Presidential Debates where the Candidates Tell Us Nothing About Real Issues

A bizarre three hours.

After listening to the second GOP debate you would think that the choice for president is all about who would have his/her finger on the nuclear button and who has been the smartest CEO. Trump says the leaders of other countries are destroying American jobs but offers no solutions (at least he has identified the loss of jobs as an issue).

Or is the real threat to America the Muslim world.

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would not support a Muslim as President of the United States. Responding to a question on “Meet the Press” today, the retired neurosurgeon said, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

On that Meet the Press program commentator guest Hugh Hewitt, who is also a constitutional scholar, pointed out that the sixth article of the Constitution specifically says that religion shall not be a criteria to hold any office. The end of the last sentence in that article reads, “but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

The problem is that the voting public can decide they do not want anyone to hold office that is not a Christian. This is not a new issue.

We have a spotty history of bias against those who hold beliefs that are not held us (that personal us). Laws aside, the first Catholic to run for President was campaigned against because of his religion. Al Smith was the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee, and lost the 1928 election in a landslide to Republican Herbert Hoover. Influential Lutherans and Southern Baptist ministers believed the Catholic Church and the Pope would dictate Smith’s policies.

Source: Boundless. “Al Smith and the Election of 1928.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 21 Jul. 2015. Retrieved 20 Sep. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/from-the-new-era-to-the-great-depression-1920-1933-24/resistance-to-change-188/al-smith-and-the-election-of-1928-1045-2231/

Much of those very same arguments against Al Smith were again used when John F. Kennedy ran for president. Americans were not dissuaded by the anti-Catholic arguments and Kennedy won. The 1960 presidential race was one of the closest elections in U.S. history. The popular vote was 49.72% for Kennedy against 49.55% for Richard Nixon. 303 electoral votes for Kennedy of the 537 total electors.

Anjem Choudary, a famous Muslim cleric in the U.K., in 2013 said, “Inevitably, I’m convinced, I’m 100% certain that the sharia will be implemented in America and in Britain one day. If we have enough authority and power, we are obliged as Muslims to take the power away from the people who have it, and implement sharia law.”

Chris Christy accurately pointed out in that last debate that the public wants to hear specifics about what candidates would do to help Americans obtain decent middle class jobs. Did any of the other candidates hear his message? I doubt it.

In my opinion no candidate in either party are worth voting for. None have proposed any specific actions they would take on any issue.

Obama’s Strategy for Fighting ISIS Isn’t All About Us

By Thomas L. Friedman in the N.Y. Times, September 14, 2014

THERE are three things in life that you should never do ambivalently: get married, buy a house or go to war. Alas, we’re about to do No. 3. Should we?

President Obama clearly took this decision to lead the coalition to degrade and destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, with deep ambivalence. How could he not? Our staying power is ambiguous, our enemy is barbarous, our regional allies are duplicitous, our European allies are feckless and the Iraqis and Syrians we’re trying to help are fractious. There is not a straight shooter in the bunch.

Other than that, it’s just like D-Day.

Consider Saudi Arabia. It’s going to help train Free Syrian Army soldiers, but, at the same time, is one of the biggest sources of volunteer jihadists in Syria. And, according to a secret 2009 U.S. study signed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and divulged by WikiLeaks, private “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Turkey allowed foreign jihadists to pass into and out of Syria and has been an important market for oil that ISIS is smuggling out of Iraq for cash. Iran built the E.F.P.’s — explosively formed penetrators — that Iraqi Shiite militias used to help drive America out of Iraq and encouraged Iraq’s Shiite leaders to strip Iraqi Sunnis of as much power and money as possible, which helped create the ISIS Sunni counterrevolt. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, deliberately allowed ISIS to emerge so he could show the world that he was not the only mass murderer in Syria. And Qatar is with us Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and against us Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fortunately, it takes the weekends off.

Meanwhile, back home, Obama knows that the members of his own party and the Republican Party who are urging him to bomb ISIS will be the first to run for the hills if we get stuck, fail or accidentally bomb a kindergarten class.

So why did the president decide to go ahead? It’s a combination of a legitimate geostrategic concern — if ISIS jihadists consolidate their power in the heart of Iraq and Syria, it could threaten some real islands of decency, like Kurdistan, Jordan and Lebanon, and might one day generate enough capacity to harm the West more directly — and the polls. Obama clearly feels drummed into this by the sudden shift in public opinion after ISIS’s ghastly videotaped beheadings of two American journalists.

O.K., but given this cast of characters, is there any way this Obama plan can end well? Only if we are extremely disciplined and tough-minded about how, when and for whom we use our power.

Before we step up the bombing campaign on ISIS, it needs to be absolutely clear on whose behalf we are fighting. ISIS did not emerge by accident and from nowhere. It is the hate-child of two civil wars in which the Sunni Muslims have been crushed. One is the vicious civil war in Syria in which the Iranian-backed Alawite-Shiite regime has killed roughly 200,000 people, many of them Sunni Muslims, with chemical weapons and barrel bombs. And the other is the Iraqi civil war in which the Iranian-backed Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki systematically stripped the Sunnis of Iraq of their power and resources.

There will be no self-sustained stability unless those civil wars are ended and a foundation is laid for decent governance and citizenship. Only Arabs and Muslims can do that by ending their sectarian wars and tribal feuds. We keep telling ourselves that the problem is “training,” when the real problem is governance. We spent billions of dollars training Iraqi soldiers who ran away from ISIS’s path — not because they didn’t have proper training, but because they knew that their officers were corrupt hacks who were not appointed on merit and that the filthy Maliki government was unworthy of fighting for. We so underestimate how starved Arabs are, in all these awakenings, for clean, decent governance.

Never forget, this is a two-front war: ISIS is the external enemy, and sectarianism and corruption in Iraq and Syria are the internal enemies. We can and should help degrade the first, but only if Iraqis and Syrians, Sunnis and Shiites, truly curtail the second. If our stepped-up bombing, in Iraq and Syria, gets ahead of their reconciliation, we will become the story and the target. And that is exactly what ISIS is waiting for.

ISIS loses if our moderate Arab-Muslim partners can unite and make this a civil war within Islam — a civil war in which America is the air force for the Sunnis and Shiites of decency versus those of barbarism. ISIS wins if it can make this America’s war with Sunni Islam — a war where America is the Shiite/Alawite air force against Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. ISIS will use every bit of its Twitter/Facebook network to try to depict it as the latter, and draw more recruits.

We keep making this story about us, about Obama, about what we do. But it is not about us. It is about them and who they want to be. It’s about a pluralistic region that lacks pluralism and needs to learn how to coexist. It’s the 21st century. It’s about time.

Winston Churchill 1899

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

This is amazing. Even more amazing is that this hasn’t been published long before now.

CHURCHILL ON ISLAM

Unbelievable, but the speech below was written in 1899… (check Wikipedia – The River War).

The attached short speech from Winston Churchill, was delivered by him in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist. It probably sets out the current views of many, but expresses in the wonderful Churchillian turn of phrase and use of the English language, of which he was a past master. Sir Winston Churchill was, without doubt, one of the greatest men of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

He was a brave young soldier, a brilliant journalist, an extraordinary politician and statesman, a great war leader and British Prime Minister, to whom the Western world must be forever in his debt. He was a prophet in his own time. He died on 24th January 1965, at the grand old age of 90 and, after a lifetime of service to his country, was accorded a State funeral.

HERE IS THE SPEECH:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome …”

Sir Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol II, pages 248-250 London).

Churchill saw it coming……

Does Islam Wish to be the Enemy of the West?

The answer appears to be YES! In communities throughout Europe Sharia law has replaced government law. In my own community Muslims refuse to obey local parking ordinances on Fridays when parking their cars before entering their mosque.

WordPress provides a daily report to me that indicates the nations of the readers of Coastcontact. Just this past Friday, October 12 there were at least seven visitors from Saudi Arabia. Many other Middle Easterners from many Islamic nations have also visited this site. I was interviewed by The Pakistani Spectator a few years ago too. However, there have been almost no comments or challenges by Muslims to my obvious Western views.

Without a dialog there cannot be a peace.

My primary target has been Islamic treatment of women. In my view they are treated like property. Many are denied education, kept wrapped in tents (called burqa), and are treated as little more than slaves or concubines.

However, many Muslims are migrating to Western Europe and America to obtain a better life without wanting to pay the price of throwing off their “old world” customs.

Pictures like this tells of a wish to convert the entire world to your way of life. These pictures are of Muslims marching through the STREETS OF LONDON during their recent ‘Religion of Peace Demonstration.’

Tell us all here in this blog what you want.

Freedom of Speech

Anti-jihad ‘savage’ ads going up in NYC subway NEW YORK (AP) — A provocative ad that equates Muslim radicals with savages is set to go up in the city’s subway system as violent protests over an anti-Islamic film ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad sweep over much of the Muslim world.

“Innocence of Muslims” is the Muhammad movie that was the excuse for riots throughout the Muslim world. Google was asked to remove the movie clip from Youtube but they refused, sighting their first amendment rights.

The American constitution’s first Amendment says

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Americans of all stripes hold those words as important as any in the bible. We go to war to defend the freedoms we have. Many elsewhere do not agree with this belief. They believe that the United States has a responsibility to muzzle words or actions they consider disrespectful.

It’s a conflict of beliefs that could lead to a breakdown of relations with other nations.

I believe Americans really take these words in our Declaration of Independence to heart

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I believe Americans will fight, if necessary, to defend the American ideals. Thanks, Thomas Jefferson.