and continued one in Afghanistan that was not ended, and then started a war in Libya but does not want to start one in Syria since we are tired of the wars that someone else started in Afghanistan and that ended in Iraq and that he started in Libya. Message? Obama says that he does not like to start wars.